Bartography

Getting out and about

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:32:00 +0000

For a while now, I've been thinking about community, and how it might relate to the market success of books for children and young adults.

A couple of things have brought this on: I'm currently reading (and being inspired by) Jay Walljasper's The Great Neighborhood Book, and in the past few months I've been surprised by the sparse attendance at a couple of launch events for appealing books by terrific people.

I look at my own situation, and I can easily see how I might find myself with a modest stack of books that nonetheless outnumbers the crowd at a bookstore thingy of my own.

When I consider these two facts --

1) Of the people in the Austin area whom I know (fairly) well, the single biggest category would be creators of children's books.

2) Of the blogs that I follow and interact with on a (fairly) regular basis, the single biggest category would be those related to children's books.

-- the phrase that comes to mind is "echo chamber." When my books are finally available, will most of the people who know about them be other folks in the local or online children's literature scene? Will the news of my publication be just one of many near-identical pieces of good news bouncing off the walls of one fairly self-contained community?

I grew up in a small town where one's authorship of a book would have been fairly common knowledge, I think, but I don't live in that town anymore, or even in a community like it. Occasionally, I miss it.

I live on a block with dozens of houses, and it doesn't take me very many fingers to count how many of those homes I've been inside of, or how many residents' hobbies, careers, or skills I could identify. I would like the people in my neighborhood to know about my work, just like I'd like to know which of them have a knack for woodworking or birding or canning their own salsa. I'd like to know them, and I'd like to have the kind of neighborhood where they know each other, and so I'm mulling ideas in The Great Neighborhood Book for how to help bring that about.

One of those neighbors I do know is a blogger, and through her blog (it's not about children's literature, and it's much more widely and rabidly read than mine) I know that her interests overlap a good deal with the sort of audience that's going to love one of those new books that recently drew such small launch-event crowds. I wish my neighbor had known about that bookstore event -- and the book being celebrated -- beforehand. If she had, who knows?

I was also struck by the large (by kidlitosphere standards) comment thread on the recent BoingBoing post, "Young adult sections in bookstore -- a parallel universe of little-regarded awesomeness." This suggests to me that -- for the right book (or topic) -- there are large, sympathetic blog audiences out there beyond the realm catering to us children's literature types. And that, just like in the physical neighborhoods we all inhabit, it wouldn't hurt to get out and about a little more often.

Mayes' days

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Sun, 04 May 2008 19:30:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:21:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 03:09:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 01:50:00 +0000

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)?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:12:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 02:19:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 03:01:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:01:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:36:00 +0000

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.

Beyond the Big Idea, part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:00:00 +0000

You Can Always Ask Uncle Wikipedia

So, let's say you read in What's the Big Idea? that the sewing machine was invented by Elias Howe, not by the better-known Isaac Singer. You want to know more -- but you couldn't find any books through Amazon.com.

That doesn't mean there aren't any books about the invention of the sewing machine, and even if it did, there still might be some trustworthy information available online.

If you happen to have a friend or relative who knows a little about this subject, you could ask them to point you in the right direction. If you don't, you can ask Wikipedia.

The thing is, like that friend or relative, there's always the chance that Wikipedia will give you more opinion than fact, or doesn't know as much as it thinks it does, or is just plain wrong.

I don't rely on Wikipedia when I need to make sure something is absolutely correct, but I use it all the time when I want to know what people who care about a subject believe to be true about it. Like sewing machines, for instance:

Since I want to know about something that happened more than 150 years ago, I'll follow the link from the Contents box to the History section:

Again, this section tells me what some folks think the facts are. Often, they're right -- but not always. Anyway, if the History section is helpful to you, then you'll want to have a look at the bottom of the page to see if it lists other sources.

If it doesn't, you might have better luck in the Wikipedia entry for a related topic -- Isaac Singer, perhaps:

At the bottom of the page, in the References section --

-- you'll see the title and author of a book about Singer and the sewing machine, as well as a link to another online article about him. If that other article makes clear where its information came from, you may have found exactly what you need. If it doesn't, it might be time to head back to Amazon or your local library.

So, is that it? Is that everything you need to know about looking online for more information on a subject you read about in a book?

