Hello everyone!
Yes, it’s been a while since I posted,
but I’m excited to bring you this little series:
20 days til TA-DA!
In 20 days, TA-DA!, my first picture book, will be released into the world!
To celebrate, I’m sharing some behind the scenes stuff each day.
Click on each drop down menu to learn about that day’s fact!
I’ll be updating everything each day!
I taught interactive history programs to students in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades
from 2010 until 2017.
Most every school day you could find me
facilitating these fun programs, bringing history to life
for the kids in the class and the parents in attendance.
I actually don’t have any pictures of me doing it,
because no one I knew ever came to them!
Well, Danny came once.
But I did some searching and found a video of little baby Kathy Ellen (2011!)
and you can see some of what I did in these clips!
An expert card kid doing his part:
Singing the national anthem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he43NGz0-YU
The Declaration of Independence (I help stir up the crowd!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL60aRFoOXY
and a battle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piFCHkOEL58
I always had so much fun!
The kids were dressed up,
worked really hard to know their lines,
and I got to improvise and riff off of what they were doing.
Also, it’s just super fun to celebrate when kids work hard,
and really exciting to see how proud parents and teachers were of the kids.
The presentation had lots of call and response and things for the kids to repeat
(perfect training for picture book writing really!)
One of the things I often said was DUN DUN DUH!
Most days I did two presentations a day
and had a thirty minute break in between to grab lunch.
One day I thought to myself,
what would the opposite of Dun-Dun-Duh be?
And that’s what tomorrow’s post is about!
After thinking about it for a while,
I decided the opposite would be TA-DA!
But when I thought of TA-DA! I automatically thought magic,
though I didn’t want a story about magic.
I wanted a story about play.
Which got me thinking about how I liked to play when I was younger,
and how different it was from how one of my brothers played,
And that’s what tomorrow’s post is all about!
First of all, I have three siblings;
an older brother, a younger sister, and a younger brother.
There’s me on the left, my brother Billy in the middle, and my sister, Debbie.
We all spent our childcare years
with a couple of great humans that were basically another set of grandparents
called Mim and Pip.
It was an at home style daycare
and we got to play a lot.
I LOVED to play with the Fisher Price Little People sets.
I would walk the people around and create stories about them playing;
I remember really liking the airport and then the western town.
(As I grew up, this morphed into a love for the game THE SIMS)
My younger brother, Billy, is 4 years younger than me
and I remember him playing a lot with his action figures.
He would hit them together and make all these fighting noises.
I remember there were good guys and bad guys,
But that was basically it.
(Sorry Billy if you had some complex backstories that I never knew about!)
This got me thinking about play styles and how the story could form.
That’s tomorrow!
and a kid who loved destruction
were playing together?
That seed got me going on the story.
I set the girl’s story up first
and then had the boy come in and try to ruin it or change it to his point of view
with the DUN DUN DUH.
The girl turns it back to her story with a TA-DA!
and they battle for a while with sound effects and who’s in control of the story
until eventually they get hungry.
Yes, it ended with snack time. (It doesn’t now!)
I polished up my manuscript and thought it was pretty good
and brought it to a conference I was going to.
I also needed a query letter for that conference,
and, GULP, had never written one!
So I had to write one, which I’ll share with you tomorrow!
What?
How you may ask?
I’ll tell you.
While I was seriously working on my writing craft
and creating lots of picture books,
I was also going to school to be a Waldorf Teacher
and working a full time teaching job.
I decided I didn’t want to throw “looking for an agent” on to the to-do list at the time; I decided I’d worry about it after I finished with the Waldorf Teacher Training.
In the meantime I was writing up a storm!
And saving up money to go to conferences.
I ended up going to one that I’ll tell you about more in the next post,
and for this conference there was an option to get query letters critiqued.
So I wrote one.
My first ever one.
And I’m going to share it with you.
What do you think?
Pretty good?
I don’t know, because I never had to send it out.
Also, side note, I can’t remember that I ever gave the kids names!
2018 me doesn’t think they should have those names.
