I can draw!

My studio space.  The white rectangles are pages of the final dummy book to be filled.  Eight now contain drawings.

Every so often I seem to forget and then rediscover that I can, in fact, draw.  This time, wow, it's crashing back on me in a glorious tsunami!

Taking the time to work out dragon anatomy and character faces has paid off tenfold.  Need another dragon in the background to round out the composition?  Move the main figure over a half inch?  No problem!  Did you know that dragons have a thumb on their wing?  It's usually tucked underneath.  Or that they have belly buttons?  Shhh, they're mammals, but don't spoil it for the kids.  (But don't ask me where the dragon nipples got off to.)

With that hurdle out of the way, I faced another problem: a reoccurring location is a page-filling heap of trash.  It is practically a character.  And try as I might, I can't seem to fake it.  I'm just not good at doodling some shapes around the edge that suggest that the entire space is filled with objects.  No, when I get going, I obsessively render every water bottle and broken cell phone.  And I'll have to redraw this heap at least five times.

But you know what?  Drawing a million pieces of trash is insanely fun!  And also, I'm getting faster and faster at it.  The first pile was excruciating, and had to be plotted out carefully in pencil first.  By the third one, I was flying by the seat of my pants, going straight at the blank sheet with pen.

Chris paid me an amazing complement when he went over to ooooh at the big trash heap, frowned, and then asked, "this isn't the original, is it?"  He asked because it was copy paper, with push pins shoved through the corners and a few dabs of white out.  Well, it's only a working sketch!  Drawn in cough sharpie cough.

As a reward to myself for getting such a reaction from Chris (who is, after all, a former art director)  I went shopping online for archival watercolor paper.

Polar Express? Bah Humbug.

I began the Christmas fun for my kids this morning by bringing down the Christmas boxes from the attic.  We arranged nutcrackers, ate some chocolates from their very first advent calenders, and set up The Train.

Oh, The Train!  It's a beautiful working model of the train from the Polar Express movie, courtesy of his awesome grandparents.  My four-year-old son waited since last December with a patience well beyond his years to play with it again.  I suppose we will have to have a showing of "the train movie" at some point this month, seeing as it is Christmas and he just had to watch it again and again when he went through that obsessed-with-just-one-movie stage of three.

If you hear some reluctance in my words, you aren't imagining things.  I'm sure there are plenty of parents who would prefer not to be subjected yet again to the movie's eerie, almost-real art style.  But that isn't what turns me off of the movie.

Back when I wrote about the Giving Tree, a friend wrote to me in private to tell me how she loathed the book, but how she was afraid to tell me so in public on Facebook.  She knew that there are many people who love that particular book, and among them some who cling fiercely and emotionally to the Giving Tree.  She was afraid to risk their ire.

I feel similarly about the Polar Express.  Reviews churn with frothy love for this book.  I am hard pressed to find any negative opinion of Chris Van Allsburg's masterpiece anywhere on the internet - and isn't the internet the source of all things cynical?  Among the few negative reviews I can find, I still seem to be alone in the source of my dislike.  Worse yet, in terms of setting myself to be scorned by those who love the book, is that I dislike the Polar Express for the very reason that it is so frequently beloved:

At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I've grown old, the bell still rings for me, as it does for all who truly believe.

 I must have been seven or eight when I first encountered this book.  Even then, I was struck with the tragedy of children growing up and becoming dim-witted adults who would not or could not see the beauty around them.

Now, as I watch my son explore his surroundings, I am floored at his inquisitiveness.  When he encounters something new, he wants to know what it is made of.  How it works.  What it does.  What it means.  He is filled with wonder and a drive to observe.  And every answer he gets makes him more excited, and spurs him onward to two more questions.  Excited questions!  My son sees the beauty of the actual world around him, and the more he learns about it, the more beauty he sees.

His zest for life isn't based on some fairy tale that is going to pop like a soap bubble and leave him feeling stranded and in need of a train to the North Pole.  Every layer of truth that he learns leaves him more fulfilled, not less.

You might wonder at my own childhood Christmas experience.  It went like this: whenever my father talked about Santa, he had that crooked little smile that indicated he was playing a game.  He wasn't lying; he was playing pretend, and waiting for me to catch on.  I did catch on, early, and I played along, eagerly and joyfully.  I can recall being seven, on Christmas Eve, listening for the sound of hooves on the roof, even though I already knew that my parents were hiding all the presents somewhere.

Why as a culture do we insist that our children believe in something that we do not?  Why to we place such value on childhood ignorance and vulnerability to falsehood?  Why do we set them up to be crushed by a reality that is drab compared to the shiny lie we have fed them?

Why, as a society who supposedly values scientific inquiry in adults, do we teach our children to place a premium on belief without evidence?

My used-book-sale copy of the Polar Express will remain sequestered on the Shelf of Dangerous Books this winter.  I will grit my teeth as Tom Hanks once again scorns the antagonist of the movie for being "a doubter".  And I will smile a crooked little smile at my son when we discuss Santa, and wallow in pride when he flashes the same crooked little smile back at me.

Oh, Those Gay Penguins!

My one-year-old pulled two books from the library shelf at random for me this week.  As it turns out, both books are about homosexual penguins.

Well, no, not really.  He's just pink.  I suppose this penguin could be gay, but the book doesn't go there.  Too bad.

Anyway, in What's a Penguin to Think When He Wakes Up Pink, sweet little penguin Patrick wakes up a new and interesting color.  His friends tease him, so he runs away to Africa to meet pink flamingos.   Due to him being a short-legged and flightless penguin, he doesn't fit in well with the flamingos.  So Patrick swims home again, only to find that his friends all think he is awesome now because he went all the way to Africa and met flamingos.

It's a heartwarming story about how it can be both challenging and neat to be different, and about how boys shouldn't fear the color pink.  I would classify it as too uncontroversial for my collection of dangerous books, but I actually did once overhear a parent at a daycare scold their son not to play with the tea set.  I'm sure that such a parent would disapprove of Lynne Rickards' sweet pink penguin tale, so for them, I add Pink to my library.

