Hey, Look! A Writer Fellow!

April 28, 2012May 17, 2012

Rhyme Time

Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? Neither did I! That’s why I’m writing about it now!

I’m a little bit troubled that I am so late to this particular party. I really should have known. I work at a school and schools live for these kinds of distractions.

Furthermore, my brother-in-law is a pretty famous poet named Philip Memmer who’s won lots of awards and has a new book out and everything. (It’s OK if you’ve never heard of him. I hadn’t heard of him either until I started falling in love with his sister.) His poetry is great, even if it doesn’t rhyme – and it doesn’t, which is still kind of a shame.

I have written a number of picture book manuscripts, but only one of those manuscripts, Donut Run, is in verse. The process was both painful and long. I worked on Donut Run on and off for about two years before I finally considered it good enough to start accumulating rejection letters.

So, to celebrate National Poetry Month while I still can, I thought I’d post the first few stanzas. And, since you know what a comments section is for, consider this an invitation to have at it.

DONUT RUN

My mom loves to cook, she just doesn’t know how.

She often fries up the wrong parts of the cow,

Or the lamb, or the fish, or whatever’s on hand,

And makes a concoction that no one can stand.

But she hit a new low on one snowy day,

When she piled our plates high with pig snout soufflé.

My dad took one look. He then rose from his chair,

And made up a lie just to get out of there.

“A meeting!” he shouted. “Oh, my! And I’m late!”

I’m really so sorry. Those noses look great.”

Then, Dad, with a satisfied smile on his face,

Ran right out the door straight for Ray’s Pizza Place.

“More for us,” Mom shrugged, as she reached for a bite,

She nibbled a nostril and then turned chalk white.

“Oh my! This is awful! Don’t eat this, it’s bad.”

Then she gazed at my plate and saw that I had.

Empty! Amazing! The plate was licked clean!

Mom looked, but the dog was nowhere to be seen.

“That’s right,” I announced. “I ate every bite.

I deserve a dessert! You know that I’m right!”

For dramatic effect I leapt to my feet.

“The badder the meal then the better the treat!”

My Mom understood. She just nodded and said,

“You’re wanting that donut the size of your head.”

April 22, 2012April 25, 2012

Fluffernonsense

The other day I was hunched over the breakfast table so miserable, tired, and achy that I felt like I was recovering from a hangover. As I had not imbibed anything stronger than orange juice the night before, this all seemed horribly unfair. I could do little more than stare at my waffle, inhale my coffee, and hope that my head would stop throbbing. It was barely after 7 AM and I had already chalked the day up as a loss.

Ellen and Alex were at the table, too. She was eating a Fluffernutter on a toasted English muffin. He was picking at dry cereal while suspiciously eyeing the Fluff jar. Alex loves marshmallows, but there’s something about Fluff that he doesn’t quite trust. He won’t go near the stuff.

After a long, silent pause, with each of us absorbed in his and her own private thoughts (my thought being, “I hate everything!”), Alex broke the silence with a question that oozed disgust: “Where does that come from?” he asked, pointing to the Fluff.

I replied so quickly my statement surprised me.

“Fluff Monkeys,” I said.

“What?” Alex sputtered, eyes wide.

Then he said: “Noooooo. It does not. It does not.”

Then, a millisecond later: “Does it really? Really, daddy? Daddy. Daddy. Does it really?”

“It really does,” I went on, warming to the idea. “Fluff Monkeys live deep in the jungles of Borneo and explorers go there to look for them.” I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with this, so I sipped my coffee to buy some time. It turned out I didn’t really need to do this; before I finished slurping, the rest of my tale came into focus. “When the explorers see a Fluff Monkey, they poke it with a stick to annoy it.

“Well, as you know, annoyed monkeys throw their poop. And that’s good, because Fluff Monkeys poop Fluff.”

To a six-year-old, there is no better punchline to any joke than “poop.” Alex was in giggle mode.

“So they poop the Fluff and throw it at the explorers. The explorers catch the poop and collect it in wheelbarrows,” I said. “Then the explorers wheel the poop away, put it in jars, and sell it to your mother.”

Ellen feigned the dry heaves as Alex leapt from his chair. He literally fell on the floor laughing.

We had a few more laughs with the Fluff Monkey idea before we all wheezed a tired sigh and got back to eating. By then I was amazed to discover that my headache was gone.

Behold the healing power of nonsense!

So let me open up the floor: What’s the most sublime bit of nonsense you ever told a child?

April 16, 2012

Happy Galley

groovy galleys — This is all rather exciting.

The galleys for Sarah Gives Thanks arrived in the mail last week. They are gorgeous. They made me giddy. They also brought into sharp focus that, hey, I have a book coming out.

That should be obvious, but I’ve been living with Sarah for such a long time that, until that delivery, I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around the idea that a book with my name on it would actually be sold to people.

My first Sarah draft was sent to Albert Whitman & Co. a couple of days before Thanksgiving 2009. I was asked to expand the story in February 2010 – which is ironic as the bulk of my initial writing labors consisted of trimming the story down to fit the publisher-mandated 600-word picture book limit.

“Don’t worry about length,” my senior editor contact, Wendy, assured me. “For something like this, our usual word count is too skimpy.”

So be it.

I delivered my impeccably researched, knowingly bloated 2,400-word draft on March 31. (“The last day of Women’s History Month!” I crowed in my email to Wendy, hoping to earn brownie points, I suppose, for knowing that the month existed.)

After a period of uncertainty, the manuscript was accepted that July. The plan was for a Thanksgiving 2011 release, but then the freelance editor assigned to my book mysteriously vanished and the illustrator kicked out. So the book got bumped to 2012.

This turned out to be fine, however, for my 2011 was surprisingly busy Sarah-wise. Children’s books go through a lot of editing, apparently. At least mine did; in the end my story shed almost 1,000 words. What surprised me was that this didn’t bother me nearly as much as I thought it might.

I soon learned to expect an almost-daily communication from Kristin, my editor. Her emails almost always outlined another chore for me to complete, but I liked getting them because they kept me busy and made me feel oddly important.

Furthermore, Kristin’s emails also projected an unwavering chipperness I couldn’t help but enjoy. It was a tone that was soon reflected in my replies: “Hi Kristin!” I’d write. (I am not the type of person who normally uses exclamation points in my salutations, but chipperness is more contagious than swine flu – and thank goodness for that.) It also didn’t hurt that Kristin is an excellent editor who selected an equally excellent illustrator in David Gardner.

So yada-yada-yada I now have the galleys – a tangible sign that the writing of Sarah is, at last, over and that I now must shift gears and get all promote-y. This is both exciting and a bit terrifying as this is new territory for me.

So! Any and all ideas on how to proceed are more than welcome!