Doc Watson, my hero, died on May 29, 2012. This is the letter I wrote to him a few years ago. It’s the first and only “fan letter” I’ve ever sent to anyone, most likely the last. I didn’t include this photo, but thought it appropriate to show me in 1970 or so, pickin’ and grinnin’.

September 11, 2008

Dear Doc,

I hope this letter finds you in good spirits and that you are getting stronger every day.

It has taken a while to find out how to reach you and thank you! The music you and Merle created has been an inspiration to me since 1968. This is a story about how you reached one of your millions of fans.

I was just learning guitar at age 13 – bored to tears with the lessons I was taking in traditional classical style. One day a friend taught me a little finger-picking lick – the one Peter Paul and Mary used for A-Soulin’ and it was like a new world opened up. I quit the lessons and began to seek out the kind of music I longed to play.

I learned about your first record and ran out and bought it. I had a little turntable in my room and about wore out that poor thing listening to Deep River Blues, Doc’s Guitar, Black Mountain Rag, Omie Wise and all the rest. I played them over and over, on slow speed (I recently learned many fans did the same thing), and tried to learn them all. I bought more of your records, especially relating to the concert double-album where the lady in the audience yells, “Sing something, Merle!” because singing was also something I did not like to do.

I hooked up with more people who loved your music. They took me to bluegrass festivals in the area and I got to jam with people or just watch, listen and learn. At that point, I believe the music was probably keeping me out of trouble. To this day I’ve never met a friendlier, kinder bunch of people than those families and friends who attended the festivals and kept a watch out for us kids wandering about.

But I soon went to college, quit after a year (still too impatient for people to teach me anything) and eventually moved to Oregon. I left behind all those friends I played with and eventually stopped playing guitar. I tried playing by myself for a while but it just wasn’t the same. And I was too shy to seek out anyone in the area who might want to jam.

Though I did play once in a while, a few years ago I started up again in earnest. My little 1967 Martin 016NY had always been sitting on its stand in the living room and it was like a reunion with an old friend. I joked that I was finding out what all she remembered. I bought your Homespun video and finally saw you play in “person” and was amazed. Where I had learned to fingerpick with thumb and three fingers, classical style, here you were using thumb and ONE finger! I tried it, then decided maybe middle finger needed to be there too. That worked, and the songs I had learned years ago came more easily than ever.

Now in winter when it’s dark early and there is no garden to tend, I play. I bought a 5-string banjo and am trying to learn that now. In fact I’m just today trying to hunt down the tab for Merle’s version of Frosty Morn. I love the way he played it.

When I started making time for music again, I stopped saying, “I don’t have time.” Instead I say, “I haven’t made the time.” I think when we say that, we realize it’s wise to make the time while we can for the things we love to do and the people we love to be with. That is why I am writing to you today, as I finally made the time to thank you for all of your fine music, your beautiful voice, and for continuing on to help keep folk music going strong and moving in new directions. But mostly I want to thank you for adding so much joy to my life.

With all best wishes,
Your appreciative admirer for 40 years,
Robin Koontz

We cleaned out our little attic last night and went through lots of boxes. We found my 1986 inventory of greeting cards and gift tags that I retired a few years ago. There were house plans that Marvin created, and a 100-year old journal written by my great aunt (more about that later). I also found a box of Mom Stuff. Moms are cool about saving stuff, aren’t they?

This is a two-page spread from an early book I created, probably circa 1960, when I was six years old.

The theme is constant throughout the 10-page book: a figure is faced with a maze to get to what I believe is the ice cream truck. It’s either that or an ambulance…but my six-year-old brain says “whassa ambulance?” so I’ll go with ice cream truck. The background colors are apparently significant. The first maze has no background, then colors appear on the subsequent pages, becoming more and more complicated.

Obviously I had an early knack for creating tension and build-up, you think? Plus, look at this artwork. What talent! I still remember when a kid said to me in 1st grade, “The only reason you draw so good is you got more crayons than anyone else.”

