By Jenny Moss
I love data. I also recognize I have OCD tendencies. Hence, my writing process involves the creation of multiple tables and timelines, and the occasional map.
Once I finish a solid draft of a book, the details can quickly overwhelm me, making me toss and turn at night and look slightly unhinged during the day.
Continue Reading Guest Post: Jenny Moss on Maps, Tables and Timelines »
Sara says, “Sara Pennypacker has been writing books for children for seventeen years now. She continues to believe that any day now she will get it right…”
What were you like as a young reader? Who were your favorite authors? What were your favorite books?
I remember feeling that books were a refuge.
Continue Reading Author Interview: Sara Pennypacker on the Clementine Series »
By Melissa Iwai
Though I’ve already illustrated about 20 books, Soup Day (Henry Holt, 2010) is the first book I’ve also written.
I’ve always wanted to write a children’s story, but the writing has never come easy to me the way drawing and painting has.
Soup Day came to me as a gift: I dreamed of a beautiful painting in which an old woman was chopping onions and a little girl was helping her.
Matt Myklusch is the first-time author of Jack Blank and the Imagine Nation (Aladdin, 2010). From the promotional copy:
All Jack Blank knows is his bleak, dreary life at St. Barnaby’s Home for the Hopeless, Abandoned, Forgotten, and Lost, an orphanage that sinks further into the swampland of New Jersey with each passing year.
Continue Reading New Voice: Matt Myklusch on Jack Blank and the Imagine Nation »
By Janet Nolan
Day after day,
year after year,
the lightbulb did not burn out.
The Firehouse Light, illustrated by Marie Lafrance (Tricycle Press, 2010), is the true story of a lightbulb that has been burning in a firehouse for more than one hundred years.
Continue Reading Guest Post: Janet Nolan on The Firehouse Light »
“What’s all this about violins on television?”
—Gilda Radner as Emily Litella, “Saturday Night Live.”
A few years ago, one of my colleagues at the university loaned my first novel, The Warrior Heir (Hyperion, 2006), to her mother to read.
Continue Reading Guest Post: Cinda Williams Chima on Violence in Teen Books »
M. G. King is the first-time author of Librarian on the Roof! A True Story, illustrated by Stephen Gilpin (Albert Whitman, 2010). From the promotional copy:
When RoseAleta Laurell begins her new job at the Dr. Eugene Clark Library in Lockhart, Texas, she is surprised that the children of the town think the library is for adults.
Continue Reading New Voice: M.G. King on Librarian on the Roof! A True Story »
Across the Universe by Beth Revis (Razorbill, Jan. 11, 2011) ARC Giveaway from P.J. Hoover at Roots in Myth. From the promotional copy:
A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.
Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet,
When I was five years old, I loved stories about magic carpets, stories where people turned into swans, stories about people so light, they wafted like feathers into the air.
One day, watching a TV commercial, I saw a kid eat a bowl of Jets cereal, then hold out his arms,
Continue Reading Guest Post: Susan Fletcher on Waiting to Fly »
Jessica Leader is the first time author of Nice and Mean (Aladdin MIX, 2010). From the promotional copy:
Nice and Mean by Jessica Leader is a hilarious story about two girls–one nice, one mean–facing off in their middle school video elective.
Are you a plotter or a plunger? Do you outline first,
Continue Reading New Voice: Jessica Leader on Nice and Mean »
