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.

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.

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.

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.