Adventures at Wilder Farm

Our friend Melissa Stewart just gave us information on a Picture Book Festival she is organizing in Belmont, Massachusetts. This is much more than just a group book signing! Each author and/or illustrator has developed a short presentation, performance, or activity to entertain attendees, especially the children. And the entire event will be filmed and made into a documentary. It’s definitely worth checking out!

Belmont Children’s Picture Book Festival
March 29, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
First Church in Belmont, 404 Concord Ave., Belmont, MA
Free and open to the public

Six local authors celebrate the release of their new picture books with an afternoon of fun for the whole family. Meet the authors and illustrators, hear them talk about their books, and enjoy a variety of performances and activities. Wellesley Booksmith of Wellesley, Massachusetts, will make books available for purchase and signing.

Here are the web sites of the participants: Sarah S. Brannen , Anne Broyles, Timothy Basil Ering, Leo and Laura Jaffe Espinosa, James Kaczman, Melissa Stewart

For more information, contact Melissa Stewart at 978-263-7279 or hbeeprod@msn.com.

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Thank you to the International Reading Association for honoring One Thousand Tracings as the winner of the 2008 IRA Children’s Book Award! I’ll be going to the IRA Convention in Atlanta this May to accept the award. I’m so excited! The conference falls on the week of our planned vacation to Santa Fe. Dave and I rarely fit vacations in these days, but decided to take the plunge for my birthday. Now Santa Fe will have to wait for another birthday. Dave is being a great sport about it all. He’s as excited about the award as I am (perhaps more). I’ll be traveling to Atlanta with my close friend Sy Montgomery. She’s speaking on a panel—Growing up Green: Environmental Conversations with Authors—with Nic Bishop and Melissa Stewart. Sy received this same award in 2000 for her book, The Snake Scientist. We’re looking forward to the conference, and to sneaking off to see the whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium between events!

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One of the envelopes used in the collage on the back cover of One Thousand Tracings was this one:

Nothing in the book mentions that the story takes place in Michigan. But it does. Lita’s grandparents lived in Pinckney Michigan during the time they organized the relief effort. They didn’t move to Plainfield Wisconsin until1949. Michigan readers found the subtle clue and the Library of Michigan contacted Lita last summer stating that One Thousand Tracings was nominated for the 2008 Michigan Notable Book selections. Hyperion sent off a pile of books to the committee. We didn’t expect to hear back—about 300 books were nominated—but in January it was selected as one of twenty Michigan Notable Books! Only two of the selections were children’s books—the other was Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis.

So Lita’s excited for two upcoming trips to Michigan this spring. On March 15-18 she’ll be doing two presentations at the Michigan Reading Association Conference in Detroit, and then she’s visiting 5 different elementary schools, including one in Pinckney Michigan. On April 26 she’ll be at the “Night for Notables” which starts at the governor’s mansion and then moves to the Library of Michigan. Then she’s doing library visits and events in the Detroit area through April 29. I’ll stay home and feed the cats.

(Click here - PDF of Michigan Notable Book Poster - if you want to download the full sized pdf which is about 1MB.)

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Anyone who has met our family knows how much I love my Maine Coon, named Pu.

But you may not know just how much she supervises my work.
I spend long hours in the studio when I’m working on a book, but I’m NEVER lonely.

And of course Pu will be in my next book!
Here are a couple of preliminary sketches for Pennies with Pu’s contribution.

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Web sites can be expensive if you don’t design and maintain them yourself. One of our local arts organizations just went through the process of hiring a graphic designer and a web designer. They put up a simple but nicely designed site. There are about 6 static pages and one group page where artist members can post a thumbnail which then links to an artist page with 6 images and a bio, artist statement, etc. The cost for this type of site—designed, hosted and maintained by a local company—is in the range of $3000 to $5000. Then there are yearly hosting and maintenance costs.

I decided to do it myself for Lita’s web site. I built Lita’s main web site—litajudge.com—a few years ago with Adobe GoLive CS2.

Adobe later acquired Dreamweaver (DW) and all indications are that this is the software they’ll continue to invest in. When we wanted a second website, specifically devoted to the book One Thousand Tracings, I used DW. I was psyched when Chris Barton mentioned the Tracings site as one he admires. I actually noticed a spike in visitors at that time.

DW is more widely used and thus easier to search/google for solutions to common problems. I’ve tried to convert the first site from GoLive to DW but a few things have not looked maintainable (the underlying HTML looks confusing) so I still maintain litajudge.com in the CS2 version of GoLive. I have great intentions of correctly doing the conversion some weekend.

The main difference in the two sites is that I learned about style sheets (CSS) for the Tracings website. Maybe everyone else already knew about style sheets, but I just discovered them last year. This site is much easier to maintain and the look is more consistent. I worked with Lita on the structure of both websites - she drew pictures of all the pages on paper and then I tried to make the thing somewhat similar to the plan. Lita usually does all the final layout tweaking, most of the image selection, and most of the writing.

The third site—this blog—uses WordPress.

I wanted a self hosted blog so I went with WordPress. But I like LiveJournal and the whole friend/community thing so I set up an account there also. I use a WordPress plug-in that automatically cross-posts to LiveJournal. A lot of people are just using blog software like WordPress to do their whole web site and I think this is not a bad idea.

So that’s where I am now with the web site development. Any questions?

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Jeannine Atkins wrote a lovely review of One Thousand Tracings for Nonfiction Monday. We’re looking forward to meeting her at the Cambridge Science Festival in May. Lita’s planning to talk about dinosaurs at the festival.

In early January Lita visited New Boston Central School (in New Hampshire). This week she received a package of wonderful Thank You notes from Ms Chase’s class. I picked out a couple of nice dinosaur pictures. This first one is from Tucker who wrote, “I like dinosaurs too, you know”.

And from Maura, who drew a slightly dragon-like dinosaur, and “used to want to be an archaeologist, but now would like to be either a vet or an author”:

I wish I could include all the pictures and letters. Thanks to everyone in Ms Chase’s class who sent letters, and thanks to New Boston Central School!

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I just heard more good news for Tracings—it was selected for the 2008 Storytelling World Awards! I feel so fortunate about the reception of my first book. And I love all the letters and e-mails I’ve received from readers of the book. One of my favorite letters came from a family who had also sent packages to Europeans after WWII. After reading One Thousand Tracings, they decided to try to find the family they had helped in Holland. By searching the Internet, they were able to track them down after all these years, and now the families are planning a reunion to actually meet each other in person! I have met many of the Europeans my grandparents sent packages to. I am so thankful that they shared their stories with me, and am happy that the book has helped other families share their stories.

I’m having a ball working on my current book—Pennies for Elephants. Here’s a sketch:

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