Adventures at Wilder Farm

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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Lita will soon begin working on Yellowstone Moran. I’m getting a little nervous, because I am Yellowstone Moran! And I’m also the sleeping guy on the right, and I’m also the gunslinger on the left (but I couldn’t find that photo).

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… for Pennies for Elephants:

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The next book out for Lita is Mogo, The Third Warthog, written by Donna Jo Napoli. This is Lita’s second project with Donna Jo. Here’s an image of the book jacket for Mogo:

And a closeup of Mogo—he’s a likable looking warthog, isn’t he?

The scheduled on sale date is July 1st.

Lita’s first book book with Donna Jo—Ugly—is coming out in paperback at about the same time. The cover for Ugly has been redesigned. It used to look like this:

But now will look something like this:

This last image is just a mock-up. I’ll miss the ducklings in the lower left, but I like the blue sky and the new title font!

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I saw a couple of nice on-line reviews of One Thousand Tracings yesterday. One at the Cybils site and another at The Well Read Child. Also, there’s a great podcast review at Just One More Book, done earlier in January. I’ve visited Just One More Book a few times and I really like the site - there’s another good podcast with two of the Cybil panelists for Non-Fiction Picture Books here.

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