Well, I haven't mentioned Google yet, have I?

Beyond the Big Idea, part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:30:00 +0000

Advance to a Broader Search

Suppose you need a book on a certain topic so badly that you don't care if your local library carries it or not. Let's say you're a Texan who, thanks to What's the Big Idea?, is all fired up about Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams -- what do you do then?

If you're like me, you go to Amazon.com's advanced book search, which covers way more books than can fit in a single library.

Enter your subject as plainly as possible -- simply Ted Williams will do in this case -- in the Keywords field.

You may also want to narrow the search down to just books for young readers. You can do this in various ways -- with another Keyword ("juvenile"), or with Subject ("Children's Books"), or with Reader Age, as shown above.

The results show three books that are obviously about the guy you're looking for. Click their titles for more information.

Now, maybe the top part of the page convinces you that this is the book to have. But if it doesn't, go all the way to the bottom of the page --

-- where you'll see a couple of options for further research: "Look for Similar Items by Category" and "Look for Similar Items by Subject." Both of these are easy to figure out just by playing with them a bit.

Assuming you do finally find the right book for you, what then? Well, you can always go back to your library's online catalog and see if that title is available there. If it's not, you can ask that your library borrow it from another library.

Or, heck, you could even just buy the book yourself, or convince somebody close by that it would make a swell [name of next holiday] present.

But what if you still haven't found a likely source for the answers to your questions? Hang on -- I'm getting to that.

Beyond the Big Idea, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:23:00 +0000

Behold, the Subject Keyword Search!

Even if the book you started with doesn't suggest another title on a certain subject, you can still easily find out whether your local library has what you're looking for.

From What's the Big Idea?, we'll go with the example of inventor Lewis Latimer, an African-American associate of both Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

In your library's online catalog, bring up the Subject Keyword search option, which might look like this --

-- or something like this:

In this case, just type in Lewis Latimer and click the Search button, and here's what you get:

In these search results, you can see not only that there are two relevant titles available, but also that one of them is specifically geared toward younger readers -- the one with a "J" for "Juvenile" in the Call Number.

Click into the record for this title and you get a little more information about the book itself --

-- but also the really important details about where you can find it:

Ah, but what if you want to find a book that your library may not have? We'll cover that next time.

Beyond the Big Idea, part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:20:00 +0000

In a comment on my post about Boston-related books, Becky mentioned a new title, Stephen Krensky's What's the Big Idea? Four Centuries of Innovation in Boston. My editor at Charlesbridge recently sent me a copy, and it will give my family lots to chew on as we figure out what we want to see during our upcoming trip.

In the meantime, the breadth and variety of innovation described by What's the Big Idea? -- and the difficulty of providing detail about each one in a single 64-page book -- has given me an idea of my own.

In a series of posts, I'm going to use examples of this book's content in a tutorial geared toward my own children -- and maybe just right for some that you know -- about how to track down more information on a subject covered in a nonfiction book. We'll start with:

Bibliography + Library Catalog = Easy-Peasy

Alexander Graham Bell was in Boston when he said, "Mr. Watson, come here..." Inventing the telephone ranks pretty high as local innovations go, so it's no surprise to see a Bell biography listed in the Suggested Reading section of What's the Big Idea?

Unless that particular title is poised to fall directly onto your head, finding additional information doesn't get much easier than plugging the first few words of that title into the Title Browse field of your local library's online catalog search:

Even if the results don't include the book you're looking for, they'll often lead you to other titles that might work just as well:

[Notice that I used Title Browse because I knew the actual beginning of the book's name. If you're looking for all books whose titles include -- but may not begin with -- certain words (such as a person's name), you'll want to use Title Keyword.]

And there you go. Now put in a hold request or just write down the Collection and Call No. information so that you'll know where to look during your next visit.

In my next post, I'll write more about how to find materials at your local library if there's not a particular title you're looking for.

Some doubt about it

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:00:00 +0000

I found out this weekend that I've got seven manuscripts to critique for Austin SCBWI's Write in the Heart of Texas conference next month. I've got plenty of time to get them done -- the conference isn't until April 26 -- so I'm not at all worried about that. But tonight I suddenly became aware of a pressure of a different sort.

