Tag: vote for zoe

Update on The Zoe Vote:  I, Queen Louise, just voted!  Have you???  When I did, I noticed that our Zoe Girl is still in fourth place, BUT she has 11% of the vote.  Please, Please, Please, after you read Ard Hoyt’s comments about making Zoe come to life on the page… VOTE!!!  (the instructions are below for those of you just joining us!)

                                                                                              

Recently, Laurie asked Ard Hoyt, illustrator of THE HAIR OF ZOE FLEEFENBACHER GOES TO SCHOOL, to comment on his experience with Zoe.  He wrote:

        I always knew she was special.  I have a dear friend who also happens to be my 90 year old Grandmother LaPreal.  She and I have kindred spirits and became close when I had the privilege of living with her and Grandpa Wayne for a time during college.  She told me stories about her life with such feeling that I tell you, I felt like I lived it with her.  Thanks to her I got to know my own Grandfather Ard who died before I was born.  Well she is a character and has reddish hair and when I told her I wanted to dedicate a book to her sometime, she asked if I would dedicate a special story with a red headed girl to her.   I waited a long time for Zoe Laurie, and when I read your text I knew that I had found just the book for my special friend. 

Each book that I have worked on has appealed to me emotionally first.  As I read your text again and again thinking about visually telling this story, I could feel Zoe’s eagerness to please and her hair’s unwillingness to cooperate.  I could almost see that little pensive face on the cover, wondering what those locks were going to do next. 

With that in mind I drew this …. and fell in love with Zoe. 

The rest of the images sprang to life once I knew her.  There was some push back on my original Ms. Trisk who I recall being older with a beehive that was way too expected.  A great catch by our editor Kevin Lewis and designer Jessica Sonkin who both told me to update and modernize her a bit.  I drew feverishly trying to find her but was frustrated until the day I saw a woman in a "power suit" wearing a necktie without a collared shirt and I thought…"ooooo, hello Ms. Trisk."

The wild hair antics were so fun to imagine.  The "Big Mistake" Tyranosaur hair is probably my favorite.

Anyway I had a blast breaking the rules at school with Zoe’s Hair.  The story really told itself to me visually and I was proud to bring it to view. 

As Laurie wrote in her note to Ard, "Thank you again a million bazillion times for making our girl so fabulous!!!!" 

And now, the time has come…  for you to VOTE and for me, Queen Louise, to beg, plead and, well, you get the idea.  I can grovel just as good, if not better, than Laurie!  Although, she does do a really good pouty face!  (I won’t "pull rank" and order you to vote, either; but it would be nice.)  So here you go…. be sure to share this information with your doctor’s office (dentist, too!), your child’s boy scout leader, your child’s dance instructor…EVERYONE YOU KNOW!

For those of you who are new to our game, here are your voting instructions:

HOW TO VOTE:

1. Go to the voting page.

2. In the bottom right corner, click on MORE BOOKS twice. (Yes, this is the tricky part. No, I don’t know why Zoe is buried at the absolute back of the pack. Kind of makes you feel sorry for her, huh?) That will take you to ZOE.

3. Click on the yellow box that says VOTE!

4. Notify all of your friends, neighbors, family members, the folks at church or temple or mosque or other house of faith, the rest of the PTA, the people at the firehouse, everyone in your classroom, and tell them all pretty, pretty please with a headful of unruly red hair, PLEASE VOTE FOR ZOE.

5. Do this every day until the end of October.

Tomorrow:  Well, I don’t really know. I do have to go to work in the Forest, probably file some paperwork, let the Creature with Fangs out… OH!  That’s right, this section isn’t about ME; it’s about Zoe!  How silly.  I don’t really know what Laurie has planned for Zoe tomorrow, but I can bet it will be very interesting.. come back tomorrow and see!  I order Thee….

Congratulations to everyone whose books made the YALSA Teen Top Ten list for 2009!

Thanks to everyone to came out to see me at SUNY Oswego yesterday! And thanks to those who sent in questions about picture book writing. Let’s get to it, shall we?

Do you get to know your picture book characters as well as those in your novels?

I know them on a completely different level, like the way you knew your best friend in second grade.

I would love to know more about how long it takes, from idea to published!

ZOE is my seventh picture book. So far the average time from initial idea to book-on-the-shelf has been four years. ZOE took longer because the story was "resting" in my drawer for several years.

[Today] you said that the illustrator is more important than the author but that the author has no control over the illustrator. That seems stressful. Does that just apply to the beginning of the process? Is there a point at which the author does have some control over the illustrator? How does the illustration process work?

The fact that authors have basically no control over their illustrations freaked me all the way out at first. But I got over it. The truth is that artists bring their own vision to the story and (in my case, at least) it’s a much more creative and energetic vision that the author has. In my non-fiction picture books, THANK YOU, SARAH and INDEPENDENT DAMES, I had a little input and was able to share my research with my illustrator, Matt Faulkner. With ZOE, I was sent the early sketches (this is very common) by my editor and was able to have a discussion with the editor about them. There was one tiny reality glitch, I believe, in the spread where the hair isout in the hall while the family has a meeting with the principal. I was able to point that out.

My illustrator, Ard Hoyt, is going to share his side of the ZOE story in this blog tomorrow.

