There is a little piece of me in every nonfiction book I’ve written. Maybe no one else can tell, but I know it is there. Sometimes I see it in the text of the words I’ve written. Sometimes I see it in the white space –the words I didn’t write.
Continue Reading Guest Post: Carla Killough McClafferty on Revealing Your Heart in Nonfiction »
Sam Bond is the first-time author of Operation Golden Llama (Cousins in Action)(Volume 1)(Bound, 2013). From the promotional copy:
Dumped at their eccentric Grandma’s, Cagney, Olivia, Aidan, Lissy and Tess are convinced they’re in for a boring summer. But when Grandma gets a series of mysterious phone calls and a highly unlikely pet sitter arrives,
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Revelry! Killer of Enemies by Joseph Bruchac from Steam Punk Romance | Coffee Time Romance. Peek: “Not too many books I know contain a pedantic Sasquatch with ESP. But he and his people are in the traditions of every Native American nation and it was not hard at all for me to imagine them surviving into the tenuous future of my story.”
I was 50 pages into my first writing project, a YA fantasy novel, when I picked up a book about writing for children.
In the first chapter, the author explained that a new writer should never start with a novel instead of a short story or write fantasy instead of realistic fiction.
Continue Reading Guest Post & Giveaway: Ellen Jensen Abbott on Verisimilitude »
By Lindsey McDivitt
of A is for Aging, B is for Books
Grumpy and frumpy, witchy and weary, frail and forgetful—none of us expects to be that kind of older person, and in reality this does not often describe normal aging.
But negative stereotypes of age, such as older characters in decline and needing help from a child,
Continue Reading Guest Post: Lindsey McDivitt on Positive Images of Aging »
Cheers to your upcoming series, The Haunted Library (Grosset & Dunlap, 2014)! Could you tell us about it?
It’s a chapter book mystery series, just like my Buddy Files series (Albert Whitman). But instead of a canine protagonist, my main character Kaz is a ghost.
Check out the Penguin Cha-Cha Storytime Kit!
Look through your shelves of picture books (does everyone love picture books enough to own shelves of them?). Do you notice any differences between the books that were written and illustrated by the same person versus the books that were written by one person and illustrated by another?
Continue Reading Guest Post & Giveaway: Kristi Valiant on Marrying Art to Text in Picture Books »
Check out Andrew Arnold‘s cover art for Little Green Men at the Mercury Inn by Greg Leitich Smith (Roaring Brook, 2014). According to Greg, “It’s a middle-grade story of three friends at a motel in Cocoa Beach and what happens the day after a space shuttle launch is scrubbed due to the presence of a UFO over Cape Canaveral…”
By Kathi Appelt
Hallie Durand is the author of the middle grade books Dessert First, Just Desserts, and No Room for Dessert, illustrated by Christine Davenier (Atheneum).
Her first picture book was Mitchell’s License (Candlewick). Mitchell Goes Bowling is her second picture book.
Continue Reading Guest Interview & Giveaway: Kathi Appelt & Hallie Durand on Mitchell Goes Bowling »
By Anne Broyles
My first picture book, Shy Mama’s Halloween, took 2.5 hours to write and sold on the fifth submission. Revision required only a few word changes. Fifteen months after an editor called with an offer, I held the published book in my hand. That didn’t take long!
Book #2,
Continue Reading Guest Post: Anne Broyles on “In Its Own Sweet Time” »
