Reading–Do the Math

I recently heard a public radio interview (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/05/08/julie-schumacher/) with Julie Schumacher, author of The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls. She talked about her “rule of 3,000.” She said,

“If I read a book a week, which I generally do, and you average that to 50 books per year over a reading lifetime of 60 years, between ages 20 and 80 — that’s 3,000 books,” she said. “And all you get in your whole life, if you are reading a book a week, is 3,000. So people always say what book would you take with you to a desert island? I think, no, the better metaphor is if you walk into Wilson Library on the U of M campus, which has millions of volumes, which 3,000 do you want?”

Or which 3,000 do you not want to miss out on?

I love a good beach read as much as anybody, but this gave me pause. Reading became even more precious. Maybe a person should pick up the pace. Read two books a week. Start younger. Live longer.

The same principle certainly applies to children’s books. Kids are young for such a short time. Are we offering them books they’ll remember and love throughout their lives? Ones they’ll pass on to their kids. Even their just-for-fun books should at least be really fun. Check out www.SWAK publishing.com and also www.readkiddoread.com for starters.

And don’t let anybody tell you read too much. Just tell them to do the math.

Happy reading!

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It’s the fishing opener or maybe vacation at the lake. You don’t fish, but you want to ride along. Great time to read. You could read a fish story.

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The River Why by James Duncan (excellent good fun)
Dr. Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish
or, if you are feeling ambitious, The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton

If you are an artist, you could do what I call print and release. This probably has to be done back on shore. You grab the fish that your favorite angler has conveniently just caught for you, slather it with watercolor or tempera paints or vegetable dyes, lay your art paper over the top and press down, just enough to transfer the paint without hurting the fish. A roller might be good. You should be able to do a few quick prints and still rinse of the fish and gently return it to the water unharmed. Later, after it’s dry, you can enhance you print if you wish, using colored pencils, more paint, or chalk.

Fishing–it’s not just for anglers any more!

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Someone famous once asked me “What Good is a Moose?”

Well, let me tell you:

1. Moose antlers can grow to be more than 6 feet wide – that’s probably bigger than you AND they carry them with their heads!
2. They have built in snowshoes. Moose are the largest of the deer family, so they have giant hooves to keep them from sinking in the mud/snow/muck.
3. Moose weigh about a ton. It would take about six Moose to make an elephant, but their legs are only an eighth in diameter.
4. Adult moose can run 35 mph which is much faster than any of us can, but even 5 day old moose babies can run 5 mph. Can you imagine your 5 day old brother/sister/child running 12 minute miles?!? Born to run baby!
5. Their antlers only take 3-5 months to develop each year. 6 feet in 3 months – that’s the largest growth spurt I’ve ever heard of.
6. Has anyone ever tried moose milk? Apparently it’s a real thing, but I’m not sure if it’s a pro or a con at this point…

I’m sure there are many more reasons moose are awesome – if you know of any, I’ll add them to the list. A post of moose pics might be fun too, so if you have any good ones, send ’em on over!

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Creativity is tricky business. We generally agree that it should be easy and fun. And it is, when we’re in the groove with all systems go. Sometimes, though, we need a swift kick to get ourselves going. We need to dare, to dream, to live large, to make mistakes.

When you come right down to it, creativity is based on choices we make, just like everything else. We have to choose which brush to use and which color, which word, which bat, which foot first, which direction. And then we have to let go.

Sometimes the right words can inspire us. Maybe  quote like these:

You must always take risks when experimenting.
–Finn Family Moomintroll, Tove Jansson, 1948

I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 things that do not work.
–Thomas A. Edison

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
–Oscar Wilde

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
–Paul Gauguin

Or maybe just do something, anything a little different–use your left hand instead of your right or vice versa. Close your eyes, hop on a brand new ride. You get the picture.

Maybe a book can get us going. We recently conducted a workshop for adults based on Margaret Peot’s  book, Inkblots. It was great fun, plopping some beautiful colored ink onto paper, folding it over, and then seeing what you got, and thinking about what your blobs might suggest.

Whatever you do, you have to begin. So go for it. And have fun!

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We got news and quotes back from our printer, so this seemed like the perfect time to catch everyone up on how our quest has progressed so far and where we’re at now.

For those few of you who don’t know or who haven’t looked anywhere else on our blog, we’re attempting to publish a children’s book. In the course of our journey, we’ve decided to strike out on our own…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

One day, Joy (mom) pulled out an assignment I (her daughter) had done in 6th grade. It was a story about how the birds had gotten their colors while playing a game of telephone. I don’t remember the exact details, but somehow that got us excited about writing together and after a few starts, a primitive version of Just Another Monday was born.

