Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Sorry I missed posting yesterday. No copy of Growing Patterns came, but I did get a very nice note from my young reader friend, Jackson S. He and I had lunch in October when I went to the Mississippi Library Association conference. In the note, he thanked me for showing him my draft copy (which I had printed on my home printer and stapled together). It is fun to have readers anticipating this book’s release. Last time around, it was just me and a close circle of friends.

The flower in the above picture is a spiderwort. A photograph of a spiderwort does appear in the book to illustrate Fibonacci number 3, but it was shot from the top and with only one flower visible.

It snowed here last night so we woke up to a white landscape.

This may be the last of the Tuscon photographs. Richard converted it to black and white. We have been updating and upgrading around here. You may notice some new things on the blog. To the left I have added more links to the blogs of fellow Southern Breezers. If I have left someone out, please comment to let me know. I am still building my list. Richard converted the Tuscon sunrise photograph to a wallpaper file. It is very nice!

I now work with a webcam attached to my monitor. It’s a little disconcerting to have this eyeball like thing staring back at me. I am practicing using Skype (which I hope to use to do virtual school visits soon) by calling Richard’s parents in England. Unfortunately, right now the news from there involves major surgery and lots of anxiety about its outcome. But it is nice to be able to see Silvana and Tony while we talk. They enjoy seeing their grandsons.

We got some nice quiet rain today and we have been having a nice day in our basement lair. Two of the boys are helping blog/website maintenance. Richard and D are playing ping-pong. It is a good start to a much-needed week off.

For me, a good novel is peopled by characters so real you feel you know them. This was how it was with Ray and Jose, the teenagers at the center of Paul Griffin’s Ten Mile River. The boys, who met and bonded during a stint in juvenile detention, have cobbled together a life on the margins in New York City. They steal food, grills, and cars, but they also share scarce food with a passel of mutts, wrestle and make jokes about body smells, noises and haircuts. Ray meets Trini during a trip to the braid shop for his weekly haircut. Though smitten, he introduces Trini to Jose and watches helplessly as they get together. Trini’s aunt Yolie, the big-hearted proprietor of the braid shop, offers the boys the closest thing to hope and normalcy they’ve seen for a while. Despite Trini’s urging and Yolie’s offer of honest work, the boys can’t quite extricate themselves from their thieving associates.

The narrative power of this slim volume is strong. I didn’t want to put it down; I devoured it in two sittings.

Luckily, I had Griffin’s the orange houses to pick up next. In it, I met the unforgettable Mik Sykes, Jimmi Sixes, and Fatima. I swallowed this one in a single sitting/lying down. Mik can’t hear well and likes to let the world fade into the background. Jimmi is a mentally ill vet and street poet. Fatima is a refuge from a failed African nation with a talent for folding paper. Griffin brings them together in a powerful story of friendship.

If I were teaching high school English or facilitating a book group with young adults, I would suggest these books. Griffin is a skilled writer who has spent enough time with adolescents in tough circumstances to pick up the lingo, to see through their tough outer shells, and to examine their deepest desires.

I am glad I met Griffin at the recent Mississippi Library Association conference. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of his work.

My business cards feature a photograph of a wolfsnail. Now that I have another book coming out, I decided I needed to create a new set of marketing materials. Some, like postcards and posters, will be book specific and feature cover art for Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature. Others, like business cards and bookmarks, will not be book specific. I decided I needed a logo,  a graphical representation of my work.

Richard and I started brainstorming; we wanted something that would say photography, writing, nature, creativity, wonder, and macro-photography. The ideas began to flow: camera, pixels, the letter p on its side, a camera with a magnifying lens in front of the lens, the letter c forming a camera, … I looked through some magazines, paged through some clip-art searches, and browsed some art blogs.