Now THIS book really is about gay penguins!  And what a wonderfully sweet book it is.  Based on a true story, two male penguins in the Central Park zoo court each other and build a nest.  A zookeeper gives them an egg to hatch, and the resulting fluffy chick is named Tango.  The end, happy happy.

Being as this is a picture book about a homosexual relationship, And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, was the most challenged book of 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010.  It was the second most challenged book of 2009.

I read this to my four-year-old.  His only point of confusion: "what's a penguin house, mommy?  I thought they lived in a nest.  Where is the house?"

Children's Books that Lack Happy Endings

For today's disturbing-and-fascinating children's literature, I present two parables.

Although I found Fox by searching for "most hated children's books", I jumped in with both feet by reading it to my four-year-old in the bedtime-reading lineup.  That was, perhaps, a mistake.  I could feel his discomfort by the second page.  At the end he was about to explode into dismayed questions, and I was not prepared at that late hour to turn Fox into the proper lesson that it needed to be.  I was forced toreach for some standard fluff book as a distraction.

That said, Fox is now on my wishlist.  It is a parable so deliciously and horrifyingly dark that I boggle to think a publisher was willing to risk it.  Good for them!  If there is room in the picture book world for this, then there is certainly room for what I want to write about.

Here is the spoiler:

A one-eyed dog rescues a bird from a fire.  She is so burned that she can never fly again.

This tragedy happens by the second or third page.  Already by this point my son was squirming with discomfort, and so was I.

The dog and the bird become the closest of friends.  Together, they run!  The bird sees for the dog, and the dog's running becomes the bird's flight.

The writing is absolutely touching, by the way.  Margaret Wild had me by the heart.  But even these feel-good bits were flooded with tragedy of Greek proportions.

Then along comes the fox, who is enthusiastically welcomed into their friendship by the dog.  But the bird fears the fox, and the dog ignores her fears.  The fox then drives a wedge into the friendship by secretly whispering to the bird that he can run faster with her than the dog can.  Ultimately, hurt by the dog's ignoring of her fears, she gives in and goes for a ride on the fox.  He runs and runs, dumps her far away in a desert, and leaves her with a nasty comment about how she will now get to understand the fox's loneliness.

The bird contemplates giving up and dying on the spot.  (And this is a picture book!)  But then she thinks of how lonely her friend the dog must be.  And so she resolves to find her way back home.

After having read this as a bedtime story to a child who was not yet ready for its deep themes, I can't help but think that Fox is a fire hose among squirt guns.  It is an immensely powerful parable that does not make any attempt to spell out what lesson the reader should take from it.  I would argue that Fox would be best when used as a teaching tool, read out loud by an adult who is armed with a lesson plan, or at the very least who is armed with some time to answer questions.

As with the other disliked children's parables I have dug up, this story could be interpreted several ways.  But I can't help but be amused and horrified at what seems like the obvious interpretation: Fox is about adultery.

Given my parents' love of Shel Silverstein, I am surprised that I never read this one as a child.  Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back, by Shel Silverstein is practically an illustrated children's novel, at well over 100 pages

Look how vulnerable that lion looks!  I haven't given Silverstein enough credit as an artist.  That's a picture of Lafcadio the lion realizing for the first time that he is naked.  But it also sums up the way a reader is left feeling at the end of the book.

Spoiler:

Lafcadio is a wild and innocent lion who eats a hunter, picks up his gun, and learns to shoot.  A man from a circus recruits him, and Lafcadio subsequently becomes rich and famous in the human world.  Lafcadio learns to walk, dress, and eat, and live like a human.  Ultimately he and everyone around him forgets that he is a lion.  Lafcadio becomes jaded and weary of his experiences, and ends up back in Africa as a hunter of lions.  One of the lions reminds Lafcadio of who he really is.  Suddenly, Lafcadio fits in to neither world.  He runs away and is never seen from again.

Gulp!  It's a fun little ride up until the lion's disenchantment with his human life.  Is this a cautionary tale about forgetting one's roots?  Surely if I had read this as a child, I would have mulled over it for years, and likely my conclusions would have had a profound impact on me.  Here is what Silverstein himself has to say about happy endings:

“Happy endings, magic solutions in children’s books create alienation in the child who reads them. The child asks ‘Why don’t I have this happiness thing you’re telling me about?’ and comes to think when his joy stops that he has failed, that it won’t come back.”

There is a spectrum in children's literature.  On one end are the comfort books - those fluffy things you can grab at bedtime to sooth the kids to sleep.  On the other end are the stories so disturbing that a child will hide a book or lock it in a cage in order to prevent themselves from being subjected to it again.  Adventure or didactic tales are more likely to end up nearer to the disturbing end of the spectrum.

Of course, a story that is just disturbing enough to be exciting for one child can well be beyond the pale for another.  As much as I am intrigued by these outliers in the picture book field, I don't believe that a story with a happy ending is inherently the bad thing that Silverstein considered it to be.  I think a story can be lasting and profound without pounding its readers into a quivering emotional heap.  I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for books that offer a bumpy ride with a nice soft pillow at the end.

Some Parental Discretion Advised.

So.  In order to clarify my thoughts on this post, popped over to dictionary.com in order to learn once and for all the difference between an allegory and a parable.  And I find the definition of a parable begins: "a short allegorical story. . ."

That explains why I was confused on the subject.

The reason I was pondering parables and allegories was because I have been pondering edgy, creepy picture books, among which my own manuscript will likely be lumped by some.  Chief among such stories is the perennially popular The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein.

Silverstein was the author of several volumes of children's poetry that children adored but which frequently bothered adults.  If you recall the Johnny Cash song "A Boy Named Sue", those lyrics were his work.  In the Giving Tree parable. . . allegory?  In this tale, a tree is friends with a boy, and together they are happy.  In their continued search for happiness as the boy grows into a man, the tree gives him every last part of herself, at his request, until she is nothing but a stump. Then the boy - now an old man - sits on her.  Sits.  "And the tree was happy."  Shudder.

