{"id":138,"date":"2012-01-22T10:42:41","date_gmt":"2012-01-22T17:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sitwithakid.wordpress.com\/?p=138"},"modified":"2012-01-22T10:42:41","modified_gmt":"2012-01-22T17:42:41","slug":"youve-gotta-love-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sitwithakid.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/22\/youve-gotta-love-books\/","title":{"rendered":"You&#8217;ve Gotta Love Books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Books are like agates. I always end my school presentations for the book, <em>Agate<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n<h3>Learn, teach, have fun<\/h3>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Books teach us, or perhaps more often, remind us. A book could remind us that we are each unique and valuable (<em>Agate<\/em>) or that small choices can make a big difference (<em>One Gorilla<\/em>).<\/p>\n<p>Books like the DoU series (<em>Just Another Monday<\/em>, <em>Just Another Tuesday<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n<h3>Hard work or fun?<\/h3>\n<p>We put countless hours into our books&ndash;a couple of years worth of writing, illustrating, designing, letting things cook for a while, then re-working, honing, improving&ndash;again and again. Nikki Johnson, the illustrator for <em>Agate<\/em>, and I &nbsp;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.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Seuss once said of his editor, &ldquo;He helped me realize that a paragraph in a children&rsquo;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.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>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&rsquo;m doing it.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Creating books is both fun and hard work. That&rsquo;s what makes anything worth doing. Everybody loves a story.<\/p>\n\n<ul class=\"wwm_social_share wwm_top_left\"><li class=\"wwm_facebook\"><\/li><li class=\"wwm_twitter\"><\/li><li class=\"wwm_gplus\"><\/li><li class=\"wwm_pinit\"><\/li><li class=\"wwm_tumblr\"><\/li><li class=\"wwm_linked\"><\/li><\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[10,12,19,23],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-tips-hints","tag-agate","tag-books","tag-just-another-monday","tag-publishing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JhDF-2e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sitwithakid.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sitwithakid.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sitwithakid.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sitwithakid.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sitwithakid.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sitwithakid.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sitwithakid.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sitwithakid.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sitwithakid.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}