Way back in 2023, my friends Laura Backes Bard and Jon Bard, the couple behind the Children’s Book Insider Newsletter, Write For Kids, and Writing Blueprints, asked me to design characters for a new website that would combine all of their services.
In a Zoom meeting, Laura and Jon cast their vision: Characters representing several types of writers sitting around an Algonquin-style roundtable. I sent this sketch full of options.
We all preferred the anthropormorphic characters for this kid lit venture. Over time, Laura and Jon fine-tuned their vision and sent me descriptions of 6 characters and a color palette…
…which I illustrated in various poses.
Eventually, I also had the pleasure of athromorphizing Laura and Jon.
I mean. How cute is this?
(o:
If you’re a writer of books for kids—of if you’d like to become one—definitely check out this fantastic new website. Write For Kids Online has everything you need to get you started and send you on your way to becoming a successful author.
When I was very young, my family moved from Illinois to Missouri. At the new house, my father promptly planted a row of roses along the back edge of the patio for my mother. Mom wasn’t a big gardener. I’m not sure how much time she or Dad spent tending her roses, but every summer, they bloomed.
My husband and I recently bought a home in Timaru, New Zealand. It’s our fourth house, although we haven’t owned one since leaving the US in 2015. Buying a home here has been our dream for nearly a decade, so of course we’re floating on a cloud of joy now that we;re home owners—but for me, it’s not just the house that’s making me happy. It’s the roses.
City of Roses
I can’t smell a rose without thinking of my mom, and Timaru is teeming with them. We just happened to drive past this gorgeous “Rose Cottage” while running errands this morning.
In five minutes, I can walk from our front door to a gorgeous rose garden in Caroline Bay, a beautiful city park.
Last weekend, a rose festival kicked off the summer season. (New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere, so summer begins in December.) And there are roses casually strewn about everywhere, decorating the lawns and gardens of nearly every house.
A Woman Who Prays
Dec 7 was my mom’s birthday. She passed away a few years ago. Some people say that grieving hearts heal over time, but I’m not sure that’s true. It’s more like grief changes you. You learn to function in spite of it.
My mother never stopped praying, and I know she had a hand in guiding me and Fred to Timaru, city of roses. Strangely, our new house—which has plenty of other flowers—had nary a rose. We fixed that today. We bought this rose and planted it for my mom, Marianne.
She is everywhere here, all around me, in every rose.
I feel closer now to my mother than ever—despite the grief and loss, which are still there, and always will be. I’m very, very grateful for our new home, and for the roses,
If you’re an American who has never been to the UK, Australia, or New Zealand and have never experienced entertainment (films, series, books) created by citizens of the aforementioned, what I’m about to share may shock you: Americans, on average, don’t speak as well as our neighbors from across the pond. A command of the English language is not prized in the US; in fact, in my experience, it is mocked. (I’m talking to you, Grinchman75—you meant “grammar Nazi” as a burn, but I have risen like a … what do you call that thingy? Oh yeah… a Phoenix!)
One American in particular—me—is especially guilty. I grew up in a family ruled by the ellipse. Rarely were sentences completed. Instead, we trailed off after a few words (…) ending our sentences with facial expressions, gestures, and—especially my father—laughter.
Dad (best father ever) also uses self-created replacements for words he doesn’t know or can’t remember, “jobbie” being a perpetual favorite; as in, “Kid, bring me that little jobbie (gestures towards object on table). No, not that one, the one we got from the…” (nod and smile, eyes sparkling, followed by raucous laughter).
Word Robbers
Sleep deprivation from motherhood whilst working two jobs did my brain no favors. I suspect wine with dinner (I swear, doc—two glasses a week) doesn’t, either. But lately, the main theft of my ability to speak proper English is my career. As a WRITER.
Sure, I spend months at a time locked in my studio wrestling with words, but here’s the thing: talking is different. Conversation is an art, a skill, and a muscle. Neglect it and it will atrophy. After speaking to no one apart from my husband (who, by now, understands my half-spoken, half-pantomime communication style), I’m barely able to ask a friend about her day. “How… you? Good?” Crikey.
Books
Reading sharpens my awareness of my verbal inadequacies. The last one to the party, I recently read Bridget Jones’s Diary. Helen Fielding’s vocabulary is stunning!
