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Last week, I spent a wonderful day with the readers of Lincoln Elementary School in Wyckoff, NJ. I was all ready to begin my presentation for the 4th and 5th graders, when they turned the tables on me and announced that THEY would be kicking off our author asssembly with a song celebrating CAPTURE THE FLAG.  Check this out… it’s set to the Pink Panther theme song!

Not to be outdone, the 2nd and 3rd graders turned the “Friend Fish Song” at the end of my picture book SEA MONSTER AND THE BOSSY FISH into “The Friend Fish Rap.”

And the K-1 students sang one of Sea Monster’s favorite songs, “Old McDonald Had a Lake.”

Many thanks to the kids and music teacher Juliette Vesque for such a delightfully creative welcome! School Library Media Specialist Jackie Soroko was one of the most enthusiastic author visit hostesses I’ve ever encountered. The students in each presentation chose a color to wear to represent my books. 4-5 wore red, white, & blue for CAPTURE THE FLAG, 2-3 wore green for MARTY MCGUIRE & SEA MONSTER,… and because Jackie was there for all of the presentations, she did a quick change from her red sweater & hair bow to a green sweater & hair bow just in time. Color me seriously impressed.

Music teacher Juliette Vesque (left) & Librarian Jackie Soroko (right) obviously make this school a LOT of fun.

Besides presenting and signing lots of books, I had a wonderful pizza-and-ice-cream lunch with some of Lincoln’s most enthusiastic readers. What a great crew!

Thank you, Jackie and Juliette, and EVERYONE at Lincoln Elementary School for such a musically and bookishly wonderful day!

Here’s the conversation I’ve been having lately with my patient editor at Bloomsbury…

This all went on for some time. But guess what? Soon is here!!

ALL THE ANSWERS is my latest middle grade novel (my first book with magic!) coming from Bloomsbury in January 2015. It’s about Ava Anderson, a nervous 12-year-old who wishes life had more answers and fewer math quizzes until she finds a magic pencil that will answer any question she writes. But it’s not long before Ava and her best friend Sophie realize that magic comes with strings attached, and sometimes having all the answers is more trouble than it’s worth. The book also has goats, jazz band, an adventure course of doom, and world-famous donuts. On fire.

I’m kind of in love with this book. It’s the most personal novel I’ve written, which also makes it, in some ways, the scariest to put out into the world. But I’m excited to share it with you. And there’s going to be quite a bit of sharing going on…because Bloomsbury is sending me on a book tour this winter. I’ll be spending the last week in January in the Midwest (details & cities to come!)  I hope if I’m in your part of the world, you’ll come by the bookstore to say hello.

The second week of the book tour is scheduled for the Northeast, and because community is a big theme in this novel, Bloomsbury has turned that week of their tour over to me, to dedicate to free & reduced price school visits in my own community – Northern New York and Vermont. Bloomsbury will pick up travel expenses, and local independent bookstores will handle all of the book sales. If you live nearby and would like information about those visits, please shoot me your email address and we’ll make sure you’re in the loop when that part of the tour is planned. Please do that soon if you’re interested – I’d love to have these local schools in place before everyone leaves for the summer.

Finally, because I also wanted to do something for schools and libraries that aren’t in those book tour cities, I’ll be offering a dedicated week of Skype writing workshops for schools and libraries. This 25-minute virtual workshop, WRITING WITH A MAGIC PENCIL, will walk kids through the research, planning, and revision phases of my writing process for ALL THE ANSWERS. I’ll share my writer’s notebook, research notes, outlines, character sketches, and marked-up manuscripts with students to show how a book evolves from a scribbled idea to a finished novel.  Students will also brainstorm their own “wish-gone-wrong” story ideas and be provided with brainstorming/planning tools that teachers may use to follow up with more writing after the visit.

These virtual writing workshops will be FREE with your school or library’s pre-order of 30 or more signed copies of ALL THE ANSWERS from The Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid, NY.  These may be student/staff purchases, books ordered for the kids via your school or PTA, or any combination of those. All orders will need to be sent with payment to The Bookstore Plus by January 23rd in order to schedule your free Skype writing workshop. The bookstore offers free shipping for US orders over $50 and will send books to your school.  There will be a limited number of spaces available for this writing workshop tour, and I’ll fill them on a first-come, first served basis until my schedule for the week is full.

This workshop is especially designed for teachers/librarians who may also want to use ALL THE ANSWERS as a grade-level, parent-student book club, or all-school read. If this is of interest to you, please email me (kmessner at kate messner dot com) so that I can request that you be sent an advance reader copy of the book to preview it over the summer.

Just as soon as advance reader copies are available, I’ll draw a name from today’s blog comments to receive the first ARC, hot off the presses.  I’ll take entries until the day the ARCs are printed and ready to go. To enter the drawing, just answer this question:

If you had a magic pencil with all the answers, what question would you ask?