So my path, while a little confusing here, was decided early: find the ice cream truck.

I am at the end of my 23 year long career as a volunteer for the SCBWI Oregon (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Oregon Region). I resigned as the Regional Advisor after taking on that huge job in 1994, and have also decided to bow out of all the rest of it for now.

We hosted an amazing conference this past weekend, with record-breaking attendance! The event was both joyful and sad at the same time. While it was wonderful to meet and greet old and new friends and accept many thanks for my work both for this event and for many previous efforts over the years, I had some panic issues during the weekend that stemmed from some of the stuff that proceeded the conference and that deeply affected me. I won’t go into detail here. The good news is that I’ve been working on a picture book idea for about six months, and on the way home on Sunday, I finally got it figured out!

A meanie considering something said to it by some very smart and brave kids.

I shared the story with my critique partners. They loved it, possibly more because they understand my need to write it. No matter, it’s done for now. It is about bullies, aka meanies – a devastating, apparently escalating issue for kids. I am so grateful that more attention is being given to bullying, because face it, even adults have to deal with bullies sometimes. I just didn’t realize that until recently.

Years ago (you can see when) some kids cajoled me into writing to Dean R. Koontz to find out if we might be related. I did learn that his Koontz family was also Pennsylvania Deutch from the late 1700s, so what the heck. I sent him a few family tree tidbits, and this was his response:

Wo. The tendencies he described in his dad are pretty much anyone’s dark, grumpy side, but definitely not a fun guy to grow up with assuming his family stayed intact. To note, here’s a guy who defied the family grump genes and worked it to his advantage by writing some pretty scary stuff.

I look back at our family life and while true, our dad was no Andy Griffith, he had a fun side that we enjoyed and still recall with a smile. And his dad was brilliant, funny, and kind-hearted. Interestingly enough, his wife, not a Koontz, was a bit of a grump, or at least when we knew her.

Beyond those Koontzes, I don’t know what any of the rest were like. When my brother and I were researching the Koontz clan, I found a book called Pennsylvania German Pioneers. There were pages and pages of captain’s logs of the Germans they were bringing to America in the late 1700s. Koontz was spelled Kuntz, Koons, Koontz, Kunz, etc. and most of them were Jacob or Frederick. We were about to give up on figuring out which Koontz was ours when I found an entry in one log that read, “Jus Koontz.” Had to be our guy. Why?

Think about the grump gene and then you can imagine the dialog between captain and Koontz:
“What is your name?”
“Koontz.”
“No, what is your complete name?”
“Is jus Koontz!”

Anyway, legacy can’t be changed; what you do with it should be the one thing you can control and use wisely. I got my dad’s humor gene and his music gene, and I got my mom’s artist and writing genes. So I got great genes, even though a few of them might be grumpy!

Meanwhile, when I tell people my name, they often ask, “Like the author?” And I say yeah, like the author.

Today I turned in the finals for Robin Hood, at last! It was a tough one even though there were no people in it, but also I had taxes to do and some marketing catch-up, plus a new project came up, which is the real subject of this post. Here is a postage-stamp version of the 18 pages of finals:

I spent the rest of the day dealing with a mouse infestation at the old mobile home where my office resides. I love the place because it’s on the farm and close to all the building activity, but it has a lot of holes in it, more each year as the building slowly rots away, so we deal with the critters that notice a warm place to hang out. One year, a western spotted skunk moved into the kitchen cabinets. That was an adventure…

So while I tossed mousy messes, I was also brain-working on ideas for the next project, a mystery story that involves dog search and rescue. I proposed the idea about eight months ago and last week I got the word to go ahead with it, and a contract is in the mail! I won’t say who it’s for at this point, but it’s younger middle-grade fiction and part of a well-established series. I have until Monday to turn in my outline for the 10-chapter book and the manuscript is due in June. Yeah, of this year. So? I love crazy deadlines!

