I’m a collector of ideas. Though not a very good one. I have a tendency to let brilliant, world-changing picture book ideas escape by not writing them down. Great ideas slip into my head at inopportune times. Almost never when I am at my keyboard or sitting with pen and …
I like it when authors talk to me. In their books, I mean (although it’s nice when they do it in person, too). And when they do, I feel compelled to respond. So when Hervé Tullet tells me to Press Here, I press. Right there. When Jan Thomas asks Can …
Fairy tales and folktales are favorites to many, and for some (myself included) they’re what made us fall in love with storytelling from a very young age. They’re often beautiful, haunting, mesmerizing; sometimes bizarre and confounding. One of my favorites is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”. The protagonist, …
Have you ever reached an I-can’t-take-it-anymore kind of moment? A moment in which you are so filled with emotion that words just fly out of your mouth in one big rant? It’s probably not adorable when you do it, but I love when this happens to a beloved character in …
Long before I wrote picture books, my sons literally had to beg me to take “true” picture books out of our library. I assumed picture book nonfiction was a shorter version of a social studies text. It didn’t take long before I found myself rereading these books after my boys …
Welcome, Rabbi Benjamin’s Buttons! I just got to celebrate a book birthday. Rabbi Benjamin’s Buttons, written by Alice B. McGinty, published by Charlesbridge Publishing, launched just a month ago. Books take so darn long to make ( I was offered the manuscript on my own birthday, in October, 2011), holding the finished …
If you’ve been trying to write picture books, you’ve probably heard that they ought to be short: 800 words, 600 words, 500 words. Or even LESS. This can seem scary. But it can be done without sacrificing plot or story. In fact, many pre-published manuscripts I see could lose 200 words …
One of my favorite books of 2014 is Poor Doreen – A Fishy Tale, written by Sally Lloyd-Jones and illustrated by *Alexandra Boiger. Want a book with a superlative VOICE? This is it. When reading this story for the first time, I smiled all the way through. But then I heard …
A passion for picture books isn’t difficult to explain. They make us laugh out loud, they make us sad (and then rescue us,) they make us happy, they teach us about the world. Some just warm our insides. Every now and then a picture book comes along that is important. …
Recently, on a family vacation—thousands of miles and a dozen years since we’d read the book he was referencing—my son said, “Look—an Oliver Tolliver dog.” Now if you haven’t read Mary Ann Hoberman’s book One of Each, you wouldn’t have known to look around for an Airedale Terrier, but my …