The Giving Tree became popular back in the sixties in part because it was promoted through church sermons.  To this day, churches present The Giving Tree as an entirely positive parable - there's that pesky word again! - with the tree representing God or Jesus, selflessly giving and giving and giving.

As an adult rereading Silverstein's book, I can't help but see the story as being something entirely different: a picture book warning about the dangers of adultery.  Talk about inappropriate children's book material!  The tree is the other woman, blinded with love, giving her life to a man who is taking and taking but who has another life elsewhere.  Or the tree is the devoted wife, giving and giving her life to a man who squanders his his love on another woman.

The problem is that the Giving Tree is entirely devoid of any guidelines on how it should be interpreted.  It is a hollow shell that can be used to teach whatever lesson the teacher or parent or gift-giver wishes to invest in it.  Religion?  Check.  Parenting?  Check.  Environmental abuses?  Check.  Pick your issue and load it into the Giving Tree like a bullet in a gun.

But what happens when a child reads this book and is given no guidance?  Most picture books are not open to interpretation.  Either the book tells a story - with a happy ending! - or it teaches a lesson - with a happy ending!  But rarely is a picture book story open to any sort of interpretation.  In those books which are not entirely pablum, the child reader is typically led by the nose to the conclusion the author wants them to reach.

The Giving Tree gives the child reader the opportunity to ponder, widely and deeply - as I did, for many years, trying to mentally make the Giving Tree fit in with all the other picture books of my childhood.  The single clue I had to guide my interpretation was that the book was not kept on the bookshelf in my room, with all of the other picture books.  The Giving Tree sat on the living room shelf, looking oddly out of place between the works of Shakespeare and Kahlil Gibran.  Apparently my parents didn't know quite what to make of it, either.  Given that it was an expensive and new edition, in a house otherwise filled with the free things my parents had acquired during their tenure as broke college students, I imagine it was given to them as a gift.

Perhaps it was handed to them when my mother was pregnant.  Because, apparently,  it is considered good taste to traumatize pregnant women with a story that hints that the way to be a good mother is to completely and entirely sacrifice one's self.  (Please excuse me while I vomit into my coffee mug.)

My childhood interpretation of the Giving Tree?  It was a warning against poorly-balanced relationships.  And it was creepy.  And I imagine that was why it lived in seclusion in the living room.  Books and gifts were sacred things to my parents, so they wouldn't have given it away, even if they disagreed with it.

So, do I now let my copy of  the Giving Tree lurk among the kids' shelf of toothless fluff, in the hopes that it will give them something to meditate on when they have forgotten all the other books?  After all, it was so educational to me.  Or, out of dislike for the way it has been used against mothers, and by churches, and in promotion of unhealthy relationships, should I keep it separate?

The solution: I will compile a library of dark and subversive picture books!  After all, these are the picture books that spark my interest the most as an adult.  The books will live in my studio, and come out to play when the kids are ready for a challenge, and when I am available to take their questions.  Some parental discretion advised.

The Stuff I Took to Encore

Across from the sign-in table at Encore was a table of books for sale, by the people giving presentations.  And uh-oh.  All of them were novels.  I stood there with my heart in my stomach wondering how I could have so thoroughly misread the event info.  YA novels are awesome, and I would like to write some myself eventually, but right now my focus is on picture books.  And I'm the dweeb who shows up to a convention of novelists with a portfolio full of picture book art.

So I asked myself "What would Castle do?"  I marched (slunk) in, walked proudly (circled warily) to an empty seat, and laughingly introduced myself as the only dork in the room who was working on a picture book.  And I was immediately informed by some very nice folks that I wasn't alone, and in fact there was another picture book writer there at our table.

I can't say that I did a great job of working the room there at Encore, but thanks to the wonderful woman who made me feel so at home there at that first table, I came out of my shell enough to have a dozen good conversations.  For my first-ever convention, I think I did pretty well.

My big honkin' portfolio thing made me feel very conspicuous at first; but after showing it off a bit, I flipped to feeling like I really had my act together in the stuff department.  This is what I brought along:

Instead of going with the standard plastic artist's book, I used a scrap book.  It was, surprisingly, more professional looking.  Also, cheaper.  A bit heavy, though.

Inside: pockets with samples of the development art for my manuscript, and the manuscript itself.  Tucked into the front window are business cards, regrettably made in haste.  

My business card design, alas, was a sad wreck.  Never use a cheap laptop with crummy screen to produce colors!  Also, calling yourself an author is a faux pas if your work has not yet been published.  Technically, if you count self-publication, I am an author.  But since my goal is to be published by an actual publishing house, I should still be calling myself just a "writer".  Oops.

Also tucked into that front flap is the World's Smallest Dummy Book.

The World's Smallest Dummy Book!  Amusing that the crowning glory of my portfolio is small enough that it should come with a magnifying glass.  But I was able to use that as an ice-breaking joke, and just about everyone I showed it to read it with enthusiasm.

Why is it so small?  It's not a final dummy book, of the sort I would send to potential publishers.  It's what I put together as a test, to make sure the text works in 32 pages, and to match the text with images for the first time.  This is how I made it:

Those are three-by-five cards, with the text of the manuscript taped on.  I sketched out the images onto these cards with a sharpie.  Then I photocopied them.  I then cut-and-pasted the photocopies some more, setting up pages with fronts and backs properly aligned, and then I had that mess copied on double-sided prints.  Then I cut out the pages and stapled them.

I would love to show the interior sketches here, but at this point I need to keep the art off of the internet if I ever hope to get it published.  Kerfoo.

I got some ego-boosting compliments from Encore-goers about my art, which doesn't surprise me given that I was a trained illustrator in a room full of mostly non-artists.  But, surprisingly, I also got great compliments on my verse!  There was one person who told me that my verse didn't sound at all forced.  Coming from a writer, I treasure that feedback.

