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Good news. Our picture book B is for Beaver: An Oregon Alphabet
has been nominated for an Oregon Book Award. My wife Marie and I co-wrote this book
(although I have to admit that Marie did all of the research and most of the writing...easiest book I ever got my name on).
It was illustrated by my childhood friend Michael Roydon (beautifully I might add).The story behind how this book came to be is interesting, and Marie tells it better than me, but I'll give it a shot here. A bit of background first...
I started my career writing children's non-fiction books and quickly transitioned into writing YA novels. Along the way I tried my hand at a picture book or two, but I could never get a publisher to buy off on one. I'm not really a picture book kind of guy and I have to say that my motivation to have one published was not exactly pure. There were two things that I found particularly intriguing about writing a picture book.
Me (sitting in my room staring, wild-eye at a paragraph that took me a half an hour to write wondering why I wrote it): "Yeah?"
Them (sitting in Starbucks sipping a Grande Latte): "What are you doing?"
Me: "Trying to write a book."
Them: "I wrote two books this morning. Emailed them to my editor. She bought 'em both."
Me: Click!
A few years ago, Pam Munoz Ryan (who I used to like before she started writing fabulous bestselling novels) stayed at our house for a couple days. After dinner one night we were talking about picture books and she said that Sleeping Bear Press was coming out with a series of State alphabet books and they were looking for authors. Marie told Pam that I didn't have time to write an alphabet book, that I was already past the due date on several contracted novels. End of subject.
Well, not quite. A few days after Pam left I called the Sleeping Bear editor and told her that I wanted to write the Oregon book. She was delighted to hear from me and said that she would send me a contract. I went upstairs and gave Marie the good news and she blew a cork, telling me that I didn't have time to write the book, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. To which I happily replied: "Don't worry about it. Your name is on the contract too. Congratulations."
Believe it or not, she was not nearly as happy as I was about her first book contract. In fact, I found out months later that she was as mad as a yellowjacket because she didn't think that she could write a book. Huh?
Another thing I didn't know about was that Marie thought I was a truth strecher. That's right. When I talk to groups one of the things I always tell them is: "Anyone can write a book if that's what you choose to do. Apparently Marie did not believe the anyone part and set out to prove me wrong.
Every couple weeks I would ask her how the book was coming along and she would just stare at me as if I had lost my mind. When I reminded her that the deadline was coming up she would shake her head with pity.
The format for these books is that there is a poem for each letter of the alphabet accompanied by a short narrative about the State. Marie decided that she would write a horrible poem that would scare me into writing the book. She started scratching words on a yellow legal pad and something incredible happened...
She called me on the phone (we have separate offices in the same house and call each other throughout the day) and read me a poem. It was excellent and I said, "Only twenty-five more to go."
She wrote most of those twenty-five poems (I wrote a couple) and the narrative, and B is for Beaver: An Oregon Alphabet hit the shelves. Not only that, Sleeping Bear gave us four more book contracts. E is for Evergreen: A Washington Alphabet (which came out this year and is wonderfully illustrated by Linda Ayriss), The Zookeeper Alphabet (which will be illustrated by our good friend Henry Cole), The Washington DC Alphabet (not sure what the final titles on these last three will be), and An Ocean Alphabet (illustrated by Michael Roydon).
A note on Mike Roydon. Mike and I have been best friends for well over 40 years. Now, it is highly unusual for an author to pick his or her illustrator. In fact, to even suggest an illustrator to an editor is considered rude if not downright stupid. So, of course I suggested Mike to the editor at Sleeping Bear for the Oregon book. She took it pretty well, but I could feel her blue eyes through the phone line rolling up into the back of her head. I quickly told her that I didn't expect her to give him a contract unless she loved his work. Mike sent her a portfolio and she signed him up.
So, there it is. I got to work on a book with my two best friends and it's been nominated for an Oregon Book Award. Anyone can write a book if that's what they choose to do.
Jack's Run #1
I'm working on a new novel, which I started in early June, and with some luck I should have it finished by the end of the month. It's a sequel to Zach's Lie (Hyperion). The Osborne's, formerly known as the Granger's are now the Greene's and find themselves in Manteo, North Carolina trying to hold their lives together inside the Witness Security Program. Things go badly for them. I'm at about 37,000 words today and I think it's going to run about 10,000 words more. What's there is pretty clean (meaning it flows well), mostly because I've revised what I have countless times.
During future posts I'll get into the various neurotic techniques I use to get a book written (which will not be my most shining moments). Right now though, just to slow things way down, I've been fooling around with iListen for my Powerbook G4. It's a pretty good voice recognition program after you train it (I used to train seals and dogs so I should be able to train a software program) and I'm finding that dictating into a headset helps me to focus better, or at least differently. Perhaps it's the newness of dictating (or maybe it's the sound of my voice) that's causing me to focus for longer periods. I'll let you know if I feel the same way when the technique gets old.
Anyway the book is going along pretty well and I've had a good summer with little travel, which has given me a lot of time to work.
When I get the novel finished I'll be getting back to a novel I've been writing on and off for about seven years called Hannibal's Mahout, which takes place in Burma during WW2. This book is due to the publisher (Dutton) by mid-January. (The original deadline is so far past I can't even remember when it was). Like all my novels, I've rewritten it over and over again. I'm relatively happy with the characters and format in the current draft, but there is still a lot of work to do on it.
By the way, the reason for the #1 above is that I suspect I'll be posting several more entries about Jack's Run before the end of the month.
Manteo doesn't play a very big role in the story, but I chose it because I spent a lot of time there on and off for several years when I was helping to reintroduce red wolves back into the wild at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. (I might even write about that someday if I get to feeling nostalgic...I have some interesting stories to tell about being a wolf biologist and this might be a good place to tell them).