The Bear Ate Your Sandwich by Julia Sarcone-Roach, was published in 2015. Adorable. I enjoyed the art. Improbable story made much more plausible than I would have believed possible at the end. Wonderful unreliable narrator. Apparently I have a thing for those, as Denver is a (slightly) unreliable narrator.
I read The Neighbors by Einat Tsarfati. Inside front flap: Climbing the stairs to her seventh-floor apartment each night, one curious little girl wonders what is behind her neighbors’ doors. Each door is totally different from the last, so she guesses that each apartment must contain a totally different kind of household. As she climbs higher,…
I have been told again and again to read a lot of picture books. I wondered how many is a lot. Thankfully Laura Backes was clear on that. Read 100 books. Several people told me to read recent picture books. How recent is recent? Some said this year, others two years, and the longest relevant…
Bad writing is GOOD because bad writing is necessary. Writing isn’t perfect the first time. We have erasers, backspacing, delete, and reprints just because writing isn’t perfect. Anne Lamott says, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” Janet Hulstrand takes that a bit farther, for us perfectionists, and…
Al Kennedy: “Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.” What can you do? Short-term: If it is a sudden, “I hate this!” Get up and walk away. Take a walk. Go to the park. Go grocery shopping…
I was listening to an author (Jed Jurchenko) talk about writing and he said that writing is creative. Does anyone disagree with that? Yeah, me neither. Then he said that editing is critical. I agree with that too. You? Then he said something I had not thought of: Do our brains switch back and forth…
A Letter for Leo, by Sergio Ruzzier, was published by Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2014. The book is about an animal mailman who never receives mail. One day he rescues a small bird, that he raises, till the birds head north again. Then the rescue bird flies away. At the end, Leo receives a…
Ideas are All Around, by Philip C. Snead, a Neal Porter Book from Roaring Book Press, published in 2016, has several interesting features. The illustrations are small photographs and large drawings and single-colored images all mixed together to tell the story. That collage of styles is interesting and offers a very different visual than most…
Consistency is key. If you only write when you feel like writing, chances are you will never be an author. Most people don’t enjoy their jobs 100% of the time and writers are not the exception to that. If you are going to be an author, you have to write. Writers write. Even if all…
What is Given from the Heart, written by Patricia C. McKissack and illustrated by April Harrison, was published by Schwartz and Wade, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, in 2019. With a young boy as narrator, this story follows a family from April to February, as the father dies, they lose their home and…