I should insert here that Joy is a previously published children’s book author (Nightlight and Agate) and worked as a graphic artist for a publishing company for many years. She brings a lot of expertise to our project – lucky me!

Just Another Monday (which has had quite a few working titles) started life as a very short blurb of an idea, maybe 4 spreads. Today they read like these first two, but at the time, they were wordy and much less clean:

Just another Monday.
You follow your mom to the car.
Look! A perfect skipping rock.
You pick it up . . .

Whoa! What was that?!

A dragon lands right beside you!
Yikes! Do you . . . 
run like crazy
or 
hop on?

From here, things progressed and a lot of decisions had to be made. We wanted colorful pictures for kids, with straightforward (not wordy or difficult) choices, and no sudden endings – all roads lead home. It has as many elements of a flash game (with decision-making and all roads leading to the end goal) as anything else.

The “simple” decision of having all roads lead home was a huge undertaking. The first 10 spreads and even the first path through were easy, but we constrained ourselves to 48 pages (so we wouldn’t end up with a 150 page children’s book – which is probably an oxymoron). That meant we had to reuse a lot of the spreads for different paths. Talk about a puzzle! Near the end I was sitting in a restaurant on my lunch break with the pages spread out around me, scribbling numbers and muttering to myself madly. Most people were avoiding me like the plague (I think I even hit myself in the head a few times 😉 ), but one nice man came over and asked if anything was wrong. I told him what I was working on and he even asked if he could help me. It was a very kind gesture from a complete stranger.

In the end, the two of us (more props to the other half of this venture!) managed to write all of the spreads.

Once we had it all written, one of our other major decisions was to cut down on the wording. No one wants to read (to themselves or out loud) a paragraph when a sentence or two will do the job just as nicely and more time can then be spent interacting with your kid (or your nephew, friend’s kid, rented child, whatever). This was again made more difficult by the need to reuse pages. (What a major foundational decision we weren’t even really aware we were making!)

During and after this, there were art decisions (we went with my line art and mom’s InDesign shading), book layout decisions (again mostly my partner in crime), cover layout decisions, and so many others. We’re still making decisions on whether the cover should come over the tabs for protection or be cut away because it looks so much, well, cooler.  We’d also like to make a series, so cover design and spine layout will matter a lot since it will be repeated (hopefully!).

After the book was set up, we sent it to publishers. It’s said Dr Seuss was rejected 27 times. Well, we’ve only been rejected 24 times so far. It’s a little (understatement) disheartening. You know you’re just number 203 in the stack they’re looking at, so it’s not personal, but phew. Also, as a note to publishers everywhere. Asking us to wait 8 months for you to make a decision did not happen. That seems unrealistic especially in today’s market. Maybe I’ll write another blog on the publishing companies’ business model. I personally think if they could tap into the online gaming model (I’ll have to think if there’s a way to reasonably do that), they would have a much better chance of staying afloat. Anyway, so no go on the over-taxed publishing companies. If it sounds like I blame them, I don’t. I just wish there were a better system…

So now we are 2.5 years in and we (and our respective husbands) sat down and tried to decide if we could start a publishing company. That is a huge jump in time, capital, and just general investment from having someone who is already set up to do so print and distribute your material. After much deliberation (drum roll please…) we went to the printer to get a quote.

We also decided to make an app for androids and iPhones. We’ll add a  part two to explain that adventure later.

I think that catches everyone up on how we got started. If you have any questions, we’re happy to let you in on anything we’ve learned, just ask!

Now, back to the beginning of the post. The short answer: inconclusive. The price is a little high to print the book with tabs, but we’re pretty sure we don’t want to do it without. We’re considering kickstarter (thanks to my brilliant sister-in-law) to get more capital for it, but we’d still need it to be a viable project. We want to be able to see a future of profit, not just breaking even, otherwise we can’t quit our day jobs and become world-famous children’s book writers 😉

Here are the major things that raise the price:

1. die cut tabs (the dies cost up front [we’d own them] and then there’s a small price increase to use them)

2. we’d like to do a 5,000 print run to start, much more expensive than 10,000 copies in a per book view, but much less in terms of available capital required

3. hard cover – we can’t have anything else and protect the tabs

4. heavy paper – the paper poundage needs to be quite high to make the tabs durable

So, we’ll update you when we’ve made a decision, but for now, we just need to sit down and see if there’s any way to make this work.

Wish us luck! and I feel like shouting out a thanks to all the support we’ve had in getting this far. We love you guys!

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Books are like agates. I always end my school presentations for the book, Agate, with this line. Books and agates have this in common: they both make us want to pick them up because we know there is something truly special inside.