Same with Nicked, by National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson, which I was prompted to read by an Instagram Story by another amazing author, Rainbow Rowell. (Master American wordsmiths, both.) (USA! USA!) Rainbow’s recent best seller, Slow Dance, is a gorgeous slow burn.
Run, don’t walk, to your bookstores and buy all of these incredible reads!
Do it, now!
What I’m trying to say is, especially now that I’m conversing daily with well-spoken Kiwis (with killer accents, by the way)…
Goodbye, Duolingo!
After two years studying Spanish, Italian, and French, I’ve deleted your rude, mean, albeit educational app from all of my devices. (Image to left is actual app icon used to bully users to engage.) Instead of guiltily trying to recall high school French for fifteen minutes a day (because, let’s face it, le vocabularie in my long term memory is all I’ll ever have), I intend to use my Duolingo time to write and read gorgeous books, and talk about them. Hopefully my English usage will be strengthened in the process.
In the process of writingAlithia Ramirez Was an Artist and creating the Alithia’s Art Angels website, I’ve become friends with Alithia’s parents, Jess Hernandez and Ryan Ramirez. Jess mentioned wanting custom Converse, two pair for herself—high-top and low—and one pair of high-tops for Ryan. I offered to find a shoe artist but didn’t have any luck, so I decided to paint them myself.
Finding shoes was easy. The best prices were at Journeys. I found some cool rainbow-y Converse high-tops that looked similar to the endpapers in Alithia Ramirez Was an Artist (above), and bonus, they were on sale! And I Chuck Taylors for Jess, the purple for Alithia’s Art Angels.
Shoe-painting research led me to Angelus Direct, from whom I ordered all of the paint supplies, including the masking tape that I used to protect the shoes’ white trim.
I used a white fabric marker from JoAnn to draw the curly scrolls on colorful high-tops for Jess and Ryan, and then drew and cut out little templates, replicating Alithia’s drawings which adorn the endpapers. From there, I penciled Alithia’s drawings onto the shoes, and painted several coats of white before adding colors.
The trick with painting shoes—at least canvas ones—is building up the color slowly. For example, painting the white Alithia’s Art Angels logo on purple shoes shown at the top of this post required 4-6 coats of white. Patience is required!
My husband and I live in Malaysia. We’re on an extensive summer trip. I painted these shoes while visiting my Dad in Missouri, both at his house and at our hotel. It was really nice to have a project to keep me busy!
This photo (above) shows the outer side of Jess’s completed high-tops. Ryan’s are similar.
Alithia’s drawings carry over onto the inner sides of the shoes. I think they came out pretty well. They certainly look similar to the endpapers!
The Book
Alithia Ramirez Was an Artist will be released on October 10, 2023. Jess, Ryan and I will be at a launch event in Uvalde…. perhaps wearing cool custom Converse! Other book events in Texas will follow, throughout October.
I wasn’t looking for an intern at the start of last term, but Raisa was looking for an internship. And my “ship” was docked right next door.
Yep, Raisa is my next door neighbor. I made a portrait of her once, before I properly knew her. (I imagine inspirational people like Raisa are the subjects of countless unsolicited portraits, especially when those inspiring people live next door to sneaky artists).
As I got to know her, I discovered that Raisa is an artist, and a writer. She is a gifted teller of stories. So much talent. So creative. So dedicated. (She also happens to an awesome and generous baker. And no, she did not ply me with brownies when she asked me about the internship. No baked goods were necessary!)
Kismet
You could say that fate had a hand in throwing us together in Malaysia—especially if you consider that Raisa is from Bangladesh, and I am from the US.
For an entire term, we met on Friday mornings at Shattuck-St Mary’s elementary school library to discuss books and writing and life. In the photo above, we’re studying the story arc of Erin Dionne’s picture book, Balletball, illustrated by Gillian Flint.
And in the above photo, Raisa is dressed as the White Rabbit for Book Week.
Read Raisa’s Stories!
Raisa is just about to begin her senior year of high school. Join her on her writing journey by reading her blog.
I grew up in a little ranch house in a midwestern suburb. My classmates were similarly situated. We were all ranch house kids—except for one girl, who lived with her mom in an apartment. Let’s call her Valerie.
Valerie was a tough cookie, let me tell you. Feathered hair, oversized plastic comb, jean jacket. Fierce.
Mousey Me would have feared her even if she lived in a ranch house like the rest of us, but her apartment-dwelling mystique made her all the more terrifying.