Before you get published, as the years and rejection letters mount, writing for children can begin to feel like not just a hobby, but an increasingly expensive one. There are the big expenses, like workshops, and the smaller ones, like books and postage, and somewhere in between are fees for professional manuscript critiques.

Even at just 30 bucks a pop -- a bargain by some standards -- those fees can give a writer pause. "Is it really worth it?" they might ask. "Is this the best use of my money? I mean, really, the guy doing the critique -- his books are all just under contract. That's not the same as published." Hard to believe, but from time to time, writers do harbor such doubts about what they're doing.

The pressure I've newly become aware of is to make those seven writers who have entrusted me with their work feel like they did a smart thing in adding the extra $30 to their conference registration check. I've critiqued lots of manuscripts over the years, but this is the first time I've been compensated for it, and I want these folks to feel like they got their money's worth, and then some.

There will still be things that they doubt, but I'd really like for this expense to not be one of them.

I Don't Know Why That Is: a blog post

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 02:45:00 +0000

Tonight during 4-year-old F's bathtime -- a typically long, agendaless process that allows lots of time for the parental mind to wander -- I noticed that all three of the novels reviewed in the current issue of Texas Monthly have covers that announce, in tiny letters, "a novel."

My subsequent, in-depth research -- meaning I looked at online cover images of current New York Times chapter book bestsellers The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Elijah of Buxton, and The Luxe -- suggests that this is not typically the case for children's and YA novels.

It just seems to be the way it's often done for novels geared toward adults. Why? Do those readers need a little extra help? Or are they even more averse to nonfiction than teens are supposed to be?

Hey, I recognize that kid...

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 03:01:00 +0000

In fact, I just wrote a picture book manuscript, Bell, about him. Here's what he's like, according to Chris Mercogliano in a post at Beacon Broadside:

[W]e say that kids with minds like hummingbirds, who aren’t yet inclined to spend long stretches of time reading, writing, and figuring, are “flighty” or “easily distracted,” not that they have attention deficit disorder. The interesting thing about these children is that given the chance to pay attention to what they want to pay attention to, they will often spend hours at a time working on a drawing, or a birdhouse, or a new skateboard move. When it is their choice, they will devour good books and stories and keep asking for more. But if you try to force them when the desire and excitement are missing, indeed that is when the trouble begins.

In my story, that boy is a hero. But I wonder if others would read it and just see him as a pain.

I, Vivaldi; them, Shefelmans

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 04:52:00 +0000

I just found out that Austin author/illustrator pair (and great, gracious people) Janice and Tom Shefelman will be at BookPeople a week from Saturday to discuss their new picture book biography of Vivaldi.

I got a sneak peek at some of Tom's art for I, Vivaldi a while back and cannot wait to see the whole thing. If you'd seen what I'd seen, you'd feel the same way. I hope to see you at BookPeople at 1 p.m. on March 8.

Hmm -- sounds familiar...

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:41:00 +0000

Here, in no particular order, are selected words that appear in at least two of the five picture book manuscripts I'm currently working on:

Blast
Jackhammer
Sledgehammer
Dust
Explode
Horn
Tail
Fire
Brick
Scratch
Hole
Luck
Monster
School

For what it's worth, "dynamite," "avalanche," "danger," "obliterate," and "defied" each appear only once, and none of them in the same manuscript.

A brief month for a brief focus on brief manuscripts

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 03:36:00 +0000

Circumstances still being what they are, I'm still not working on what I'd thought I'd be working on this month. But you know what? I really like what I've been doing instead.

And what I've been doing instead, besides more pleasure reading than I usually get around to, is working on picture book manuscripts. Five of them, in fact, in varying degrees of completeness and quality.

These aren't new ideas I've ginned up in the past few weeks, but things I've had in the back of my mind for a while and just hadn't taken the opportunity to do anything with. If my own track record is any indication, at least four of them won't amount to much, but these five seem to be the most promising of all the story ideas I've had filed away.

I hope to wrap up work on these -- for now -- next weekend, share them with my agent, and move on to another previously scheduled project while waiting to see what, if anything, happens next with these picture books.

