Mayes' days

I don't remember whether I mentioned him by name, but during the picture book panel discussion at last weekend's SCBWI conference, I sang the praises of former Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Robbie Mayes.

It was Robbie who, in responding to an early draft of The Day-Glo Brothers six years ago this month, gently advised me, "If you were to develop this project further, what I'd like to see is a shorter text..."

People, it was more than 6,000 words long.

Can you imagine the restraint that went into providing the advice quoted above rather than scrawling "cut, cut, cut, cut, CUT!"? Or the generosity that led him to send anything besides a canned, "doesn't meet our needs at this time" reply to this sad, deluded writer who didn't realize he had enough text for six longish picture books?

I did develop the project further, obviously, and chopped the text of The Day-Glo Brothers by about 2/3, down to something resembling its current form. It still wasn't what Robbie was looking for, but the time and encouragement and specificity he provided made a huge difference for me, my manuscript, and my career.

As you can imagine, I've often thought fondly of Robbie, and since he left the business three years ago I've occasionally done a quick search for news about what he's been up to. I never found anything -- until yesterday.

Children's author Sam Riddleburger (The Qwikpick Adventure Society) has done the great service of getting Robbie to reflect on his time as an editor, recently posting the first and second installments of a still-in-progress, three-part Q&A.

You should read the whole thing, of course, but I thought I'd give you a taste of what you'll find:

Robbie on long editorial silences: "Trust me that when you don’t hear anything for a while—this is of course after first getting some encouragement—chances are pretty good you are not forgotten."

Robbie on gimmicky cover letters: "I felt a well-written, personality-ingrained letter helped me to form an early picture of what kind of writer I had on my hands. Sometimes the letter even trumped the manuscript in terms of whether I thought it a potentially worthwhile investment to offer encouragement and (hopefully) useful criticism."

Thanks, Sam. And thanks again, Robbie.

It's almost as if the bats are a metaphor for something

What we did not see.
(Photo from
Bat Conservation International)

Much of my time surrounding yesterday's Austin SCBWI conference was meticulously planned -- the full-to-bursting conference itself, the half-dozen manuscript critiques I provided, my performance as tour guide for my visiting agent, my mission to meet the macaroni-and-cheese needs of my visiting editor, and the post-conference consumption of chicken fried steak at Threadgill's.

But meticulous planning will get you only so far. After dinner, another local writer and I took four out-of-towners to participate in the beloved Austin activity of watching 800,000 or so Mexican free-tailed bats take flight from beneath the Congress Avenue bridge as the sun went down. A lot of people do this -- yesterday evening, hundreds of folks standing on the bridge or sitting with us on a hillside below waited for the bats to emerge.

We waited, and we waited, and we waited. The sun set completely with no mass emergence of Tadarida brasiliensis. The sky darkened to the point where we really couldn't tell whether any bats were flying out at all, or if they were just clinging to the outside of the bridge -- either way, none of us were going to witness the spectacle of all those flying rodents silhouetted against the fading evening sky.

What could we do? We'd showed up on time, we'd waited for a long while, but there was never any guarantee that any of us were going to get what we'd come for. Families with small children were the first to pack it in and head for their cars. When the patient troop of Boy Scouts from Humble, Texas, got up and left, I took that as a sign that the show -- such as it was -- really was over. We folded up our blankets, too.

But then one member of our party gravitated to a spot below the southeastern corner of the bridge, and gradually the rest of us joined her. If we used our hands to shield our eyes from the light of the streetlamp overhead, we could clearly see something. Not the picturesque bat exodus that we had expected, but something remarkable in its own way.

One-by-one at times, and other times in clusters, the bats were indeed coming out -- though that's not what we saw, exactly. What we saw instead was more amazing than that. A few feet or yards from the bridge, the bats just seemed to materialize. Suddenly, in midflight, there they were, their brown bodies flitting and swooping and darting. And then, just as amazingly, they seemed to dissolve into the night sky or into the shadows beneath the bridge.

Over and over, we watched it happen. Everybody else had gone, but the six of us who stayed received our own private display. It was not what we had planned for. It was wholly unexpected. And it was uniquely memorable.

They say that a certain percent of success (or life) is just showing up. Last night was a reminder that there's also something to be said for sticking around and keeping your eyes open.

Get some wisdom from accomplished children's literature professionals. Or from me.

Talk about being in good company...

