Reading TOO MUCH!

TOO MUCH! NOT ENOUGH! is a Read Out Loud video (and podcast!) for KidLit TV! Special thanks to Julie Gribble, Sam Devotta, and KidLit TV for making the magic happen!

In other book news, I will be at Strawbery Banke for their annual Children’s Literature Festival from 11-3pm this Saturday. I will be joined by lots of other talented authors and illustrators and it’s always a fun family event! Admission to the lit festival is free, and their Fall Festival goes on at the same time and looks fabulous.

I finished this Meet The Artist promo piece this summer and it just went around to editors last week. It was fun to illustrate my kids - they grow so fast, even this seems like forever ago. It also gave me an excuse to teach them about the Renaissance man (ahem, and woman). I packed another “fluffernutter with apple slices” again this morning, so not everything has changed!

On the scene in 2019

I’m excited to share two fun projects I worked on coming out in 2019. First up, I created interior illustrations for OPERATION FROG EFFECT, written by Sarah Scheerger, coming from Random House on February 26th, 2019. The book is fantastic and is getting great early reviews (I love this description: “Operation Frog Effect is like The Breakfast Club for middle schoolers. It’ll make you laugh, cheer, and strive to be a better person.” —Shannon Hitchcock, author of Ruby Lee & Me and One True Way). It’s told by eight students in journal format. One student prefers to draw his entries - which is where I come in. I loved working in this style and can’t wait for another middle grade project to land on my desk.

Next up is my picture book Now? Not Yet! Coming out on May 14th, 2019 and just in time for hot summer days where you dream of cool lakes and camping with friends. I just loved returning to my dear monster friends’ world one more time. It’s full of extra surprises and silliness and lots of Peanut energy.

I’ll be sharing inside peeks at my process for each of these books in the new year. In the meantime, I’m working on top secret NEW projects with NEW friends that I am really excited about. I just have a few more events lined up this fall. Come join me with Jannie Ho and Jennifer E. Morris at Toadstool Bookshop this Sunday at 2pm. OR, check out the Strawbery Banke Children’s Book Festival on October 6th from 11am-3pm (admission is free) to meet me and lots of other fine authors and illustrators!

Happy PEANUT Day!

In celebration of National Peanut Day, I’m giving away three copies of TOO MUCH! NOT ENOUGH! to teachers and librarians (US only). The first three comments on this blog will get a copy and extra classroom goodies!

To say it’s been a busy month is an understatement. The same week that TOO MUCH! was released my family and I moved from our home of 16 years. We didn’t go far, we really love our town, but we still had to pack up all that stuff. AND host a launch party at Water Street Bookstore. THEN unpack (in theory, that part is going REALLY slow) and adjust to a new home, a new school year starting and lots of fun Peanut & Moe book parties.

If you’ve missed the fun, don’t worry. Join me (and Jannie Ho and Jennifer E. Morris) on September 23rd at 2pm at Toadstool Bookshop in Milford, NH. OR! Come to the Strawbery Banke Children’s Book festival during their Fall Festival on October 6th from 11am-3pm. Admission is free for the book festival and there will be a room full of authors and illustrators.

*I’m celebrating National Peanut Day by making muffins. It’s on the rainy day fun fortune teller, make one for yourself, here, on page 3.

The dinky cars of TOO MUCH! NOT ENOUGH!

When I started working on TOO MUCH! NOT ENOUGH! with Tundra editor Samantha Swenson, she had so many wonderful ideas to make the story bigger and more chaotic. My dummy was 32 pages, and the final book is 40. Sam tossed out a few ideas to make their rainy day chaos even MORE chaotic. One of them was playing with dinky cars. Now, I naively thought Sam meant little cars and that dinky was just a cute descriptor. No! She was actually referring to Dinky cars - a line of English metal toy cars and trucks made from the late 1930s to 1970s. And in a strange coincidence, I actually had been collecting metal matchbox cars and trucks from England in the 1970s. Not Dinky, but close! I loved playing with toy cars as a kid, but one little red truck was my favorite, and very much a symbol of my dad, who drove an 18-wheeler when I was a kid. It was also made the year I was born, extra special! I had been picking up similar trucks at antique stores the past few years. I loved how they were styled and hoped to use them as inspiration for another picture book idea I've been picking away at.