Decades later, when gathering ideas for Let’s Be Friends, I found myself categorizing various potential barriers to friendship—and I remembered my bias against Valerie. A “dwellings” category was added. Can friends live in any kind of house? Of course they can!
Originally, I drew a yurt under the flap. I thought a yurt would be a funny surprise.
About the Yurt
For a while, right around the time that I was writing Let’s Be Friends, my husband was fantasizing about retiring in a yurt. With me. We even spent a few nights in a very lovely New Zealand yurt AirBNB, as research—both for retirement, and for the book.
The yurt in Let’s Be Friends was eventually replaced by a treehouse. And unless fate takes an absurd twist, I very much doubt that my husband and I will live out our days in a yurt.
Incidentally, the couple who own the NZ yurt AirBNB also rent out a ship that they converted into a treehouse. Please, nobody tell my husband. We live in an apartment now, and I’d really like to keep it that way! :o)
I was living in Auckland during New Zealand’s only mass shooting, which happened at a mosque in Christchurch. Idyllic, peaceful, beautiful New Zealand was shattered by an act of hate.
In the aftermath, I couldn’t stop wondering why our differences matter. Aren’t we all ultimately the same? Does it really matter that people look different, come from different places, worship differently? (And, by the way, isn’t religion supposed to be about love?)
This swirl of questions became the inspiration for a proposed lift-the-flap book, What Matters?. Every spread showed people with different opinions, different life styes, physical differences, etc, and asked the question, “Does it matter?”. Under the flap, the answer was always some form of “No!”.
My original storyboard for What Matters?
My agent pitched the idea to HarperCollins, where an amazing editor took an interest. She shared the proposal in a meeting, and the project sparked conversation. Apparently, a person’s ethnicity, color, and religion do matter. Of course! All of that stuff shapes each person’s worldview.
The concept of material wealth didn’t make it into the final book.
The editor asked me to pivot and send a revision.
The original color sketch and final illustration. Religion made it in—yay!
After a month of thinking and hand-wringing, I rewrote and redrew the book. I was visiting my cousin Tom at the time, who tossed ideas around with me and generally kept me sane.
Can cousins be BFFS? Of course!
I’d been asking the wrong question. “Does it matter?” became “Can they be friends?”. The answer under the flap was always some version of YES, and adds even more positivity to what I hope is a loving, joyful message.
HarperCollins bought the book, which was a giant relief and an enormous cause for celebration.
Let’s Be Friends is available everywhere as of Dec 14, 2021. Click here to order your copy today!
For years, I’ve been wanting to write for older kids. I’ve explored a few characters and have written a paragraph here and there, but never built momentum.
As explained in my previous post, in the spring of 2021, an idea for a YA novel popped into my head. I knew it was good, but I remained STUCK.
Thankfully, I was binge-listening to Children’s Book Insider‘s Kidlit Distancing Socials, including a Chris Tebbetts interview. Chris announced a Highlights Foundation online course that he was co-teaching with Erin Dionne: “Getting Your Middle Grade or Young Adult Novel UNSTUCK”.
I took the course, listened to it repeatedly while illustrating other books, and then, over the summer, wrote my novel!
I highly recommend the class, which delivered on it’s promise one hundred percent. I stand before you, UNSTUCK. Able to write. (And in the photo above, I stand before my beat sheet. Perplexed about how to move my plot along… but not stuck!)
Amazing.
“Getting… UNSTUCK” is now an online on-demand course at the Highlights Foundation. Anyone can take it, any time! Click here to check it out.
You’d be wise to connect with the Highlights Foundation to receive course updates. Connect with Erin Dionne and Chris Tebbetts, too! Erin and Chris are excellent writers and excellent teachers. Check out their books, and follow them on social media so you won’t miss notices about any of their other classes or workshops.
I’m a book illustrator who sometimes also writes, mostly for very small children. Writing was never one of my career goals, and writing a novel was never on my radar, until… ba-boom!
Cue lightning bolt.
Yep. I was struck by a story idea for a kidlit novel. Bonus: the subject was of great interest to my teenage son. He loved the idea, and I loved discussing it with him!
After a few years of talking, it was time to act. This book wasn’t going to write itself! Not knowing where to begin, I poked around on the internet, listened to tons of author interviews, and enrolled in a few online classes. I thought I’d share the highlights in a series of posts for any potential authors out there. Note that I am not affiliated with any of these courses, I’m just sharing my experience as an online kidlit writing student.