And while I have no idea what I'll be working on next January, or next March, I plan to spend next February doing the same thing that I've been doing this February: working for pure pleasure on new picture book ideas that accumulate in the meantime. That, at least, I can control.

Does this sound like any recent YA novels you know?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 02:21:00 +0000

This caught my eye last week:

Announcing The Willie Morris Award for Fiction
This annual award will honor the author of the best book of fiction set in the Southern United States.
The winning book should reflect, in the words of Willie Morris, "hope for belonging, for belief in a people's better nature, for steadfastness against all that is hollow or crass or rootless or destructive." [emphasis mine]

The winning novel will be chosen for the quality of its prose, its originality, and for authenticity of setting and characters.

The author will receive $1000, an expense paid trip to New York City, and be a featured lecturer at The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction.
The first award will celebrate a novel published in 2007, and the first lecture will take place in October, 2008.

It doesn't say that the book must be intended for an adult audience, and so it occurs to me that surely there must be at least one YA novel from 2007 that fits the bill.

Maybe that's just Looking for Alaska talking -- I think Willie Morris would have loved the beautiful, impulsive, unknowable title character in John Green's 2005 debut. And I think Willie Morris would have identified with narrator Miles Halter's search for the "Great Perhaps," which to me sounds a lot like what Morris was looking for when he left Yazoo City, Mississippi, for the University of Texas at Austin.

"Something different was stirring around in my future," Morris wrote in North Toward Home, "and I would brood over the place where I was and some place where I would end up, and for days I carried a map of the University of Texas in my shirt pocket. I was bathing in self-drama; perhaps it was my imagination, which had never failed me even as a child, that sought some unknown awakening."

(A bit about Willie Morris: If, like me, you've been even half-serious about newspaper journalism as a UT student in the past 40 years, there's a good chance you've been through a "Willie Morris" period -- lasting at least long enough to read North Toward Home and, in some cases, with no evident expiration date. The highlight of mine was the dinner he treated me to at Hal and Mal's in Jackson, Mississippi, as I drove back to Austin after a spring of magazine internships in New York City.)

Anyway, a cursory search for 2007 YA and middle-grade titles yielded a few potential candidates for The Willie Morris Award --

When I Crossed No-Bob by Margaret McMullan
Picture Perfect by D. Anne Love
The Baptism by Shelia P. Moses
Breathe My Name by R.A. Nelson
My Mother the Cheerleader by Robert Sharenow

-- so if you know the authors I hope you'll tip them off to this award (and the March 1 deadline), and if you can suggest other titles in the comments here, please do.

Don't make Bartography cry

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 02:33:00 +0000

From Lyn Seippel, assistant regional advisor of the Austin Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators:

Only NINE spots remain with our featured authors in the Critique Clinique at the April 26th Conference. [Bartography note: I'm one of those authors, and if my spots don't all get taken up, I'll be so sad.]

* First Come – First Served
* Available to anyone who registers for the conference

Secure your spot now and then you’ll have until March 1st to work on your manuscript.

Once you have your manuscript professionally critiqued by one of our featured authors, and revisions are complete, then consider sending it to an editor or agent for consideration. As a registered participant of the April 26th conference, you will be able to submit to/query speakers Alvina Ling (editor), Deborah Wayshak (editor) and Erin Murphy (agent) after the conference.

Registration forms and detailed information are available at www.austinscbwi.com.

Lightship wins!

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:54:00 +0000

I first wrote about this book last March, and I'm delighted to be writing about it again -- this time to announce that those of us on the 2007 Cybils Nonfiction Picture Book judging panel have given author/illustrator Brian Floca our top prize.

Have a look at who else won this year's Cybils.

The $1 million -- $10,000? $100? -- question

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Barton) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:11:00 +0000

Camille, Gail, and "Tales from the Slush Pile" have gotten me to thinking:

When kids ask how much money an author makes, how much is their question about arriving at a specific figure, how much is it about determining whether writing would be a realistic way for them to make a living, and how much is it about just figuring out where in the financial hierarchy of public figures a children's author ranks?

If it's mostly the latter, wouldn't the right answer be, "Less than anyone else you've ever heard of"?