At the Austin SCBWI conference this coming Saturday, I'll be participating in the picture book/chapter book panel discussion, "How I Got Published/Continue to Get Published." I'll get to pass the microphone back and forth with Christy Stallop, Brian Anderson, Jane Ann Peddicord and Lila Guzman. Not a bad bunch at all.

Moderator Julie Lake gave us a preview of her questions, and I've been mulling over some of those this morning. If you don't mind, I believe I'll take this opportunity to think my responses through out loud.

Real quickly-like, what did I do to get published?

In the case of The Day-Glo Brothers (Charlesbridge, 2009), I found a story that I thought would be fun to research, fun to tell, and fun to read. (Note: I kept the audience in mind, but I kept my own tastes in mind even more.)

Easy to sell? Well, there weren't a whole bunch of books out there about obscure entrepreneurs researching fluorescence during the Depression -- nothing I could point to and say, "See? These books are big!" But I did learn the market well enough to know that publishers were open to picture book biographies of such unconventional subjects as Waterhouse Hawkins and Fannie Farmer.

I researched, and I wrote, and I submitted. And I submitted. And I cut my manuscript by 2/3. And I submitted some more. And my 23rd submission (approximately) of this manuscript coincided with having a couple of local acquaintances put in a good word for me with their friend, the Charlesbridge editor. I would not have had those acquaintances without SCBWI, and it just goes to show how important personal contacts are in this business.

What trends/changes do I see now vs. when I first started trying to get published?

The avenues for making professional connections and learning the industry and expanding one's awareness of what children's literature can be have been greatly expanded by the kidlitosphere (and keep in mind that the avenues that existed within the children's literature community were already pretty impressive when I started seven years ago). But writers, beware: The potential for distractions from the actual work of reading and writing children's books has become just as vast. Strike a balance, and be vigilant about sticking to it.

What would I do differently if I could do it over again?

I would have waited a lot longer before I began submitting my work to agents. To that agent who received my very bad batch of first manuscripts -- which no editor or critique partner had laid eyes on -- I apologize.

The best part of a busy week

It wasn't toting home from UT an enormous stack of books about antebellum Charleston and the B&O railroad as research for my Impostors project.

It wasn't reading a terrific nonfiction proposal from a new friend and then putting her in touch with a children's literature professional who was just as enthusiastic as I was.

It wasn't picking up Keep Your Eye on the Kid as a baby gift for a film-historian mom's firstborn (See? I'm doing better!) and then visiting with a kidlit friend while I was in the neighborhood.

It wasn't even finding out about another friend's wonderfully ambitious (and long overdue) historical and literary project.

And it wasn't finishing my first reads of the manuscripts I'm critiquing for this month's conference, or successfully shaving 12 pages of my own down to 10 for submission to a critique group, or making plans for a get-to-know-you lunch this week with a couple of local literary folks.

Nope, it was an hour spent at my kitchen table with a pair of preteen writers. They came equipped with loads of enthusiasm and terrific questions about writing and publishing, and I got to share the evolution of my relationship with one publishing house from rejection letters -- all of which I saved and was able to show them -- to acceptance of one of my manuscripts.

And the best part of the best part was when one of them said, "Little, Brown! Almost everything I read is from Little, Brown!"

The mysterious nonfiction-as-birthday-present society

The Mysterious Benedict Society has been on my mind lately -- with up to $7 (before tax) of parental cash to spend during a recent bookstore outing, 9-year-old S snagged the new paperback (with a sneak preview of the soon-to-be-published sequel) for $6.99.

For a friend's birthday yesterday, S gave him a hardback copy.

And so, when I was thinking about what to give my nephew A when he turns 10 later this week, I thought -- well, you can probably guess what I thought.

But no dice -- my sister-in-law told me that A had already read it. Loved it, too, but I didn't want to get him something he'd already read. (If you assume that I was set on getting him a book of some sort, you're assuming correctly.)

Then I thought of something outlandish: I could get him a nonfiction book. Yes, I'm afraid it's true -- even someone with a vested interest in the health of the children's nonfiction market defaulted to fiction when trying to think of a kid's birthday present.

Once I got past that, though, it didn't take me long to come up with a choice I'm happy with and I hope my nephew will love: Sid Fleischman's Escape!: The Story of the Great Houdini, which as you can see from this link comes with the Fuse #8 seal of approval.

With that taken care of (thank you, 2-day shipping), I can now devote more time to wondering why I didn't think of nonfiction in the first place. My immediate hunch: When picking a book for A, I was interested in knowing what he's been into, in case there was something along those lines I could get him, or even the latest in a beloved series.

