All in a Day’s Work

This week I finished a pretty horrifying but interesting proposal that was requested based on a query. Here’s how it works much of the time for nonfiction projects: you pitch an idea to a publisher that is accepting queries only. First you make sure they haven’t done anything like it and yet you feel it…

Spacing out in our space

A friend asked his artist friends to share photos of their work spaces for a presentation he was working on. When I sent him mine, his comment was, “I love ugly offices.” That’s what I have. My office is situated in a dilapidated mobile home across the road from my house. We call the old…

Restoring Old Stuff

What Do They Dream? is one my ideas that’s been rejected by a small number of publishers, most 4-5 years ago. Several rejections were very nice, just “too many dream books.” So after filing it away for a few years, I decided to try to make the text more unique, and continue working on collage…

Sharing Our Stuff

Some of us are old enough to remember what a lonely job this is: creating stuff while sitting in a dark attic using a single candle for light. The family occasionally tossed up a bone and told us to sell something soon or we’d all starve to death. We’d send off our latest brainstorm in…

Old dog keeps on trying new tricks

African Elephant I’m still messing about with collage and the computer. This time I wanted the line drawing (that I create with a real pencil and piece of paper) to look like a block print. Well, it looks more like stained glass, but that’s okay. I used the “cut-out” feature in Photoshop to get the…

“If you can’t do everything brilliantly, at least you should have a bash.”

This week, Kids Discover posted my blog post about the possible perils of labeling a child the “class artist.” Here’s the link that explains why that might be a bad idea. The author Neil Gaiman was interviewed on NPR this morning. He stated, “You have all these amazing tools; it’s up to you what kinds…

Back to Work.

This is another collage for the nonfiction book I’ve been working on. The verse is omitted since I hope to sell the idea at some point, but this critter and the setting worked well as a subject for collage. I hope that the publisher hires me to illustrate it if it sells! But honestly, that…

Bad Poetry? Oh, noetry!

I was researching a new nonfiction book idea and recalling one of my favorite editors telling me that my nonfiction writing is too “textbooky” for her. Yeah, that’s a word. And selling a book to that editor is on my bucket list. I have been getting kind rejections from her for about twenty years. Seriously….

Switching Gears

I had a week after the school visit to catch up on things, so I used some of the time to keep messing with computer collage, gleefully recalling that this time last year I was stressing out over the annual SCBWI Spring Conference. Retirement is good. Here’s the latest version of the collage I was…

Ghost Writer in the Woods!

Here is the cover for my first Boxcar book, The Mystery of the Fallen Treasure. It was extra fun to receive this today because I happened to be working on the next one at that very moment and was totally in the Boxcar Mode. So anyway, as you can figure out from the author’s credit,…