Moving forward, I would like to hook up a critique group in my area.  I got a couple of leads there at Encore.  I assume it'll take a while for that to happen, though.  In the mean time, it is time for me to move along to the final dummy book.  But in order for that to happen, I could really use a giant cork board so that I can pin the full-sized sketches on the wall in order.  Kind of like this:

Hey, lookie there!  Those are some big sheets of homasote freshly covered in white paint.  Now I just have to bribe my husband into holding them up while I screw them onto the walls.  Then my studio will feel pleasantly like a classroom back in RISD's illustration building.  I never thought I would miss that neglected old tub of a building enough to imitate it.  Next thing I know, I'll be beating on a piece of pipe with a wrench to simulate the noises made by the radiators.

Spider

I spotted there upon the wall

A spider climbing up,

A hairy, giant thing she was,

And so I grabbed a cup.

I pushed her in with newspaper

And moving carefully,

I took her outside to the yard

And gently set her free.

Professionalism in Writing

Yesterday I attended my first ever conference-type event: Encore!  That link may not work for non-members of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, so the short version is that Encore! is a repeat of a previous event's most popular workshops.

I have been letting the adventure percolate through my brain all day to try and figure out where to begin writing about it.  And poof!  An internet acquaintance known as the Bitter Homeschooler revised a blog post about people who make stupid assumptions about homeschooling.  It had nothing whatsoever to do with SCBWI, or Encore!  But the revisions she made were in response to some feedback I had sent her.  Or, possibly, the changes were inspired by other feedback that was similar to mine.  Either way, it was quite a delightful surprise.

In my sordid past I spent time at ConceptArt.org, a forum in which aspiring artists can get help in becoming professionals in the entertainment industry.  It was considered good form there for all members to spend time in the critique area. As an illustration major, and as a professional artist in the games industry, you would have thought that my feedback would have been welcomed.  Instead I was regularly yelled at by angry amateurs who insisted that I was wrong.  The language was regularly sarcastic, sometimes florally abusive.  Many people just never bothered to reply.  (I'm sympathetic!  As a big scary professional, I must have scared their pants off.)  I can't remember being thanked for my feedback (which the Bitter Homeschooler did), or at the very least thanked for my time.  It must have happened, but it wasn't the norm.  I wrote hundreds of critiques there.  I left when I realized how bitter the experience had made me.

Contrast that to a sprint review at my workplace.  My team would watch as I navigated through a fresh environment.  Their job was to point out every last pimple and wart.   Conflicting opinions were noted and weighed.  And then a to-do list was made.  The following day I fixed stuff.  Easy!

Okay, okay, so I admit I sometimes sulked over changes I had to make.  Criticism is hard to endure even in the most professional of settings.  But on the internet, a critique that arrives from a mostly unknown person, unexpectedly and unrequested?  That's license to tar and feather them, in absentia,  in front of an appreciative audience.  Preferably with gobs of steaming sarcasm.

The author of the Bitter Homeschooler reacted to criticism with a level of professional grace that I know I didn't consistently exhibit in my own professional art life.  And it was a rant that she so gracefully edited.  Rants and grace go together like nails and water balloons.

I know this is important to the Bitter Homeschooler, because her mild-mannered alter ego is trying to get herself established as an author of young adult fiction.  All I can say is that if this is how she responds to the comments of near-strangers on the internet, she is going to flourish when it comes to taking the criticism of an actual editor.  So my hat is off to you, Bitter Homeschooler!  You aren't as bitter as you would like your readers to believe.

And I seem to have wandered quite completely away from the topic of Encore!  So let me bring it back by saying how deliriously happy it made me to be invited to not one, but two critique groups!  What a thrill it was to be in the company of people who are as hungry for critique as I am.  The aspiring and successful writers of SCBWI are not internet nitwits!  I can't wait to meet with more of them.  Walking into that busy ballroom at Encore! just about scared my pants off, but it was well worth it.

Red Wings, Part 2

I have to admit, when a children's book makes my brain churn as much as The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings, I have to love it, even if I loathe my interpretation of its message.

Yesterday I wrote about my own hissing dislike of Red Wings.  RebeccaFrog, who had introduced me to the book, left some delicious comments in reaction to my reaction.  Completely unrelated, she also drew my attention to a  "cute" little picture being passed around Facebook: a sweating rhinoceros, on a treadmill.  Behind the rhino, taped to the wall, is a picture of a unicorn.

The rhinoceros picture alone is a tragically poignant and humorous summing up of our culture's attitudes towards beauty: we torture ourselves to look like starved supermodels who themselves are Photoshopped to be more thin and lovely than nature can manage.  But the real kicker was the caption on the image: "Never give up on your dreams."

Before I touch that, let me flip over to a fragment of an interview I caught on public radio some months ago.  The scientist being interviewed had spent time studying happiness in America.  He had data showing that our typical happiness over time takes a walloping nose dive when we are in our twenties.  Then it goes up again.  There might have been dips in the teen years and at midlife-crisis time, but I do recall with certainty that the major dip corresponded with the transition from life as a college student to life as a real adult.  And after that point, happiness went mostly up, and up, and up.

And what happens to us when we get out of college?  We get a job, get married, have kids; and we face the ultimate dark truth that we can't be the astronaut or the rock star or famous artist that we had fixated on being for so very long.  But then we reset our goals: get a promotion, go to the beach with the family, buy a house.  Once our goals are no longer out of reach, we become happy again.

 The notion that we, as rhinoceroses, should never give up trying to be the mythical unicorn is a recipe for a future in therapy.  If you make the achievement of an unreachable goal the necessary step to becoming happy, then you will by definition never be happy.  And yet our society places an emphasis on binding happiness to the achievement of goals.

But the flip side of our culture are the cultures around the world that do place an emphasis on finding happiness in what you are given.  But so often these cultures involve gross inequalities and human rights abuses.  It is one thing to find a zen peace in accepting that you will never get to ride on the space shuttle; it is quite another to ask a child bride to find joy in the abusive relationship she has been put into against her wishes.

But here is another complication: people appear by and large to be happier when they make an irreversible decision than when they are permitted to change their minds.  Once again, this comes from an interview I caught on public radio that, dang it, I have no link to.  Sorry!  There was a study involved, and the implications were creepy.  (Which college?  Which career?  Career or family?Divorce! Abortion!)  The author of the study went on a bit about how we tie our happiness to achieving our goals, and how as a culture we don't like to admit that we can also successfully convince ourselves to be happy when we fail to reach our goals.  And the reason we don't like to go there is because we see that sort of happiness as being fake.