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Writing Blueprints
If you want to write for kids of any age but aren’t sure where to begin, or you’ve been trying for a while and feel frustrated or lost, look no further. Laura Backes (of Children’s Book Insider and Writeforkids.org) and her team have put together a Writing Blueprint course for every kidlit category, from picture books to middle grade and young adult novels. Each blueprint is self directed and takes you step by step through the writing process. Because the blueprint system is clear and linear, it can save endless hours spent meandering.
“I guarantee that you are going to write a first draft that wanders in a lot of different directions before you end up where you think you should be going. And you will have huge rewrites ahead of you, that you could possibly avoid, by doing this.”
Laura Backes
Before using the blueprint, I had written nearly 20K words guided by a loose outline. The scenes were good, I loved my characters, and I was thrilled to be writing my book! The more I wrote, however, the more I felt that my story was drifting. I sensed massive rewrites and restructuring in my future, which made the process feel heavy. It seemed the only way to find and work out the details of my story was to keep writing, which would mean even more eventual rewriting.
Enter: The Detailed Outline
After helping me create characters and story ideas, the Middle Grade/Young Adult Writing Blueprint guided me through the process of outlining. Creating a detailed outline for my story was not easy for me, but it was so worth the effort! I am much more at ease as I’m writing now, because I know exactly where I’m going.
In addition to the instructional videos and worksheets, the Writing Blueprints package includes lifetime access to the course, and inclusion in a private Facebook group.
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If you are ready to invest in your writing career, Writing Blueprints is a great way to start. Terrific bang-to-buck ratio.
Click here to be redirected to the Writing Blueprints website.
Click here to be redirected to a free trial of Writing Blueprints.
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Want to follow along on Twitter as I write my book? Click here!
What online writing classes have you enjoyed? Let me know in the comment section. :o)
On May 18th, I had the pleasure of joining the amazing Laura Backes Bard, the founder of Children’s Book Insider, for a live Zoom chat focusing on board books.
Click here to watch the replay on CBI’s YouTube channel. Considering that this was my first live interview, I think it went pretty well. Whew!
An Unexpected Cover Reveal
While prepping the day before the interview, I discovered that HarperCollins had revealed the cover of my latest board book, Let’s Be Friends, several weeks earlier than I was expecting. How perfect! I was able to share the cover during the interview.
Board Books
If given a do over, I would spend a few minutes gushing over little ones and their caregivers, all of whom have my heart. Board books, after all, are at the center of the sacred ritual of reading to babies and toddlers. When I was a young mother, I took every opportunity to snuggle with my baby and a book. Libraries and bookstores were our regular haunts. At night, when my son begged me to keep reading past his bedtime, I usually indulged him. Childhood is fleeting, after all. In hindsight, I know I made the right choice, despite the brain cells that I certainly lost to lack of sleep. :o)
Human babies are only tiny for an instant—their growing up is as swift as the beat of a hummingbird’s wing.
Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon
Board books give authors and illustrators opportunities to share in all of that good stuff. What a gift.
This CBI interview made me realize that board books are a sweet spot for me. I absolutely adore babies, and two-thirds of my writing credits are board books, but before this interview, I had never considered that I had a specialty. As I learn to write for older kids, it’s comforting to think of board books as home.
My friend Michelle and her daughter Sophia, enjoying “Healthy, Healthy, Love, Love, Love.”
Dreaming of Writing for Children?
Laura Backes and her husband Jon Bard have spent decades collecting helpful information for children’s book writers. If you want to get into the business of children’s books, explore Write4Kids.org and Children’s Book Insider.
CBI’s YouTube channel is a great place to start! There are tons of topics from which to choose. I’ve listened to every interview, and have learned from all of them.
Write4Kids.org is chock full of helpful info, too. While you’re there, sign up for the CBI newsletter, which is amazing! Priceless content, for the price of a cup of coffee.
If you’re looking for a class, CBI has got you covered. Their Writing Blueprints are revolutionary self-paced online courses tailored to various genres, at a very reasonable rate. I’m about to begin my own journey with one of these blueprints, and will keep you posted!
Meanwhile, if you have any questions about board books, give a shout!
Here are my two most recent board books. :o)
Click here to order Healthy, Healthy, Love, Love, Love
Click here to pre-order Let’s Be Friends (available everywhere on Dec 1, and in stores on Dec 14)
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