The first middle-grade novel I attempted (at the time, I didn’t even know what it was, I was just typing) was called Willie, Find Him! and was about dog search and rescue. I was introduced to dog SAR via friends in Washington who were active as team members of Cascade Dogs with their giant schnauzers. It was so exciting and also gratifying to see how our dogs, our pets, could save our lives. I went home and wrote a pretty awful story on a rented Brother typewriter. I submitted it to a couple of places, and not surprisingly, nobody offered to buy Willie. That was okay, I still liked the idea. That was in 1988. 20+ years later, when given the opportunity to propose a mystery, I incorporated SAR into the story, and that’s where we’re at today.

Hey! Never throw away an idea you believe in. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve been downsizing/cleaning in preparation for our eventual move to the Funny Farm across the road from our current house. I dove into the publishing files last night and ran across my first book contract. And look, today marks its 26th anniversary!

Pussycat Ate the Dumplings, Cat Rhymes From Mother Goose is actually still in print, via uTales – eBooks for Kids!. But back when it was originally published, the children’s book industry was not even called an *industry.* It was about editors and authors/illustrators. It was about flourishing bookstores that specialized in children’s books, schools with huge book budgets, and libraries with community support.

Pussycat, published by the two editors who made up the children’s book imprint for Dodd, Mead, and Co., was featured on their catalog cover. They made a poster for it and sent it everywhere. They invited me to ALA in San Francisco. They subsequently contracted two more books, This Old Man and Dinosaur Dream (my first authored book, though er, it was wordless).

And then it started. In 1988 the swallowing began. Putnam bought out Dodd Mead’s children’s book list and the rest of the company was disseminated. I’m not that well versed in the entire history, but I think this was the beginning of the change. What was the change? Well, *somebody* noticed that children’s books were generating money. A lot of money. And next thing we knew, editors had to scramble to somehow prove to the somebodies that a book the editors believed in was going to make the somebodies a ton of money, leaving the editors less time to do what they were originally hired to do – acquire and edit books. More big houses ate up smaller independents and editors started losing their jobs.

My editors went from Dodd Mead to Putnam, then were shown the door. Happily, E.P. Dutton gave them their own imprint. I published nine more books with them before their imprint was squashed when another merger occurred in 1994. Hundreds of authors and illustrators like me, called “mid-listers” because our books only sold 5-10,000 copies, started finding it more and more difficult to stay published because we didn’t earn enough and the number of published titles decreased. And meanwhile, we know what happened to the children’s bookstore and library market.

Twenty-six years later, it’s still tough but not impossible to get published by a traditional publisher, but when I found that old contract last night, it made me miss the good old days. I was indeed lucky to have caught the wave! Now I’m just hangin’ on.

A teacher at a school where I was presenting said that to me years ago, and I never forgot it. It was a good lesson about misrepresenting what we illustrators and writers do. Yeah, I do make my life look like a holiday for the kids. The idea is to encourage them to consider that art and writing might be an okay way to go with their careers – so I just show the fun stuff. The reality would be something I would discuss with high school kids, but I never get that invitation. So, the kids and the teacher figured I had it made.

These are the sketches for a spoof of Robin Hood I am working on, in case you missed my earlier post. It’s a Merry Band of Hikers who get lost and then found by a packrat.

But it’s all work, with the frustrations and failures along with accomplishments that we all hopefully experience in our work lives. I will admit that I do feel lucky that something I work on is eventually appreciated by a few of those kids, and teachers, too.

To note, being a teacher was the second thing on my career list under “artist.” Hey, you all just sit around and play with kids all day! You are so lucky!

I should be working on Robin Hood, the last of the four early readers I was hired to write and illustrate for Rourke Publishing. It’s time to do the illustrations. I did stare at the storyboard for an hour or so. But I was hopelessly stuck. The create gene wasn’t happening.

I reviewed a dizzying batch of contracts for the SCBWI Oregon Spring Conference yesterday and went back over them today. Three of us read this stuff and we hope that all the issues are nipped in the bud!