UPDATE ON QUEST TO GET ZOE INTO A BOX OF CHEERIOS:

I’m told that Zoe is holding in at fourth place in the Spoonful of Stories contest. One the intrepid Friends of the Forest dug around and discovered that the author and illustrator of Jump! (the mysterious unpublished book currently in first place) has been making funny YouTube videos to get folks to vote for his book. This is brilliant!

I, sadly, don’t have time for videos, so I will resort to old-fashioned groveling and begging.

PLEASE VOTE FOR ZOE TODAY AND EVERY DAY UNTIL THE END OF OCTOBER. AND PLEASE GET FIVE FRIENDS TO DO THE SAME THING. ::grovels in a humble and appeasing manner::

For those of you who are new to our game, here are your voting instructions:

HOW TO VOTE:

1. Go to the voting page.

2. In the bottom right corner, click on MORE BOOKS twice. (Yes, this is the tricky part. No, I don’t know why Zoe is buried at the absolute back of the pack. Kind of makes you feel sorry for her, huh?) That will take you to ZOE.

3. Click on the yellow box that says VOTE!

4. Notify all of your friends, neighbors, family members, the folks at church or temple or mosque or other house of faith, the rest of the PTA, the people at the firehouse, everyone in your classroom, and tell them all pretty, pretty please with a headful of unruly red hair, PLEASE VOTE FOR ZOE.

5. Do this every day until the end of October.

Go ahead and yell at me. I took yesterday off.

We sprinkled my father-in-law’s ashes up at our camp on Saturday, near where we put my Mom last month. We had a great family get-together at our house afterward, tears and laughter, bitter and sweet in just the right proportions. And I woke up Sunday with a burning need to spend the entire day in my garden and not touch any computers. Thanks for being understanding.

So…. picture book writing!!!

What follows is my approach to writing picture books.  (Yep, it’s all my copyright, but may be reproduced for classroom use.) There are many different variations on this, of course, but I thought guidelines might be useful for some of you.

When I am thinking of a picture book idea, I am always aware of the structural limitations the form imposes:

1. A picture book has 32 pages.

2. This means a picture book has (usually) 16 2-page spreads.

3. Good picture books usually have fewer than 750 words. Fewer than 500 is better.

4. A picture book needs a beginning, a middle, and an end.

5. A picture book has character, conflict, and character growth that is a result of the conflict (Usually!  "Quiet" picture books, sometimes called "mood pieces" (think GOOD-NIGHT MOON) are noticeably short on conflict and character growth. They are also wicked hard to get published.)

6. Picture book writing tends to be short on narrative description. Descriptive details are taken care of in the art.

7. (Warning – biased statement ahead) Picture book stories build the stage upon which great art can be committed. The illustrator is more important than the author.

8. The unfolding of the story must provide the artist with varied settings and perspectives for illustration purposes. No talking heads.

9. Authors have no control over the illustrations of picture books, unless they choose to illustrate them on their own. Don’t waste any energy fussing abut this. Focus on your story.

10. Picture book writing is the essence of story structure boiled down to the barest of bones. It’s way harder than it looks, and incredibly satisfying.

I was just asked on Twitter if I prefer the novel form or the picture book form. The answer is "Yes." I really like having different forms to work on. I can take as many years tinkering with a picture book as a novel. It may only have a couple hundred words, but they have to be the exact right words in the exact right order! But the subject matter of my picture books tends to be a whole lot lighter than my novels and that is a nice break for my soul.

Your turn – What questions do you have about picture book writing or the writing of THE HAIR OF ZOE FLEEFENBACHER GOES TO SCHOOL?

Update on the Zoe vote. Yes, there is a wee bit of controversy. Isn’t there always with voting? The lead book, JUMP!, will not be published until next Spring. Yet it currently has 47% of the vote. ZOE is in fourth place, with 10% of the vote. The rules say that you are only allowed to vote once a day and I am a rule-following kind of kid.

David Lubar points out, "You might want to add that each person can vote once per day from each computer he or she has access to, since the "once per day" limit is linked to the specific computer casting the vote. So, if your public library has 20 computers… (Not that I’m advocating voter fraud, but I was born in NJ, so it’s in my blood.)

A couple of people have written and suggested I promote a break-all-the-rules-vote-a-million-times-a-day campaign. Nope, sorry, ain’t going to go there. We are talking about getting picture books into boxes of Cheerios, for crying out loud. I would feel forever stained if my picture book was sullied by cereal box fraud.

Please vote once a day. EVERY day until the end of October. And please get five friends to do the same thing.

For those of you who are new to our game, here are your voting instructions:

HOW TO VOTE:

1. Go to the voting page.

2. In the bottom right corner, click on MORE BOOKS twice. (Yes, this is the tricky part. No, I don’t know why Zoe is buried at the absolute back of the pack. Kind of makes you feel sorry for her, huh?) That will take you to ZOE.

3. Click on the yellow box that says VOTE!

4. Notify all of your friends, neighbors, family members, the folks at church or temple or mosque or other house of faith, the rest of the PTA, the people at the firehouse, everyone in your classroom, and tell them all pretty, pretty please with a headful of unruly red hair, PLEASE VOTE FOR ZOE.

5. Do this every day until the end of October.