CWIM Giveaway and a Challenge for the New Year

Happy New Year!
I have the pleasure of kicking off our TeachingAuthors posts for this year with a giveaway of the 2018 edition of the Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market (CWIM), published by Writer's Digest Books and edited by Cris Freese. Read on to learn how you can enter for a chance to win this great resource. (A BIG thank you to Writer's Digest Books for providing our giveaway prize!)

Last fall, I mentioned that I have an article in the 2018 CWIM on "Working with Small Presses." I happen to have a second article in the same issue: an interview with award-winning picture book author Carolyn Crimi. In the interview, Carolyn discusses, among other things, the use of humor and wordplay in her books, her writing process, and her next release, the middle-grade novel Weird Little Robots, which will be published by Candlewick Press in 2019. Weird Little Robots was billed as Carolyn's "debut middle grade" in the Publisher's Weekly announcement of the sale.

Full disclosure: I met Carolyn Crimi when we attended Vermont College together years ago, and I consider her a good friend. When I proposed the interview to the CWIM editor, I pitched it as a piece about a "bestselling picture book author turned novelist." But I knew that Carolyn had previously ghostwritten two novels in R.L.Stine's Ghosts of Fear Street Series, a fact she discusses in the article. Even though Carolyn is working on another novel, she says in the article that she will continue writing picture books, too. She's not afraid to wear lots of different hats: picture book writer, novelist, illustrator, teacher, improv artist, actress, etc. 

One of the things I admire about Carolyn is that she likes challenging herself, which leads to the topic of our first series of posts for the New Year:

How will you challenge yourself as a writer this year?

My self-imposed challenge? To revise the nonfiction picture book biography of mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi that I wrote years ago. If you follow our blog, you know that working on the biography led to my young-adult novel Playing by Heart. The novel is based on  the lives of Maria Gaetana and her younger sister, composer Maria Teresa Agnesi. To write Playing by Heart, I had to immerse myself in the life and culture of 18th-century Milan.  I now feel better equipped to again tackle the true story behind my fiction.

As I type this blog post, I'm thinking that rather than revise the biography I originally wrote, perhaps I'll start from scratch and try coming at it from a completely different angle. We shall see. My goal is to bring Maria Gaetana Agnesi's story to life in a way that will connect with young readers--something my earlier drafts didn't accomplish.

Now it's your turn:
What writing challenge will you take on in 2018? I invite you to share your answer in the comments below or on our Facebook page. (If you haven't already "liked" our Facebook page, please do so today!) Your answer can serve to enter you in the CWIM giveaway if you follow the instructions below.

First, though, I'd like to share a bit of good news about Playing by Heart (Vinspire Publishing). Leslie Lindsay, a Goodreads "Top 1% Reviewer," gave the novel a
5-star review! She enjoyed the novel so much, she invited me to do an interview on her blog. You can read the interview and her complete review here. I'm grateful Leslie also posted her review on Goodreads and Amazon. (The heading of her Amazon review reads "Historical YA Fiction Appeals to Readers of ALL Ages.") My publisher wants me to have at least 50 Amazon reviews and the book currently has only 31. So if you've read the book and enjoyed it, I'd appreciate if you'd post your honest review on Amazon, Goodreads, or both.   

By the way, I included this info and other good news in my latest Creativity Newsletter, in which I also discussed being creatively inspired at the movies recently. You can read that issue here. If you enjoy it, I hope you'll become a subscriber in the right sidebar of my website's home page.

And now, for the instructions on how to enter our giveaway for a chance to win a copy of the 2018 Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market (CWIM):

You must use the Rafflecopter widget at the end of this post to enter the giveaway. You may enter via 1, 2, or all 3 options. 

If you choose option 2, you MUST leave a comment answering the question:
What writing challenge will you take on in 2018? either on this blog post or on our TeachingAuthors Facebook page.

If you have trouble posting your comment, you may submit it via email to: teachingauthors [at] gmail [dot] com.

Email subscribers: if you received this post via email, you can click on the Rafflecopter link at the end of the message to access the entry form.

Note: if you submit your comments via email or Facebook, YOU MUST STILL ENTER THE DRAWING VIA THE RAFFLECOPTER WIDGET BELOW.
The giveaway ends January 24 and is open to U.S. residents only.

Winners will be notified via email, so watch your inbox!

