...do not happen in Los Angeles. That's a shame, because I sure get tired of the monotonous 70-something-degrees-and-slightly-hazy weather. On the other hand, our little Subaru is suffering from an out-of-whack window right now, and it would leak like crazy if subjected to rain. So I guess I'll deal with the sunny weather and count my blessings. If I must. At least until the window gets fixed.
Speaking of sunny weather, it was hot, sticky, and crowded at the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The best part about the festival: it was free! (Well, it was essentially free: only Ticketmaster and a $0.75 service charge stood in the way of complete free-dom.) I attended a few of the kids' lit panels with a couple of fellow children's writers. We started with a tween panel featuring Gennifer Choldenko (Al Capone Does My Shirts), Lisa Yee (Millicent Min, Girl Genius), and Linda Urban (A Crooked Kind of Perfect). After the tween panel and a frappuccino break, we moved on to a YA discussion featuring Jay
Asher (disco mermaid, reigning Cinder-fella of YA, and author of Thirteen Reasons Why), Cecil Castellucci (The Plain Janes--a graphic novel!), and some other authors that I don't remember.
I only stayed for about 20 minutes, because I needed to get to the
picture book panel. The panel featured, among others, David Weisner (two-time three-time(!) Caldecott winner, most recently for Flotsam) and Kadir Nelson (We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball). None of the panels was particularly
groundbreaking, but it's always inspiring to hear professionals in your
field speak. It's especially fun to hear them talk about how they moved from being struggling, "pre-published" writers to best-selling authors, because you start fantasizing that someday you will be on a similar panel telling a similar success story.
No book success for me yet, but I did get one step closer this month to seeing my work published in the magazine market: I finished my Highlights High Five assignment. (I wish I could post scans right now, but I have to wait until September, when the issue comes out.) The art director was pleased with the finished art and said she hopes we can work together again soon. Me too!
The Highlights High Five assignment inspired me to pursue more work in kids' magazines. Right now, I'm in the sketch stage for some "Hidden Pictures" that I will propose to Highlights. Spider magazine also has a puzzle on it's back page, and I'd love to try my hand at that, too. And eventually, I want to submit a poem/illustration combo to Spider as well.
Poetry is actually on my mind a lot these days. For my writing group, I've submitted poems the last couple of meetings, and they've been well-received. I enjoy writing them, even though it is HARD--especially if you are trying to follow a specific form, such as a sonnet or a limerick. I started writing the poems because I had a loose notion that they would make a good picture book of sorts (maybe a book for older readers that happens to have pictures.) I thought it would be neat to introduce kids to various classic forms of poetry, break down the rhyme schemes and structures for them, give an example poem written in each style, and maybe include a sidebars with information on "real" (that is, famous) poets.
Anyway, here's a haiku that I wrote:
WORMS
Fat, fleshy squirmers.
Six pink curls in two red shoes.
My sister will freak.
Here's a limerick:
POINT OF VIEW
There once was a monster who said,
“There’s a little boy over my bed.”
Said the boy, “Sir, you blunder!
It’s my bed your under!”
And the monster, embarrassed, turned red.
I kind of got on a monster limerick kick, actually, and it was a blast. I wrote four others in addition to the above, featuring a witch, a mummy, a ghost, and a werewolf. At my writer's group, Edith suggested that I do more poems with the same characters, because as she put it, "The characters are too much fun to only get one poem!" I thought that was a nice compliment, not to mention an excellent idea! I would love to write more monster limericks, at least for myself. As far as seeing them in print, who knows. The whole monster poetry thing might be too similar to Adam Rex's masterful Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich for publishers to bite. Still. Monster limericks are "frightfully" fun to write. Ba-DUM-bum.
Horace and Amelia update: I've done some small tweaks to the text, after putting the story away for a couple of weeks to get some distance. Now I'm starting to toy with thumbnails and character design. (Several months ago, I came up with early versions of Horace and Amelia, but I want to allow myself to refine them...or scrap them completely and start from scratch.)
I'm beefing up my character skills by studying a book that I picked up on impulse. It's Cartoon Animation, by Preston Blair, who worked as a Disney animator for many years. I don't want my characters to look like Disney characters, but I do think that classic animation has a lot to teach me. I hope I can condense the information and apply it to my book illustrations. I will try to post some practice pages from my sketchbook in the next few days.
A final April note: This month, I became an aunt! My sister gave birth to a baby girl on April 8th. She's such a sweetie. I am going to paint a little something to hang in her nursery, but I haven't made it beyond the idea phase yet. I hope to finish the piece by the end of next month, so I'll post it next time!
Next month: Book Expo America! (Among other things...)
