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A Welcome Birthday cake for Winky Blue (and me)
from Don Gill and Charlotte Lappla Elementary Schools
Lucky Winky!
You can read all about Winky Blue's adventures in my six-book series
about the comical bird and his owner, Rosie.
Showing off their monsters inspired by MONSTER COUNTDOWN
(Those were some mean monsters!)
By Price Stern Sloan, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group. (Ilustrations copyright (c) by Pedro Rodriquez. Images may not be reproduced without the permission of Price Stern Sloan.)
Joëlle, tell us about the book's genesis. Was this an idea that haunted you for a long time, or did it come to you in a flash of insight or inspiration?
A lot of people are talking about the end of oil happening in our lifetime and what kind of changes that will bring. Some think it will be devastating with a long transition period while people figure out this new life without oil, and that idea of a period of upheaval is what caught my attention. From the time I first came across this idea until I wrote the first draft, was a relatively short period of time, but the original manuscript does not even resemble what Restoring Harmony turned out to be in the end! I rewrote this book more than anything I’ve ever done. Only the premise and Molly’s name are the same as the first draft.
Can you talk about your writing process? Do you outline or write a lightning-hot first draft?
There is nothing fast about any first draft I’ve ever written. First drafts are a total slog for me. I have to make up rules (like write for 40 minutes, take a break), goals, and rewards to get a first draft done. I’m now outlining a bit more than I used to (at the recommendation of my agent) and I’m finding it much easier. I never thought I could, but what I discovered is outlining is just like writing a first draft – I have to make myself do it, and I can if I put my mind to it.
Describe your writing space for us. What is comforting or inspiring about it?
I have a lovely office, painted light green and dark purple with a great desk and good light. Everything a writer needs. I really like things to be orderly and so when it gets messy (I prefer order, but tend to be a bit untidy!), I have to stop and clean it up in order to write. I think it’s just another excuse to procrastinate when I’m writing first drafts though because I have no problem revising, which is my favourite part of writing, in a mess!
Do you have a regular writing schedule? Also do you belong to a writer's group or do you prefer to create in solitude?
When I’m writing – and I take long periods of time off from it between projects – I generally write Monday through Friday about four to six hours a day between 10am and 4pm. After four o’clock, I’m no good.
I have a wonderful network of readers who help me with my books, but I generally only give them something that I think is finished (it never is though because they always have lots to say!).
You seem to have a natural ability to market and network; tell us a little about what you did and continue to do to get word of your new book out?
My ability to network really is just that I like people. I like to talk to them, email with them, hear about them, and help them. It’s not something I consciously do as networking. I’m not leaving comments on people’s sites so that they will remember my name when my book comes out. I only leave them if I have something to say. And while I know that interviewing lots of authors on my site brings me traffic that I might not otherwise get, it’s really more about promoting authors I love and their books. It would be so boring to talk about myself all the time.
While I’ve never promoted a book before, I have worked in marketing and publicity for both theatre and visual artists. I’m not very good at the cold-call thing, which is why writing is so great. Everyone expects an email or a postcard! Aside from interviews, so far, I’m mostly doing mailings to librarians and booksellers in a targeted area. I’m working up other things too, but until I am assigned a publicist, I’m just mostly gathering information for when I need it.
We know you are a fan of the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace. What other books from childhood influenced you and you writing?
The British writer John Rowe Townsend is one of the best storytellers out there and he’s sadly overlooked in this country and the U.S. He has over twenty YAs and MGs out in England (although, I fear many of them are out of print these days). For a long time I was simply a fan of his, but in 1992, I wrote him a letter and we’ve been corresponding ever since. I even met him and his partner Jill Paton Walsh a few years ago. His books have been a big influence on my writing, especially Restoring Harmony. If you can find it, I highly recommend The Summer People. Also, I love The Xanadu Manuscripts and King Creature Come.
Last of all, give us a hint about your next project, and good luck with RESTORING HARMONY!
I’m working on a new novel called THE RIGHT & THE REAL. It’s about a teen girl whose father gets sucked into a cult (posing as a church), and when she refuses to join too, he kicks her out of the house. I’m only about half way done, so I’m having to do all those bribes and tricks to get me through the first draft! Wish me luck.
And thanks for having me.
When I was a little girl, I loved having my mom read me the rhyme "Over in the Meadow in the sand in the sun, lived an old mother toad and her little toadie one. 'Wink,' said the mother, 'I wink', said the one. So she winked and she blinked in the sand by the sun." The rolling rhythm and rhyme of "Over in the Meadow" continued to haunt me, me and now Harper will be bringing out my spooky twist on the rhyme called, TEN LITTLE GOBLINS. The book, which will be out in 2011, will be beautifully illustrated by Jane Manning, and I can't wait to see it and to read it to kids at school visits and book stores!
In 1980, when I moved to New York, I enrolled at Fashion Institute of Technology to become a fashion designer. My new artist’s portfolio bulged with shiny pinking shears, pins, and colored chalk. But the work was grueling and the stiff mannequins draped in muslin had little connection to the dazzling creations floating in my head. Late one night, after a long day at work, my German draping teacher eyed the mannequin I was draping for the fourth time.
“Zat pin has no meaning!” she cried, pointing accusingly to a pin I had just stuck in the mannequin.