I’ve just been thinking of them as boy and girl for so long
That it’s weird to see that I once thought they had names.
Okay, but tomorrow I’ll be talking more about this conference and how I met my editor and agent.
I worked for my brother’s outdoor laser tag business on weekends
(on top of my regular teaching job!)
and saved up money for about six months
to go to a conference put on by the Andrea Brown Literary Agency in California.
At that point I’d not sent anything out to agents yet,
but had lots of manuscripts (8 I think?) that I thought were ready.
I brought four to the conference
and honestly wanted to come away just knowing
if I was on the right track or not.
At the conference, I was in two writing groups that met a few times
over the course of the weekend.
Each group had four people,
and the leader of the group was either an agent, editor, or writer.
You had half an hour to read a bit of your story and listen to everyone else’s feedback.
I ended up reading the four stories I brought and getting great feedback.
Guess who my leaders were?
One ended up being my agent,
and the other ended up being my editor.
Yes, I felt very lucky, but I was also prepared.
I’d written a lot before going and polished the heck out of these manuscripts.
I’d gone to big national conferences and done intensives to hone my craft.
And I knew the market, which impressed my editor.
By the end of the conference, Ariel, who ended up being my editor,
asked me to send her TA-DA!
And Lara, who ended up being my agent for a time,
asked me to send her another book.
I ended up working with Lara and we sent out two books before we sent out TA-DA!
They did pretty well but were ultimately rejected.
When we sent out TA-DA! Ariel was excited to see it.
So was my work done?
Far from it!
There was more work to do, and that’s in tomorrow’s post.
before Ariel saw it,
and Ariel and I made even more.
The core structure and theme of the book stayed the same,
but it didn’t end at snack time (I’m so glad it didn’t!)
In the original the kids change/ try out the other sound effect once and then eat snack.
When we worked on revising it,
we added in their imaginary play during and after snack,
and REALLY fleshed out the character of the boy.
Originally he just wanted to cause trouble,
but then we figured out WHY he wanted to cause trouble
(The girl has a toy he wants and he thinks if he can mess up what she’s playing he can get it from her a)nd that let us to have him be a magician
(I know, after I said I wasn’t going to do magic with TA-DA!) plus added so much more depth to the story.
Oh I also had to take one instance of fire out…
you may have noticed there was a volcano in my query letter.
We decided it was too much fire to have the girl flame throwing and have a volcano.
So the volcano and the dinosaurs around it had to go, tragically.
Dinosaurs used to be a big part in the story.
I guess I’ll just have to write another book about them!
Then it headed off to acquisitions, and I’ll tell you what happened tomorrow!
Day 14
In the summer of 2014.
I was so excited, of course!
Here’s a blogpost I did about it at the time.
It took a while for it to sell
because there are lots of meetings that happen at certain times.
Publishing is a big waiting game!
But I was so excited to get my contract
and know that someday soon my book would be a real book!
Fun fact: when it first sold, the idea was it would publish in 2016.
Fall 2016 to be exact.
Pretty soon after it sold though it was pushed back,
which, at the time, I thought was a bad thing of course.
But now I see it was a good thing, because in Fall of 2016
I was adjusting to being a parent!
(Awesome kid Rosemary was born in August of 2016)
And now, in 2018,
she is old enough to talk about my book and guilt people in to buying it,
basically being my marketing intern.
So there’s that.
Tomorrow’s post is going to be about the illustration notes that were peppered throughout my manuscript,
which usually editors say they DO NOT want to see.
So come back and hear all about it!
So normally editors don’t want you to use illustration notes.
Those are notes, not part of the text, that explain what should be going on in the illustrations.
Most of the time these are unnecessary,
unless you are saying something completely different in the words and pictures,
which sometimes happens.
Illustrators usually don’t like these either because they don’t like being told what to do! (I don’t blame them!)
But some were necessary with my book.
There’s a page where the boy walks away from playing with the girl because he’s had enough.
But all he says is, “Never mind.”
I had to put a note because it wasn’t clear by the text what was happening.