So of course I was excited to add toy cars to Peanut and Moe's play landscape. But when I started working on them, I realized it would be way more fun if I could make OTHER kids special toy cars and trucks part of the book, too. I reached out on instagram and several friends sent pictures. My son was also busy making his first Pinewood Derby car so that was an great source of ideas, too.

To celebrate the last 7 days leading up to TOO MUCH! NOT ENOUGH! being released, I will be sharing those cars and stories each day on instagram and twitter.

And while you are waiting for TOO MUCH! to come out, you can pre-order it from Water Street Bookstore (or anywhere books are sold) and the activity kit is ready now for your crafty kids!

Drawing Peanut & Moe

Please enjoy this time-lapse process video of me, drawing Peanut & Moe. I created all the final art for this book on a Wacom Cintiq monitor using photoshop. The drawing part is sped up, but I believe it took me about 4 hours to paint from a fairly tight sketch to finish. Look for TOO MUCH! NOT ENOUGH! in stores in just two weeks!!!

As a side note - many (many many) years ago, I worked as a compositor at several different animation studios. I worked with 2D, 3D, and stop motion animation - taking all the elements and blending them into final frames for TV, motion ride films, and video games. I loved my work. I was pretty good at it, too. But I knew I wasn't in the right field. I wanted to make MY ideas and stories come to life - and being a compositor is just about following direction. I've been too chicken to jump into making videos (or...book trailers!) because I thought I wouldn't remember how to do any of this. And isn't it a terrible feeling to no longer be good at something? But I surprised myself by picking it up quickly and having fun. Something old became new again, and it's lovely!

Design and Style: the Evolution of Peanut & Moe

These are just some of my original character design sketches for Peanut & Moe. I landed on Moe's design fairly quickly, but Peanut took a bit more tinkering. Once I had them fairly sorted, I made final art. For several years, all my Peanut & Moe art was a mix of gouache paint, colored pencil, a bit of multimedia (pink fur paper!) all cut and assembled to create a dimensional piece.

I'm still proud of the dry-brushing on that pancake stack! 

This phase involved photographing the finished art. It was a technical challenge to get the shadows just right - soft, but pronounced.

At some point I relinquished my layered/photographed technique. The above is a combination of gouache and pencil, combined digitally. 

And here they are, in the final spread from the book. 100% digital. I switched over to working on a Wacom Cintiq a few years ago and I am still over-the-moon-in-love with working this way. I hope it's as apparent to you also, how each iteration made the final idea and characters stronger. IMHO, every little edit to an eyebrow, finger shape, or color palette made an improvement. The power of persistence!

Once upon a Peanut & Moe...

I like a catchy jingle. I like to either make them up or co-opt them from pop-culture and make them my own. I guess you could say it's my 'thing', though not many people know this about me.

Many years ago I took a depressing indie tune with the lyrics 'too much, not too much' and turned it into the more upbeat and amusing, 'Too much mayo, not enough mayo'. (I will gladly sing it for you if you see me in real life and ask nicely)  Naturally, I sang it to make turkey sandwiches.

On a quiet drive home from an illustrator meeting, I somehow realized 'too much! not enough!" was a fantastic refrain for a picture book. This may have been my first original idea for a book of my own. And if it wasn't, it was certainly the first one that seemed good enough to remember.

It seems like a bit of a miracle, but this little note from nine years ago fits the book coming out in August. Originally I named the monsters Little & Big. Names would go through major revisions, but the characters never wavered.

I struck gold (sort of!) with premise #2. The first part is essentially what happens, and they do get to camp under the stars but you have to wait until book #2 comes out next year.