I took that as a deeply existential statement about my future as a fashion designer, and quit. Now what was I going to do?
During my lunch hours at the law firm I worked at, I browsed through Scribner’s Bookstore on Fifth Avenue, climbing the winding stairway to the second floor to read in the comfortable armchairs. I found myself drawn to the children’s section and the books I’d grown up with –– the OZ books, the magic books by Edward Eager, the Betsy-Tacy stories. Finding them was like rediscovering old friends. I remembered the first time I opened a Betsy-Tacy book, I was nine going on ten). “Going on ten seemed to be exactly the right age for having fun,” I read. Those were the most exciting, the truest words I ever read. And they were in a book!
For some reason I had never read the Betsy-Tacy high school stories.
But now, twenty-four years later, I submerged myself in Betsy's high school world, the one I wish had been mine. Family, friends, heartaches and crushes – it was all so innocent and fun, the perfect escape from the loneliness of New York. But I couldn't locate the last book in the series, Betsy's Wedding. Betsy’s life, so vividly evoked, was incomplete and unfinished without the last book. I had to have it. The bookstore said the book was out of stock. The publisher said it was out of print. Finally I found it in the Staten Island branch New York Public Library. I immediately called and reserved it. But I couldn't bear to wait for the machinery of the New York Public Library system to grind into motion. I would take the ferry to Staten Island and get the book myself.
On a gray, misty Saturday in early March, I made the trip, watching impatiently as the ferry plowed through the cold, choppy waters. Couldn't the engines go any faster? What if someone else took out my Betsy book first? What if the Staten Island branch burned down before I got there? When we finally docked, I ran all the way to the library. I didn't open the book until I was on the ferry again, headed back across the bay. Even then I hesitated, holding the book tightly in my lap. Betsy's Wedding was the last in the series. When I finished it, there would be no more new Betsy-Tacy adventures to discover. But at last, sitting on the hard ferry bench, my face wet with foam, I began reading.
“Almost choked with excitement and joy, Betsy Ray leaned against the railing as the S.S. Richmond sailed serenely into New York City's inner harbor,” I read. “The morning was misty, and since they had passed through the Narrows, she had seen only sky and water—and a gull, now and then…”
I looked up at a gull swooping over the gray water. New York of 1980 had vanished. It was 1919, and I was a young woman returning from a long voyage, and anxious for her first glimpse of New York. I smiled to myself and went on reading. “My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be…”
The Wizard of Oz was the first in the series by L. Frank Baum, but Dorothy wasn’t the only child to find her way to Oz. In later books, children arrived from all over the U.S. I fully intended to make it there myself before I became an adult. I wasn’t sure exactly how it would happen, but I had faith that it would.
One Christmas vacation, I was curled on the floor of my bedroom in my new red pajamas eating an apple and reading The Emerald City of Oz, the sixth book in the series, when I came to the last chapter, “ How the Story of Oz came to an End”. It described how the author, Baum, had received a personal note from Dorothy:
"You will never hear anything more about Oz, because we are now cut off forever from all the rest of the world. But Toto and I will always love you and all the other children who love us. Dorothy Gale."
I stopped chewing mid-bite. I didn’t move or even breathe as the enormity of what I had just read sunk in. The whole universe seemed to stand still with those terrible final words – "we are now cut off forever from all the rest of the world." I was locked out of fairyland forever, stuck in the real world trying to coerce ordinary life into a story.
The Emerald City of Oz was published in 1910, so by the time I read Dorothy’s letter, Oz had been cut off from the rest of the world for forty-five years. But to me Oz was breathlessly immediate, and everything that happened was happening right now. (Later, Baum decided to continue the series after one of his readers suggested Dorothy send him more Oz adventures by wireless telegraph.)
I must have known Oz was fiction. I was nine years old, after all. But a part of me believed that the fairyland existed on some plane, and that I would get there before I reached adulthood. Other kids had made it – Betsy from Oklahoma, Button Bright from Philadelphia, Trot from California. Surely there was room for one more kid to squeeze in before the door to Oz was slammed shut forever.
The way Oz was cut off, Baum explained in The Emerald City of Oz, was by making it invisible to outsiders.
“But how can you do it?” asked Dorothy. “How can you keep every one from ever finding Oz?”
“By making our country invisible to all eyes but our own,” replied [Glinda] the Sorceress, smiling… “We will be able to see each other and everything in the Land of Oz…but those who fly through the air over our country will look down and see nothing at all.”
That was the chink in the wall, the crack in the door left ever so slightly ajar. Oz might be invisible to most people, but if you looked really really closely, you could glimpse it shimmering through the fabric of reality, a parallel universe to the ordinary world we lived in. You might not be able to live there, but by watching closely and paying attention, you could at least catch sight of it now and then.
The book was inspired by a game I used to play with my daughter when she was little; I would try to tickle her neck and tell her a vampire was coming for dinner. The first rule in the book is one I'd be wise to employ myself: STAY CALM!
It's amazing how much editing a little book that only has a few hundred words requires. My smart and very patient editor, Brooke Dworkin, was a tremendous help with this.
For my other children's books and school visits, please visit my website, www.pamelajane.com.
- Mood:
giggly