I'm as indoctrinated as the rest of my generation of goal-seeking affluent white Americans, so when I see a story from 1945 about a bunny who gives up on a dream to instead accept his lot in life, my reaction is to hiss at it.

My more delayed reaction is to put the book on my Amazon wishlist.  I do believe I want a copy of The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings on my shelf.  It will sit right next to The Giving Tree, which will be the topic of a future blog post.  Red Wings isn't necessarily one I will pull out to read to my kids, but it will be on my mind as I try to figure out what stories I can tell that will help guide future generations to neither entirely accept their lot in life, nor tie their happiness to the achievement of shoot-for-the-moon goals.

Red Wings

Some years ago, in the BC era (Before Children), I was wandering the back rooms of an antique store with a friend when she picked up a copy of the little book pictured above, gave a squee of joy, and shared her fond memories of having read it as a child.  I loitered in that room and read the book.  There was no squee for me.  The book gave me cold chills.

I still feel guilty for wrecking my friend's fond memories of this book.  Having grown up with it, and not having seen it since her childhood, she did not see the dark side of this outwardly charming tale.

I'm afraid that the book doesn't exist in my otherwise extensive library system, so my retelling is based entirely upon that one very quick read there in that dusty antique shop.  The Little Rabbit who Wanted Red Wings, by Carolyn Bailey, is about a baby bunny who longs for a pair of red wings.  Against the advice of mommy bunny, he, or possibly she, gets those wings, and discovers that life with wings is rather awful.  Nobody recognizes him.  He ultimately gives up the wings and goes back to being a generic baby bunny.

I can see how this would be a cute and happy read to a child.  I can also see how such a story - published in 1945 - would help to guide little girls gently into their expected roles as future housewives and mothers.  Or nudge little boys to follow their fathers' footsteps into the factories or mines.  Or indoctrinate black children so that they wouldn't get uppity ideas into their heads.  And all of this is done so gently and cheerfully!  Because obviously teaching children to aspire to great things or different things or difficult things can lead to - oh no! - bad experiences!  We wouldn't want those bad experiences in our children's soft and cozy futures, now would we?  We wouldn't want our darling baby bunnies to grow up into fascinating people whom we don't recognize, now would we?

I must admit, Red Wings stung me doubly because since my earliest childhood, wings have been a potent symbol to me of my own future freedom.  As I progressed from grade school to middle school to highschool, my educational track pushed me deeper and deeper into misery.  I fantasized about dragons and winged unicorns, about my hundred-pound backpack turning into wings, about growing wings to save me from falling when the cliff of graduation finally came along.  I was seven years old in 1985 when Mr. Mister released the song Broken Wings, which echoed through my childhood and is possibly to blame for my wing obsession: take these broken wings/ and learn to fly again/ learn to live so free.  Had I read The Catcher in the Rye during my teen years, I would have added wings in my mental image of the drama out there on the rye field.  Instead, I painted pictures of dragons chained in dungeons, or with torn wings.

I finally did find my wings as an adult, in the form of a career making art for games, in (finally) dating and falling in love, in having the free time to paint and play and choose my own path. I have even jumped out of an airplane in exploring what my wings can do.  Twice!  I am in love with my metaphorical wings!

If I succeed in getting my current manuscript published, I hope that some graduate student out there will analyze it, because I have taken all of this wing business and folded it up and crammed it in there.  I would like to get the wing metaphor over with so that I can move on to telling stories about topics other than dragons and wings.  At least some of the time.

Perhaps someday I'll even write a story about bunnies.

Ocean's Gift

Ah, my kitchen workspace. It's crowded.

It usually looks more like this.  The clutter is typically less pretty, but in this case, my husband had just brought in a giant haul of tomatoes from the garden, and the results were pretty enough to photograph.  The baskets can't go on the floor, because then the toddler gets into the tomatoes.  I have had two tomato seedlings germinate in the bathroom already, thanks to her.

Anyway, as you might guess, this has had me longing for a studio.  If only we could lump the two kids into one bedroom for a while. . .  Well, actually this has been working nicely for the past week.  I thought the two of them would be playing rock-em-sock-em robots sleeping together, but so far, the worst that has happened was when the toddler attempted to nurse on her brother.  Had I not intervened, he may well have done the back stroke right out of bed with her on top.  Mostly, though, they just seem to keep each other sleeping.  Hooray!

So, it is time to get rid of the crib!  And while I fantasize about expensive drafting tables, I'll look at yard sales for basic stuff to stock my space with.

Now, let me interrupt this story with something that happened to me as a pre-teen back in Hawaii.  So, I was on the beach one day.  Yay, another beach.  Hawaii has lots of those.  So I was dorking around with some flotsam  a big piece of wooden vine stuff made soft by the water.  I bent it, twisted it, and voila!  I had made a sort of necklace.  I tried it on.  Then I set it down in the tide, thinking to myself, "a gift to the sea!"

Not five minutes later I reached down to pick up what appeared to be litter in the sand.  It was a necklace.  A fat gold chain, of the sort that some surfer dude would wear his bling on.  With a loose clasp.

I swear, I wouldn't try to pass of such a generic fairy-tale story as truth if it didn't actually happen.  I still have the necklace around here somewhere, if you want to see it.  The clasp still comes loose.  The chain is still ugly.

Anyway, I bring all this up because I had something similar happen just this week.

It started with a notice in the paper about a church yard sale.  Yes!  I have stuff that I desperately want out of my house.  Kid's clothes mostly; so I bagged it all up, and went to load it in the car, when I remembered the itchy, heavy, computer desk chair that came along with the house.  I hoisted that puppy into the Subaru and wiggled it around.  "I should carefully test to see if it fits," my brain said.  Meanwhile my hands were thinking about the kids upstairs.  Without consulting my brain, they reached out and gave the hatch a good slam.

One bucket of glass later, I took a ventilated ride to the church and got rid of the chair once and for all.  Rain fell in the trunk.