So, you might be thinking, "What the heck took nine years if you figured all this out from the start?". I'm showing you snippets from a notebook that I started on August 20th, 2009. My son was 8 months old and I was on the verge of a breakdown because I just needed time to myself to make art. That Sunday morning I left with a mission, putting my husband on baby duty, while I grabbed a new notebook and headed for the nearest coffee shop. I got there and it wasn't open yet. Wasn't going to be open anytime soon, in fact. I may have cried. But then I got to work. I sat in my car and wrote page after page. I doodled ideas for what these monster friends looked like. I thought of all the ways they could irritate each other, and how the little guy would make things better. And then I went home. Back to my overwhelmed new stay-at-home-mom life. But the glimmer of this book was a life line. 

I worked on this story all those years. Bird by bird, as Anne Lamott would say. I made art. I made dummies. I shared them with critique partners and started from scratch again. I got an agent and we submitted my dummy. It made it to sales and acquisitions and to revision with two lovely publishers at the same time. And because publishing is often perplexing and unpredictable, it ended up back on my desk again. There was a small army of wonderful friends who listened when I grouched about how long it was all taking. I got busy with other projects and sold my first book, SMALL. Around the same time, I illustrated a book with a fantastic editor at Tundra books. When it was time to think about my monsters again, my agent and I wondered. Perhaps Samantha Swenson would be a good match? The first news was good! But then time went by (again, publishing) and I worried. But the real news was spectacular. Not only did Tundra want to publish TOO MUCH, they offered me a two book deal. And as fate would have it, that second book is another Peanut & Moe story. I had known these characters for so long, that they almost wrote their own second story. Oh, pish. I wrote it. With the wonderful and smart guidance of my editor, Sam. And this one didn't take nine years from start to finish. It took under a year.

I will share a lot about Peanut & Moe in the weeks leading up to their book debut, but I wanted to start here. Whether you are a reader, a teacher, or a pre-published author, I hope you walk away learning a bit about what inspires me as a writer (jingles!) and what helped me publish this book (tenacity! passion! good friends! never quitting! a great agent, editor, and publisher!)

TWO Months until TOO MUCH!

1. Countdown to TOO MUCH! And just like that, a book I had an idea for about a decade ago will be in stores in two months! TOO MUCH! NOT ENOUGH! has been getting some excellent press. You can read reviews on Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, University of Manitoba (I really loved their review), and Story Monsters Ink. I was also recently interviewed on Boston Voyager where I talk about my winding journey to become an author/illustrator. I'll be blogging quite a bit more in the next two months - sharing sketches and videos about the making of TOO MUCH! Stay tuned!

2. In today's mail I've been squirreling away swag for just this moment. I'm finally sending out these boxes to independent bookstores across the US. If you are a bookstore owner, send me an email and I'll make one up just for you! Some of you will get a Moe box, some will get a Peanut box, and just one of you will get a Moe AND Peanut box! But who!

3. My To-Be-Read Mountain I've been incredibly busy at this time of year for the past few years. Which inevitably leads to a huge pile of books I desperately WANT to read but have no time for. I dream of a book vacation and until then will humbly share most of these books with the kids who are burning through books at a fierce rate. Also, there are a dozen books I want to add to this pile but I am barely restraining myself (Mary's Monster by Lita Judge will land there soon, I know it.)

4. Father's Day Shopping If you follow me on social media, you'll notice I've shared IT'S GREAT BEING A DAD quite a bit in advance of Father's Day. I had so much fun creating the illustrations for this book, and it's a little uncomfortable for me to hawk books aggressively but I really think more families need this book! You still have time to order from uh, that place with prime shipping and have something for Dad to cuddle up with on Sunday morning while you finish making breakfast (or getting dressed to go out!) ***But if you live near Exeter, Water Street Bookstore has a few copies left AND a million other awesome books - I dare you to leave with just one. I know I can't do it.

5. But I'm listening! Don't feel too sad for my lack of reading time. I am plowing through a lot through my ears while I work. Recent audiobooks I've enjoyed: Wild, The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl, and have just started Genuine Fraud. For podcasts I've burned through a ton of Hollywood Crime Scene (my new fav!) peppered with weekly listens to Westworld with Jay, Jack & Mike, Wait, Wait, and How I Built This.