I saw a line drawing of an eye that I liked. Richard took that idea and came up with something I really like. He took a photograph of our camera and pulled up a sunflower photograph he had taken earlier this year. He used his Wacom Intuos 3 to draw, shade, and shape. He still has some fine tuning he wants to do. We aren’t sure whether to put a straight line on the bottom or whether to try to incorporate text. I’ll share the final logo when it’s ready. I plan to use the logo on business cards, my website, bookmarks, flyers, etc.

Do you have a logo? How did you choose it? How do you use it?

As the second in a week of posts with photographs of my Sunday morning walk, I offer a Gulf Fritillary feasting on Lantana flowers. Three of these were fluttering around the same group of bushes. What a fantastic color they are! I love the orange tip on the antennae. It looks like the head of a pin.

Today I interview Elizabeth Dulemba. She is on a blog book tour to launch her new book:  Soap, Soap, Soap ~ Jabon, Jabon, Jabon. Elizabeth and I know each other because we are both members of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in the Southern Breeze region (Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi).

When we finish visiting here, you’ll want to visit her website to view the book’s trailer and check out the fun coloring pages and interior images.

Your first book as an author/illustrator also happens to be a bilingual book in English and Spanish. How did that affect your writing process? Was anything different about the illustration process?
SOAP, SOAP, SOAP is based on a classic Appalachian Jack Tale, but I wanted to make it modern and relevant to today’s audience, and make the embedded Spanish easy to understand throughout the context of the story. It’s a bit like a puzzle, like any writing, just with different rules. For instance, you don’t want the Spanish term and its English translation to be too far apart. Like in the opening line: “…his mamá…handed him some money. ‘Here’s some dinero…’” That sort of thing. If the words are too far apart, the connection is lost. But I love puzzles, so it’s a fun way to write.

As far as illustrating SOAP. The story came first on this one, so it was almost like any other project, although I had the freedom to tweak and rearrange the text as needed without offending anybody!

I know you learned some Spanish for your book Paco and the Giant Chile Pepper. Were you able to translate your own book?
I took two years of very intense Spanish lessons at the Latin American Association in Atlanta (and highly recommend them). I’m not fluent, but I did learn enough to be able to do the initial bilingual text myself. Of course, it had to be vetted by a professional translation company to make sure it was accurate. There are many things we say in English or ways we say them that simply don’t translate – and visa versa. I was close, but we had to make a few changes.

I know from reading your blog that you embrace technology. What kinds of high tech skills are you working on now?
Funny you should ask. I’m having lunch with an iPhone App creator tomorrow. I want to experiment with turning one of my book dummies into an iPhone story app – hopefully in time for Halloween since it has a witchy theme. Cross your fingers!

I am interested in the moment of creation. Do you remember? Did it come from your writing place or your drawing place? Are those distinct places?
My publisher for Paco and the Giant Chile Plant was so pleased with my work (I was the illustrator only) on that book, they asked me for more. I adore folklore, and Paco was a retelling of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” so the seeds were already planted to do another Jack Tale. I did research and read tons (which I’d done at other times in my life since my exit show in college was about the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, where I heard Jack Tales from the master himself, Ray Hicks). And I didn’t have to go far for that research. The original SOAP story was in my own library in a volume of Jack Tales collected by Richard Chase and dedicated to me by my grandparents in 1975. Truly, I have an interesting history with these tales, they keep turning up in my life. Of course, the original is politically incorrect and completely unsuitable for modern times – that’s where the work came in – and while it is recognizable to those familiar with the story, it really ended up being something completely unique. Interesting factoid: the protagonist, Hugo, is named for my little cousin “Hugh” – a.k.a. the “Hughlito” in the dedication.

What do you have coming up next?
I’m currently illustrating “The 12 Days of Christmas in Georgia” written by my friend Susan R. Spain for Sterling Publishing (Holiday 2010). I’m also writing a new novel, have a picture book proposal with my agent, and am speaking at four book festivals this Fall. I stay pretty darned busy.