Then an editor I had contacted asked to read my middle grade novel Hot Walker, and wondered if I could turn it into two books. Apparently, they prefer a series. She had only read the query for the story, but her interest in it was very exciting! I figured out how the book could be divided, and am thinking about more books (why not? without hope, there is no life). Meanwhile I polished up the synopsis, did another read-through of the 37,000+ word story, and sent it to her.

Then at mid-morning, a start-up publishing venture (well established elsewhere, unlike most of these companies I’ve been contacting lately) sent a writer prompt for a 6-700 word story to see if my style might fit their program, and a lot of other writers were also invited thanks to a post they had on their careers page recently (and my sharing!). Here is the prompt:

A seven-year-old boy with big ideas tries everything he can think of to make his grumpy dad laugh. But nothing he does works, until…

I decided to go for it immediately, not dally and stress over attempting to create the perfect story. I’ve learned from my heroes that writing fast means we can sometimes get the slip on the demons inside us all who, given the time, will stomp our confidence to a pulp. It worked! I struggled a bit, came up with a beginning of a story, went for a walk in the rain with Marvin and Jeep, then finished up what I felt was definitely good enough to submit. And if they don’t like it, it’s fodder for another project.

Nothing is lost by the time spent off-project today. I’ll get back to that storyboard for Robin Hood in the morning and I’m pretty sure the stuckness will be gone. Breaking away to take on new challenges always helps when I’m stuck on a project. See if it works for you!

Today I completed the finals for the third book I was hired to illustrate, another one that I also wrote. And this time, the dang writer was a wee bit wordy! It was a challenge to allow enough room for all that pesky text, gripe grumble…

This is a view of three of the spreads as of this afternoon. Though all are done, I probably shouldn’t show the entire book. The colorful woman is the town mayor, the boy is a braggart, and the beaver is of course, Rumpelstiltskin!

It’s a great feeling of being at least almost done after so many decisions about setting, characters, color, design, etc. Viewing all the spreads at once is a great way to step back and catch the errors/inconsistencies by looking at the book as a whole, not just individual pages.

Writers don’t really get that opportunity, do we? Yes! We can upload a manuscript to the Kindle Cloud and then download it to an e-reading device. If you don’t have a Kindle, Nook, iPad, whatever, Kindle has a free version you can download that works as an e-reader on your computer.

There are probably other options, but in any case, this way you can read your book as if you bought a real book. For me, it’s a really helpful way to work on my writing. There is something about my story being a book of sorts, not just manuscript pages, that makes it easier to be objective and critical.

I was given lots of time for the interior finals on the four books I wrote and illustrated for Rourke, but the covers had a tight deadline and were completed last December. When I began working on the interiors for Paul Bunyan, I noticed a problem. Other than Babe, the main characters were boys. I had a boy MC in Run…It’s a Bee! and Rumpelstiltskin, too. What was I thinking? I like girl heros. So, with permission, I altered the gender for the MC in Paul Bunyan. I just made the hair a little longer. I probably could have left it short, but that was our solution. While the original cover might be in some of the marketing material already, who’s going to notice?

I was tempted to show just a hint of surprise in Babe’s face, but I promised to keep the changes minor.

This reminded me of an incident when I was doing a drawing demonstration for a group of 1st and 2nd graders. We always create first as the writer of a single scene story, establishing the setting, characters, and plot. Then I draw, incorporating (most of) their suggestions. In this scene, a deer and an elephant were having a tea party; I forget the plot. I was just about done when a voice cried out, “Make the elephant a girl!”

Ut oh. So. Both animals were in the buff, and sitting with tummies out, legs dangling from the parlor stools. Too late for girlie clothes. I tried to think of a solution that honored our drawing. What do these kids know? Is this going to become more than a drawing demonstration? Where is the teacher when I need her???

Finally, I had a solution: I added thick false eyelashes to the elephants dot-eyes.
“Yayyyyyyy!!!!!” cried the entire group.
“Whew,” sighed the illustrator.
Class dismissed.