By the way, congratulations to Jeanne S. on winning a copy of Paul Mosier's Train I Ride in our last giveaway!

Don't forget: today is Poetry Friday. This week's roundup is hosted by Catherine at Reading To The Core.

Finally, remember to always Write with Joy!

Carmela

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Short, Sweet, Sold

As someone who never read picture books as a child (the only kid I know who never cared to look at the pictures) and who has yet to successfully write a salable one, my primary qualification in writing this post is as a mother to a three-year-old and five-year-old.  Yes, I realize that I am hardly unique in this regard, but bear with me for a moment.

Those pesky editors we keep hearing about who want picture books to be shorter than 300 words?  I have a confession.  They are my heroes! 

Despite the oft-heralded demise of the picture book, both of my kids are read to at school daily. My son's preschool has an aftercare program called Leaping Into Literature, in which each day's activities are tied to the picture book du jour.  (They cooked Stone Soup last week - yum.)  The breadth of literature read is impressive and spans Hans Christian Andersen to Weird Al.  But at home, we chiefly read at bedtime. And if at bedtime I pluck from the shelf a book with enough words to place sleep another ten minutes from our reach -- back it goes in all due haste.

When my kids were very little, I took them to story time at the library. Mostly I would chase them through the stacks in our (blessedly!) tiny branch. While I started reading to them when they were infants, it took until they were about three until they learned to sit still for a good story.  My son, age 3.5, can now read simple texts himself and will listen attentively to a book for at least fifteen minutes; however, I'm still not sure how much he comprehends.  For my daughter, the bedtime routine might include a picture book, an easy reader, and/or a chapter of a book meant for older readers.  Sometimes I read, sometimes she reads, and sometimes we read to each other. While she may practice her independent reading skills with an appropriately leveled easy reader, there are picture books that she could never read herself that have plots and vocabulary more befitting the story sense of a child her age.  Each has its purpose, and indeed, the pictures serve an important function in helping children to decode the words.

Apropos of reader Bruce's recent comment about multi-layered picture books, a few weeks ago I was reading Jan Brett's Gingerbread Friends to Kate for the first time. In keeping with my typical failure to study the (gorgeous) illustrations, I got to the end of the story and was baffled as to what had happened.  Where did the gingerbread friends come from?  "Well," Kate said patiently, "Mattie was baking them.  See the pictures inside the hearts?" She pointed to the story within a story unfolding in the margins.

Last night we were reading the fabulous Dear Tabby by my good friend, Carolyn Crimi.  While Kate obviously had no idea who Dear Abby was, she was thoroughly entranced and asked to hear the story again and again.  The grown-up humor was such that I was equally happy to read it repeatedly, and the uplifting message was one that I could stand to hear every day.
(Real-life conversation:
Me: We got a new book.  It's called Dear Tabby.  A tabby is a type of cat, and I know you like to read about cats. 
Kate: A pussycat is another type of cat. What does 'pussy' mean? 
Ah, aren't books great conversation starters?)

For every 1,000-word book my daughter may read now, she will be just as happy to return to the board books for her infancy.  Can't we all relate to the nostalgia for the simpler days of our youth? :)

I calculate that I spent roughly five years (3,000 sittings, conservatively estimated) reading the same fifty or so books (happily) and the another fifty or so more (not so happily) to my under-three set. I don't care how 'soft' the picture book market is at the moment. There is a dearth of books with very few words that are meant for the youngest readers -- the sort that our JoAnn Early Macken writes so beautifully.


This is, needless to say, a tough market to write for.  Those of us who are also artists have a leg up.  Those of us who were kept after school in kindergarten because we were deficient in cutting skills (*raises hand*) have considerably larger hurdles when it comes to pitching a concept-heavy book for the youngest readers in which the pictures that we can't draw will tell a large part of the story.  But take heart from JoAnn (as I do).  It can be done!  

Whoever your audience, whatever you do -- spend time with a little kid.  Get inspired.  Enjoy!
--Jeanne Marie

Writing Workout

Crystallize your one-sentence idea.

Write your book for a one-year-old.

Write it for a three-year-old.

Write it for a five-year-old.

If you are feeling very ambitious, write it for a seven-year-old.

Observe how it changes with each iteration. 

Observe how it stays the same. 

Read it to a real kid (or three or four). 

Have fun!