Learn, teach, have fun

You can learn anything from a book. Stephen Chu, energy secretary and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, says that he learned to play tennis by reading a book.

Books teach us, or perhaps more often, remind us. A book could remind us that we are each unique and valuable (Agate) or that small choices can make a big difference (One Gorilla).

Books like the DoU series (Just Another Monday, Just Another Tuesday, etc.) are mainly about the fun, staying ahead of dragons and aliens, and so forth, but they , too, teach us that our choices lead us through life.

Hard work or fun?

We put countless hours into our books–a couple of years worth of writing, illustrating, designing, letting things cook for a while, then re-working, honing, improving–again and again. Nikki Johnson, the illustrator for Agate, and I  once spent an entire Saturday coming up with a single just-right word. She bought me an hourglass timer after that, saying that was the limit of the time I could spend on any one word.

Dr. Seuss once said of his editor, “He helped me realize that a paragraph in a children’s book is equal to a chapter in an adult book. He convinced me that I had as much responsibility to take as much time and work as hard as [adult writers] did.”

Of course Dr. Seuss also told an illustrator, I think you are taking this job too seriously. . . the trap you have fallen into is one that I fall into almost every day of my life. I continually forget that I am writing and drawing for kids, not critics. I get too self-conscious about style and subtleties, when all I should be doing is knocking it out, and laughing while I’m doing it.”

Creating books is both fun and hard work. That’s what makes anything worth doing. Everybody loves a story.

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Our DoU series (wish us luck with the publishing!) is all about making choices – kind of like life. In our series, all roads lead home, which I particularly like. That makes it easier to understand that no choice is the “wrong” one.

My grandpa used to say:

“If it’s a hard choice, neither one is wrong.”

and I’ve appreciated how much easier that advice has made it for me to make really hard choices. Since not making a choice is usually a choice in itself that I may not want to make (or so they say), his advice stops me from freezing up. Go ahead and read that sentence again, it took me a while to type it right and I’m still not sure… 😉

So, without further ado, a silly game of would you rather to play together:
would you rather…
1. go for a walk or sit and read a book
2. have a PBJ sandwich or have a PB and honey sandwich
3. play a musical instrument or sing
4. sleep late or get up early
5. eat a blade of grass or eat a bug leg
6. have a paper cut or get a hang nail
7. tell a story or have someone tell you a story
8. have your cheek pinched or get a sloppy wet kiss
9. make a snowman or throw snowballs
10. go to the beach or climb a mountain
11. eat something salty or something sweet
12. have a pillow fight or a water gun fight
13. wear shoes or go barefoot
14. get tickled or raspberried
15. go somewhere with your favorite person or have them come to your house

Let me know of any other good, clean “would you rather”s – they can be a great inspiration for writing!

***special note: for those of you following our self-publishing journey, we had a meeting with a printer this week. We’ll give you more details after we get the quote back, but the man we talked to was incredibly nice, helpful, and got both of us excited about our book all over again. Thanks for that!

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The reason so many stories use this opening is that it works! You are immediately transported to the land of the story –  in almost any place, time, or culture (for example [from wikipedia]):

• German: Es war einmal… ‘Once there was…’
• French: Il était une fois… ‘There was a time…’
• Norwegian: Det var en gang… ‘There was, once…’
• Greek: Μια φορά κι έναν καιρό… ‘Once, in another time…’
• Spanish: Érase/Había una vez… ‘There was, once…’
• Latin: Olim… ‘At that time…
• Vietnamese: Ngày xửa ngày xưa… ‘A long, long time ago…”
• Star Wars: ‘A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…’

It’s in the words and the way they’ve been said for so much of our lives. These are some of my favorite words to hear because I know what’s coming next! (stories!) Anyway, aside from the philosophical, here are some ways to spruce up your once upon a time. Maybe they’ll even inspire you to come up with your own 😀

• 1. In the age of the blue bearded children…
• 2. It was a lovely day, on a lovely planet, in a stinking cesspot of a galaxy…
• 3. Once, before the age of sand…
• 4. Beware the wandering walruses in this time of geese and hawks…
• 5. One day, after school and before ogre training…
• 6. Long ago on top of the mountain and under the clear blue sky…
• 7. Just yesterday…
• 8. Before we were a thought in our parents’ heads…
• 9. Between the days of the tournament and the day of celebration…
• 10. The hour of Cerberus’ birth…
• 11. During my third season…
• 12. As soon as the giant hammered doors clanged shut…
• 13. The year I turned into a carrot…
• 14. The moment the camel turned its head…
• 15. In the golden age of eagles…

Hopefully this gets those creative juices flowing – feel free to add a few of your own in the comments section!

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Our first post! 😀

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