So, what did I find at the yard sale that made up for this?  Here is the short list:

One box of hats and purses for the kids to play with.  A pile of kitchen oddments, including cast iron pans.  One big car ramp toy for my son.  One potato bin to get those piles of produce out of my workspace.  Two brass candlesticks.  One swanky metal teapot.  Various Christmas deco items, so that my mother doesn't tell me I'm such a heathen this year.  An entire box of gaudy but not-cheap necklaces, including freshwater pearls.  One antique ivory bracelet, which may someday go on display with my skull collection.

But that's just the bonus stuff.  So what did the rain bring me in exchange for the Subaru's window?

A DRAFTING TABLE!

At this point I feel that it would be most appropriate to present you with a photo of the table.  But it is still crammed into the Subaru. . .  which is right over there, in the garage. . .

It seems this is the best I will be able to do in the dark.  If you use your imagination, you can vaguely see a gray rectangle in there, crossed by a dark band, through the absent window.

Now, if this this were a fictional tale, I would tell you how the table only fit into the car because the window was gone.  That would suitably cap it off as something out of the Brothers Grimm.  But, alas, the table fits in there just fine with or without windows.

So tomorrow, I trade a raven for a writing desk!  I mean a crib for a drafting table!  And to think that just last week I was daydreaming of my own studio with a fancypants art table.  I just had to smash an expensive window to get it.

Confidence

I find that when I stop doing an activity for a few years, and then pick it up again, deep and profound insights about that activity come crashing into me.  This time, it's drawing with a brush.  I never trusted myself to draw with a brush.  There were occasions when I did it, and I had great results - such as a cat study that I painted for my college-entry portfolio way back as a nugget.  But then I would try again and it was like every mark I made was put on the paper with a wet noodle.

Now I get it.  Drawing with a brush is exactly like playing music.  The minute you doubt yourself, you start screwing up your performance.  It takes an absurd belief in yourself to make a confident line.

And part of making this medium work for me involves believing that even if the line isn't at all what I intended, that it's still a good line that I can work with.  As long as I can embrace the flubs and erratic wiggles, then the medium is still mine to do with as I please.

Another part of it is that I have to calm myself in a meditative manner before making the first mark.  Ironically, I seem to be able to do this consistently even though I arrive at each little art session jittery with eagerness to use my precious time well.

Anyway, the above is much more tight than I plan to paint my book illustrations, but it needed to be done.  And the fact that I could do it loads me with more confidence.

And there still is no good way to put wings on a quadruped.

Satomi Ichikawa

One of my research methods has been to simply pick a shelf at the library and go through each book.  I take a quick look at the art style and a quick glance at the text.  If the text is in verse, I take it; if the art style is anything that catches my eye, I take it.

The book pictured above is one with an art style that caught my eye.  The author and illustrator is Satomi Ichikawa, who, surprisingly, has no formal training in art.  She paints in vivid watercolors, sometimes with a touch of outlining, that beautifully capture the details of other cultures.  I took home My Father's Shop and My Pig Amarillo, and reading them gave me all of the same people-watching pleasure as reading an issue of National Geographic.

Her books nicely illustrate how when a writer illustrates her own book, she can leave so much out of the text.  The remaining writing is spare and clean, without redundancy.

Up, Down

Dragons going up!

Dragons going down!

I'll be sad when I start making finished art for this book, because I won't be able to share it online as I go.  (Because no publisher would want to publish something that was swimming about on the Internet, in case you are wondering.)  But for now, I can enjoy sharing my studies.  Stay tuned for more dragons!

A Tale of Two Styles

Image one: five hours of work.  Warm brown on a warm gray paper.  Image two: an hour and a half.  Navy blue on a cool blue paper.  The dragon on the left was done in a half hour flat.

Okay, so there are a few anatomy problems with the right-hand dragon in the second image.  Those hind feet!  Those wings!  But I consider them a worthy trade for the more fluid lines and the sacred increase in speeeeed!

I discovered that, to a degree, I can erase my dark lines by scrubbing at them with a wet brush.  (For those wondering, the medium here is gouache, which is opaque watercolor.)

A non-artist of mine offered the best praise possible: she couldn't tell the difference between the styles of the two images.  My son, who is four, gave what for him would be considered a long and serious look, before commenting, soberly, that "it has too many heads."

My apologies for the poor image quality!  Given the choice between making art or properly documenting it, I must choose the former is I ever hope to get anything done.

I keep getting this giddy thought that I don't have a teacher standing over my shoulder poo-pooing my use of outlines.  I'm getting away with something, and it makes me want to cackle naughty laughter!

Verse Vice

Deep in the grickle grass some people say

if you look deep enough you can still see today

where the Lorax once stood just as long as it could

before somebody lifted the Lorax away.

          -The Lorax, Dr. Seuss

Back before having children, I had a yawning apathy towards verse. My highschool English experience to this day seems like it was aimed to kill my love of reading. But I hesitate to blame school for my dislike of verse. No, the problem with verse is that it is archaic, and archaic literature does so very little for me.

But when I cracked open Dr. Seuss for my son, I was won over by the perfect beauty of anapestic tetrameter! For the first time in my adult life I experienced modern English being used in verse in the setting that verse was made for: performance. Verse has to be spoken aloud to be properly appreciated. Spoken aloud, verse makes English so much more accessible that a three-year-old can memorize great swathes of text that would otherwise be far out of his reading level.

At this point I have to restrain myself, because I am like a convert to a religion: I have this desire to grab people and scream into their faces that I HAVE THE TRUTH ABOUT VERSE! No, the rhyming isn't the important part – not by a long shot! Any schmuck can pick up a rhyming dictionary. It's the rhythm that makes or breaks verse.

Verse meant to be read to children must be almost perfectly even and repetitive in its rhythm in order to be readable on the first try. If the rhythm is sloppy, the reader goes tripping and fumbling and stumbling over the words. By comparison, the “verse” of music can throw in extra beats or leave them out willy nilly because music, generally, is practiced to perfection before being performed. But the parent reading to their child is putting on a performance with no rehearsal.