But trade nonfiction titles are typically singular creations -- in literature for children and young adults, nonfiction authors often don't return to the same topics as their previous works. And perhaps partly for that reason, nonfiction authors seldom attain the same prominence as A-list fiction authors and thus don't come to mind as brand names (as in, "He just loves Jim Murphy!"). So unless there's a particular subject that a young reader is nuts about, eliciting nonfiction recommendations from that reader's parents can be tough.

Even more so when the eliciting party doesn't think to ask about nonfiction favorites in the first place.

What am I working on (3/08)?

Well, since last time, let's see...

Researching and writing new profiles for my Impostors project, a.k.a. Pasta.

Booking a summer trip to Boston, where I'll visit my Day-Glo publisher and hang out with my agent and some of her other clients.

Starting manuscript critiques for next month's SCBWI conference, and making plans to entertain out-of-towners.

Revising my recent picture book manuscripts, starting with Bell.

Toiling away on a plan to raise the profile of children's and YA nonfiction right here in the (or at least a) River City.

Trying to keep my writing-related-but-not-actual-writing-writing activities in check. So with that, I'm off...

They'll always have the Harvey

And then a very surprising thing happened. A group of friends were eating at a restaurant called Florent. They had heard about the fireboat and decided something. "Let's save the Harvey. Let's buy her!"

-- Maira Kalman, Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey

My wife spotted this item about the closing of the Manhattan restaurant mentioned in one of our family's favorite picture books.

And I thought my antennae were up for tangential children's literature references...

It's a blog, it's a book, it's...

Noblemania! You really should check out this recentishly new blog from Marc Tyler Nobleman, the author of the forthcoming picture book biography Boys of Steel, about the creators of Superman.

Now, if you'd written a picture book about the birth of the Superman comics, who would you want to illustrate it? Ross MacDonald, right?

Care to guess who the illustrator of Boys of Steel is?

And I thought it seemed like a long time to me

As more family and friends and old acquaintances become aware of my children's writing pursuits and books under contract, I'm getting more questions about how the whole process works, and how long it takes.

"Wow, it takes that long?" is a common response.

This weekend, a family friend and fellow homeschooling parent asked if I'd be willing to discuss the process with her daughter and a friend, aspiring writers who are 10 and 9 years old. Sure thing, I replied, but I just realized something.

At their age, when they hear how long I've been at this -- 7-plus years of writing, 3 1/2 years since receiving my first contract -- with no books on the shelf, how is that going to sound?

Would that be like telling a 36-year-old such as myself, "Well, I've been at this for 30 years, and I got my contract 15 years ago, so, you know -- my books will be out any year now"?

Beyond the Big Idea, part 5

Go Ahead, Google it. Or Ask. Or...

If all else fails -- searching your local library's online catalog, using Amazon.com's advanced book search, and seeing what sources Wikipedia can point you toward -- there's still the option of plopping keywords into an Internet search engine.

For our last example of how you might find additional information about something you read in What's the Big Idea?, we'll go with the guy who came up with one of the most useful inventions in the past 40 years: the @ symbol.

The book tells us that it was Ray Tomlinson who decided to make @ a part of email addresses, and let's say that you want to find out more about how that happened.

An Internet search for "email" will get you a few billion results -- probably more than you have time to look through. Even just searching for "Ray Tomlinson" might get you a lot of stuff you don't need -- information about other Ray Tomlinsons, or other things that the Ray Tomlinson has done over the years.

But if you put both "Ray Tomlinson" and "email" into a search engine --


Wait. This isn't Google. What, you may ask, am I doing?

Just showing that there's more than one search engine out there. This one's called Ask, and as you can see, it's pretty good. The links in the middle of the page look useful enough, and the "Narrow Your Search" links over on the left show that the combination of those two search terms has gotten you right to what you're looking for.


It won't always be this easy, but you get the idea.

Now, let's do the same search in Google:


Notice how three of the first five results mention the year 1971? That probably means that 1971 was a pretty important year for Ray Tomlinson and email, so add "1971" to your search terms, and see what you get:


You might be happy to stop with the links listed here, but there's one more trick I'd like to show you. Google has a book search, too, and books often do a better job than web pages of saying where certain pieces of information came from. Anyway, if you try the same search terms there, you'll get something like this:


Would you just look at those page counts -- 900! 902! Now that's additional information.