But the first spread, where it says the girl is in a crystal castle in the mountains with her animal friends? I didn’t need to write anything there because the text made it pretty clear. And Kaylani made an awesome fort out of tons of toys for the castle, plus the animal friends are super cute stuffed animals that look homemade! So of course I loved that.
We did go through one edit where I did write out what was happening in each spread, art wise.
This was mostly to keep track of what was in the real world and what was in their imaginations.
That was so we could all get on the same page about what the vision for the book was,
then I did not need to be involved in the illustrations at all, like it should be.
Let me tell you about the first time that I saw the illustrations though.
Spoiler: I was so excited!
I did what anyone alive today would do:
I checked out her stuff online.
And I loved it.
Of course she hadn’t done anything for TA-DA! at that point,
but I knew her style would be perfect.
When the first sketches of TA-DA! came my way from my editor,
I was so excited.
I remember we had a family meeting:
Danny (husband), Rosemary (toddler daughter) and I
and looked them over and thought they were SO AWESOME.
To an author, it truly feels like magic when someone takes your words
and makes them into pictures.
I felt so lucky and knew then and there
that Kaylani was going to ROCK this book.
And there’s something I noticed right away that she added
that was going to make the story SO MUCH BETTER.
But that’s in tomorrow’s bit!
The dog.
I LOVE the dog.
When I wrote the story, I had the boy interacting with a dragon.
But then the girl turns the dragon into a kind dragon, so we wanted the boy to have something else to play with: a rabbit.
But the dragon was still in on a lot of the action.
We talked a lot about how the boy would hold two animals or how the girl would hold the wand and the dragon
and couldn’t really figure anything out
and then the GENIUS that is Kaylani Juanita made the dog the dragon.
MY FAVORITE addition to the story!
Tomorrow I’ll talk about the endpapers and the cool effect they have.
It’s like sitting down with me and flipping through the book while I tell you all the special features!
All you have to do to get it is buy my book!
Trust me, you’re going to want this behind the scenes look!
If you’ve bought the book, click here to get your PDF!
Here’s a taste:
I love how the endpapers set the scene of the book so well, and also give you a preview as to the content of the book.
You can see both what the girl is imagining and what is really happening.
This is such a core theme of the book and a fun thing to find in the illustrations:
The kids are imagining things but also acting them out in real life,
and the two worlds (imaginary and real) look completely different.
But if you look closely at the real world, you can see where the imaginary world is layered on top of it.
The idea to make the endpapers match and be morphing from imaginary world to real world and back
(go ahead, flip to the back endpapers for a second to see what I’m talking about!)
is something that came up in a conversation with my editor, Ariel, one day when I visited with her in San Francisco.
At the time I had no baby (Hello, Rosemary, who, at the time of writing this, is just about to turn 22 months)
and could make the trip up to SF pretty easily from where I lived in Santa Cruz.
We had the Crystal Castle/in real life blocks from the start of the story,
but there was nothing related to the blocks at the end.
The kids went to Atlantis, and Ariel suggested we could have the blocks turn into that!
It was genius.
She is a genius editor!
I also REALLY love how the art extends to the flap and continues the story.
That way all those kids who get the book from the library will be able to see the entire picture!
Tomorrow I’m going to talk about the fonts used in TA-DA!
There are two and I LOVE them!
it was important to be able to distinguish between the two kids talking.
There was too much going on for speech bubbles,
so it ended up being two fonts.
And two different colors!
I love that the colors are purple and red!
And that the boy has purple.
Fun fact: when I was pregnant with Rosemary I bought yarn to knit her a blanket.
Only I didn’t know it was a her yet; we didn’t know until five minutes after she was born!
One of the colors I selected was purple.
The person behind me in line said, “Purple? What if it’s a boy?”
and I said, “Purple, and all colors, are for everyone. Hello, Donatello? And purple is traditionally a royal color, again, for men and women.”
So I am particularly happy that the boy got purple.
The boy’s font is Aniara
and the girl’s is Myster.
I think they’re perfect!
Want to know the last sentence added to the book?
Tune in tomorrow!
Thanks for celebrating with me!
Kathy Ellen