You know a line of verse has failed when you have to go back to read it out loud a second time. A children's book that gets butchered on a first reading would have been better off written in prose.

A Little at a Time

Here is the same image, this time with highlights added.  I literally finished this with a screaming toddler wrapped around my leg.

Whenever I start a big project, I am hit by a singularly unproductive wave of jittery energy to do everything all at once.  This wave is driven by fear of various sorts: fear that I have to prove myself, fear that my work isn't good enough; fear that I don't have enough time.  Writer Deborah Marcus humorously addresses the latter fear in a recent blog post.  My wave of energy invariably crashes onto the pointy reality that I don't have boundless open time, and leaves me in a funk.

But I have successfully tackled a few long-term projects over the years, and they have given me a road map through the rocks.  First order of business: squelch the wave of jittery energy!  Kill all hopes of accomplishing anything in a hurry!  Doing a little every day or every few days is very very productive over a long period of time.

Prior to having kids, I did a painting a day in oils to learn the medium.  I finished 200-plus paintings over the course of a year.  This I did primarily by hauling myself out of bed at the time of day when I would rather sleep.  Then, while pregnant with my second child, AND working, I wrote and self-published a rather hefty cookbook for food banks to use as a fundraiser. That work was done after Gabe was in bed, and later, after both kids were asleep.  I basically gave up a year of television and games to do that, and it was worth it.

It's nice to be back in the saddle.

Kadir Nelson

My behind-the-timesness really shows when I admit that until this week, I didn't know who Kadir Nelson is.  By chance at the library I pulled two of his books at random from the shelves.  His specialty is African Americans, and wow, the emotional ranges he can portray leaves me stunned.

Above is a scene from Please, Puppy, Please.  Below is Moses, When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom.  These two books could not possibly illustrate better Nelson's range.  One of these stories is a warm fuzzy read.  The other could easily move a reader to tears.

I don't know precisely what medium Nelson uses, but it appears to be oil paints on the top layer.  Under that is pencil and transparent patches of color.  I am immensely attracted to this technique as both a way to preserve the lines of a drawing, and as a way to reach a full-color finished painting without bogging down in unnecessary details.  For example, in page after page in both books, Nelson includes trees as background elements.  Trees represent a monumental problem for painters, because they are made up of millions of individual leaves and branches.  A picture book illustrator can't hope to paint every leaf on a tree and still meet deadlines.  Nelson's approach is to draw the shape of the tree in pencil, scribble in a curly texture that approximates leaves, put a wash of color over that, and then touch up the dark areas with another wash, and the light areas with opaque color.

The Giant's Socks

Here is today's naptime progress.  I found some inspiration in one of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators's previous Golden Kite Award winners:

You wouldn't know it to look at this tiny image, but Watson uses a technique not unsimilar to what I am building towards: a transparent medium on top of a drawing, that is then touched up with a opaque medium.  He uses watercolor and egg tempera, specifically.

I am particularly attracted to the way he handles his drawings.  The lines are painted over with lines of color.  Every object is essentially outlined with a darker shade of the color that it is filled with.  In this way, he carefully preserves his elegant and naturalistic representations of plants and animals, while addig an extra boost of saturation.  The amateur botanist in me swoons at the specific plants elegantly filling the corners of his action scenes!

Although I have no intention of imitating him to this degree, I could spend an hour staring at the knit socks he so lovingly painted onto the giant. Watson rendered each and every thread!

The Great Bill Peet

I don't remember reading Bill Peet's picture books as a child. But as I read them now, with every turn of the page comes a trickle of long-lost memory. At this point I have revisited at least a dozen of his books, and I am forced to conclude that I must have read all thirty-some of them once upon a time, with one interesting exception.

Bill Peet's stories are occasionally in verse - the Caboose who got Loose being perhaps his most noteworthy. His verse, when he uses it, is clunky. He has a tendency to force a stress onto the wrong word in a familiar word pair, such as train WRECK instead of TRAIN wreck. He also sometimes adds or drops syllables at random, trashing the rhythm he just established.

The Kweeks of Kookatumdee has such pervasive rhythm issues that reading it out loud to my kids was an exercise in futility. Prose would have been easier to read aloud! Since the whole point of verse is the reading out loud experience, Kweeks shoots itself right in the foot.

And yet Peet tells such marvelous stories! Kweeks is one of my favorites, dealing with a flock of flightless birds living on an island which has but a single food-producing tree. After failing to mediate themselves, they fight over the food. One bird grows grows gargantuan while the others get so thin that they can finally fly away.

It's a didactic story, but it is also wide open to interpretation. Was Peet talking about gluttony? Bullies? Communism versus capitalism? The roots of warfare?

My own manuscript is crafted similarly. It is didactic, but different (adult) readers are going to walk away from it with different messages.

Hopefully, not too many will find my story offensive. That is the danger of treading into didactic territory. Even Bill Peet, who I would at this point call my role model, wrote stories that leave me cold. Chiefly among them is the Caboose who got Loose, featuring a female caboose who bemoans her life of being towed about. The only action she takes in the entire story is her decision to accept her miserable, passive situation. I would call it sexism, but the main character in Chester the Worldly Pig makes the same non-action, deciding gruesomely to return to a farmer and await his slaughter. Think that's creepy? Add to that Peet's admission that Chester is essentially an autobiography dressed up as fiction, and you get a downright tragic glimpse into the mental workings of the author.

I had mentioned that there is one interesting exception to Peet's books. Bill Peet wrote an actual non-fiction autobiography. And he did it in picture book format. Bill Peet: an Autobiography, is a massive tome by picture book standards – almost 200 pages! And Peet didn't pull the teeth from his life's story to change it into fuzzy bedtime stories: on page one he writes about his father abandoning the family. Growing up poor, limping through school, an oppressive grandfather, the Depression, working working always working, and a 27-year string of miserable experiences while working for Walt Disney; these are the dark gems of his life that he captured in drawings and presented as children's reading material!

I don't mean to sound disproving. On the contrary, I am thrilled to see that the children's book industry is so open to dark and honest subject matter. Not only did this unlikely work of children's literature get published, it won a Caldecott!