What do you do to feed your creativity?
I either go for a walk or take a shower. Sounds silly, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stuck on an idea or illustration, only to stop, shower/walk and have it all come clear! As far as refilling the deeper coffers – that requires a sandy beach and ocean waves…

What do you do when you are not creating children’s books?
Um. What? When I’m not creating picture books? Ha! Truly, this is my passion. I’ve wanted to create children’s books my entire life. This career demands a lot of tangents, like public speaking, volunteering as Illustrator Coordinator with Southern Breeze region of SCBWI and being on the Board for the Georgia Center for the Book, marketing, etc. but it all ties in with my children’s books in some way. I’m living my dream.
But for completely unrelated activities, does going out to a nice dinner with my hubbie (where I talk about books), or digging in my garden count?

Thanks so much for hosting me Sarah!

For several years, Elizabeth has been the Illustrator Coordinator for Southern Breeze. The gallery exhibit of original art by Southern Breeze illustrators was her brainchild. After its inaugural showing at the Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Ga. in May 2008, it was picked up by the Southern Arts Federation as a touring exhibit called Storybook Look. It made its touring debut at the Saenger Theater in Hattiesburg during the 2009 Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival.

It’s my birthday and my 250th blog post so I decided I needed some pretty pictures to brighten a dreary day. My yard is very, very green because of all the rain. When I got back from walking the dog I noticed dozens of mushrooms across the front lawn. I don’t know the names of any of them. I will have to learn how to identify mushrooms. If you look very closely, you can see one has a spider crawling across it. I was shooting with our brand-spanking-new Nikon D700, but I was too lazy to put on the macro lens.

It’s not as if I need an excuse to take photographs of flowers, but I spent a very nice hour or so yesterday reading and enjoying The Metamorphosis of Flowers by Marie Perennou and Claude Nuridsany. It was inspiring. My parents lent me the book. (Aside from being glad to have them in town, it is fabulous to have their library in town as well.) Perennou and Nuridsany are the authors of Microcosmos, the book that inspired the movie. Lovely, lovely photographs and beautiful writing.

Today marks my most varied (and abundant) harvest from the garden: a cantaloupe, an eggplant, an okra, a cucumber, and two kinds of tomatoes. Yum! The okra, eggplant, and tomatoes went into a side dish for lunch. How far we’ve come from the first seedlings .

Today’s other news is that Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature is very nearly finished. I never think I’ll ever get to this point with a book, but I almost can’t bear to look at it one more time. (My editor reported dashing across to the other building on the Boyds Mills campus to write final changes into a final proof.) I know this feeling will pass. It is beautiful and I’m grateful for everyone who has helped it get to this point. Now, it’s time for it to be a book. Already. The seed for this book started germinating in February 2008 at an SCBWI/Southern Breeze conference.

My editor has a rough layout of Growing Patterns from the art department! He went through the book and came up with a handful of questions and/or comments. I was able to answer most of them easily. He wants to see a few more photographs.

We need another example of a one-petal flower, a different photograph of an amaryllis (from a slightly different angle) and, perhaps, a different example of a four-petal flower. As I was going back through the photographs in the “Fibonacci” category in Lightroom, I came across the above photograph. I think Richard took it. I’m glad I found it. It won’t serve our needs as a flower photograph, but the bug is really cool.

Does anyone know the name of this flower? It is a wildflower and it blooms in April (or was blooming in April 2008, anyway). I’ve scoured the two books I have on Mississippi wildflowers and have come up blank.

The questions at this point in a nonfiction book’s process get very tricky, I’ve found. Once editors and writers face having something printed (that means forever, right), we start getting really nervous about having everything right, right, right. Because I am trying to write about a complex subject in a clear way, I sometimes simplify to the point of making something wrong. This is what we’re trying to avoid.

Experts can be a big help in this regard — or they can muddy the water. Before starting this project, I had no idea how many different words there are for petals (corolla, ray flowers, disc flowers). What a layperson calls a petal may actually be another part of the flower that has taken on petal-like attributes such as color. You see what I mean? At this point, it is very easy to get lost in the trees … and miss the forest. But, we’re close.