Mostly, I am thrilled for the chance to see into the professional history of an author and illustrator whose work I find both so admirable and so frequently flawed. Peet was an animator and storyboard artist first, a visual story-teller second, and only after much effort did he finally become a writer. And he reinvented himself, methodically trying out multiple avenues for his his artistic bent before becoming a parent and, in reaction, finding a comfortable second career in chidren's books.

Perhaps I can do the same.

Sketches and Plato

I am pleased with my drawing progress. Here are two studies of my main characters, in plain-Jane no. 2 pencil, on gray paper. Next I will try a combination of watercolors and gouache as I did with the last study. But this time I will be letting the gray of the paper pull its own weight. The purpose of the dark paper is so that I don't have to cover the entire surface with paints, which takes time, and isn't the best use of watercolor. 

Most of my story takes place in a cave, which means a lot of dark images. Then I can switch to white paper for the above-ground parts of the story.

Speaking of caves, one of my readers asked me if I was familiar with Plato's allegory of the cave. I looked it up, and wow! I have quite by chance rewritten a story that I had never read. Plato's allegory involves people in a cave, watching shadows.  Mine involves dragons in a cave, with hoarded treasure playing the role of Plato's shadows.

If I were a novice, I would now be quaking in my socks, wondering if this were plagiarism or copyright infringement. Or I would be wallowing in fear that woe-is-me I must be too unoriginal to be a professional. At this, I now laugh! I could certainly have deliberately rewritten Plato's allegory both ethically and legally. As for originality, hah! There is nothing new under the sun. The art of writing lies in making the old stuff sound new.  (Incidentally that was only one of two things I learned from Shakespeare.  The other thing was a list of archaic naughty words.)

No, the me of now does not in any way find this distressing. Let me put this another way: I have unintentionally reinvented a story written by none other than Plato! I mist permit myself, for a moment, to wallow in some fat, juicy ego, because right now I seriously rock. 

Removing Artist's Block

Closing in on a style.

After having noodled around with a few drawing and painting styles, I have come to some major conclusions. Conclusion one: college convinced me that my home-grown approach to drawing was somehow inferior to what they had to teach. As a result, I switched styles repeatedly in college. But my original approach still results in both a process and product that I prefer.

Conclusion two: my strength is in drawing. By choosing opaque finishing mediums, chiefly acrylic and oil paints, I was making a ton of unnecessary work for myself, because the bulk of my time spent painting went into tediously protecting my drawing. And the times when bad painting obliterated a good drawing were heartbreaking, and unavoidable.

Conclusion three: worrying about the archival properties of mediums has held me back. I always saw watercolor as less permanent, and therefore less worthy of my time.

Conclusion four: somewhere along the way I got the notion that a good grasp of anatomy is both entirely necessary, and can only be maintained with an endless stream of life drawings. These ideas gave me an underlying feeling that due to my lack of willingness to be a 24-hour art machine, I could never succeed as an illustrator. In reality, had I spent a little time reading children's picture books or viewing other professional illustration outside of my narrow range of interest, I would have seen how bogus these ideas are.

These blocks will not hold me back any longer.

Loosen Up

An experiment in spontaneity and speed.

Anyway. I have a manuscript. I am making art. Ironically, given that my education was in illustration, I am struggling with the art. And old dichotomy is rearing its head: either I can enjoy the product of my efforts, or I can enjoy the process. In college, and then after that in the games industry, I had a habit of knuckling down and grinding through to get the product that I was after. The actual art-making process could be so tedious, I had to actively use music to pound my brain into submission while I worked. This time around I intend to have a more healthy relationship with my art.

Coincidentally, if I expect to make more than minimum wage as an artist, I need an art style that isn't glacially slow. This is why your typical children's book looks more like Dr.Seuss than Dinotopia. Seeing as I learned how to paint by studying Dinotopia, I have to set out in a direction that is quite new to me.

College-me would have turned her nose up at choosing a simple art style for economy. The me of now is ready and willing! But where to start? I have been messing around with watercolors, gouache, pens, and pencils. Oddly enough, I may have to try black bic pen next. College me would have gagged. But if the ink can play well with watercolor, it's a process that I know would be fast. I drew a whole perspective tutorial for conceptart.org in bic, and much of that without pencil. So, it's worth further investigation.

Practice

I do my best writing while nursing the baby,
I tap out the words with my thumb;
The dishes neglected, a diaper needs changing,
The shower is coated with scum.
Though Facebook is calling and laundry need doing,
Instead I'm attempting to rhyme;
My Swiss-army smart phone allows me to wrangle
The very best use of my time.


Here is one of my attempts to work out character and art style for my picture book, as well as a snippet of doggerel to practice meter.

Here Goes

                                        

My workspace competes with produce from the garden.

I am a writer and illustrator of children's books. While I may be no professional yet, in the sense that I have not been neither published nor paid to do these things, I can't get published without first doing a great deal of work. Thus, since I am already doing the work, it is already my profession. Therefore it would be in my best interest to start cultivating a professional attitude towards what I am doing.

Never mind that I am doing my writing on my smart phone while nursing, and painting on the kitchen table while the baby naps. If Stephen King admits that his writing/life balance didn't work until he traded the grand central mahogany desk for a family sofa and a bitsy workspace shoved into a corner, then I certainly won't be ashamed that my setup might look like a hobby setup to some layman whose opinion doesn't matter to me anyway.

But I suppose I should introduce myself before getting into details. My name is Michelle Clay. I have written blogs, newspaper articles, and a cookbook. I spent a decade making computer games. I got my bachelor's degree in illustration. I have done my homework on the children's book industry, and know that I am likely facing a year of queries and rejections before, if I am lucky, I get a small advance. I know that if I work my ass off and get seriously lucky, I might be able to produce a steady income of perhaps half of what I was making previously. Fame and fortune? Hah! Like I said, I've done my homework.

This blog is to be my professional attitude blog, to remind myself that what I am doing is real work, with a concrete goal: publication. And not just once. I want this to be a career. Here goes.