“I’ve written a Picture Book…”

 It’s the beginning of a conversation that I have with people regularly – at writing group, at a school or conference or in the grocery store.  And please note that my capitalization of the words “Picture Book” is intentional.  This Picture Book is a proper noun in the writer’s world. This book is beloved. Often, it’s their first manuscript. Sometimes, it’s inspired by children or grandchildren. Sometimes, it’s a fine idea, and the writer has worked hard to revise the text.

 “So what next?” the person asks. “How do I get it published?”

 “Well…” I pause here. Usually, I tell the writer about SCBWI and Harold Underdown’s beginner’s guide to children’s books and how one actually writes a query letter. But what I really want to say is, “Write more.”

 Here’s the thing about picture books. In my experience, writing them is a lot like skipping stones when you’re a beginner. You kick rocks around the shoreline until you find just the right one. You might have the perfect smooth, flat rock. But then if the angle is wrong, if you throw too hard or not hard enough, you still end up with a plunker. It takes a lot of tries to get a really great one. Picture books are like that, too. At least, they are for me.

At least once a day, I see something interesting or beautiful or weird, or I hear something amazing or funny and think to myself, “Hey! That could be a picture book!”  Sometimes, I hold onto that thought long enough to consider it for a moment and think either “No…never mind.” Or “Yes…yes, it could indeed.”  If the pondering leads to a yes, I scribble the idea in my notebook. This probably happens twice a week, on average.

Lots of these ideas live in my notebook forevermore. I wave to them when I flip through the pages, but that’s about all the attention they get. Except for the really persistent ones.

Of those ideas that get written down – let’s say there are maybe a hundred over the course of a year – a handful aren’t content to just live quietly in the notebook. They follow me around, when I’m running or driving in my car, even when I’m in the shower. (Ideas are not big on privacy and personal space.)  These ideas that surface over and over again and demand to be thought about some more?  I try writing them into books.

This probably happens around thirty times a year. I sit down with the idea and say, “Okay…you’ve been following me around for weeks now. What is it? What do you need? What’s the story?”  And I take a stab at shaping that idea into something that will work as a picture book.

About a third of these end up not working out, and I know that pretty quickly. Sometimes, I’m only halfway through a draft when I look at it and think, “No…not this.”  That happened this week, with a book called WOMBAT’S VALENTINE.  It doesn’t mean that WOMBAT’S VALENTINE should never be a book. But it does mean that right now, I haven’t hit upon a great way to write it. So that idea, having had its fair chance in the sun, goes back to hanging out in the notebook for the time being.

The other two thirds of those picture book ideas are more promising. I sit down. I write a draft of the book and think, “Hmm…this might just work!”  I finish, set it aside for a while, and revise.  I do that five or six more times.  This happens with about twenty manuscripts each year.

After all that revising is done, I decide that I do not like eight of the books very much after all.

The other twelve books, I show to a friend (usually with an email that says, “Am I crazy or could this be a picture book?”)  I have great writer pals who answer this question truthfully.  Well…mostly. They really never say, “Good God, no!” even when the manuscript might warrant that. They say, “Well…maybe. I wonder if you’ve thought about any other structures…” or “It’s interesting…and I think if you really work on the character arc, you might have something here.”   Once in a while, they say, “Yes! I think this might very well be a book some day.”

This happens maybe eight times a year.  Remember that I started with roughly 365 flashes of idea – 100 of which made it to the writer’s notebook, 30 of which got started, 20 of which actually got finished without being abandoned halfway through, and 12 of which were then promising enough to share with a writer friend. Of those twelve, I will probably be wrong about four of them. So now I’m down to eight manuscripts that have made it through all those stages of picture book writing and revising.  They have survived the picture book gauntlet.

These are the manuscripts I revise a few more times and then send to my agent, generally with a note that says, “I’ve written this picture book, and I really love it. When you have time, please take a look and let me know what you think!”  She reads them and ponders. (At least, I imagine her pondering.)

Of those eight manuscripts, two or three will have problems that my critique buddy and I either didn’t notice or didn’t know about. Maybe the book is kind of didactic, after all. Maybe it’s too similar to a Mo Willems book that we didn’t know about. Or maybe it needs a stronger ending that I can’t quite come up with yet. So those books don’t go out into the world.

The other five or six manuscripts might be revised a few more times before they pass muster with my agent. She will send those out to editors and wait for their responses.  There will be more revising. And if things go very well, one or two of those original 365 idea-sparks will grow up to be a book.

This is why I try out lots of picture book ideas. I fail frequently and cheerfully. But I’ve also been able to work with a few great editors to make a few of those ideas into real live books. And that is an amazing experience.  It just takes a while to get there.

So you’ve written a picture book.

And that’s great!

If you feel like it’s ready…if you’ve revised and revised…if it’s the best book it can be and has the potential to thrive in the current market, then send it out to a few editors.  And then?  Step away from your email, and step away from the book.

Write something else. Something new.

Write more.

Because if you’re anything like me, you may have to skip a lot of stones before you get it just right.

“Are any of your characters you?”

 The question comes up in virtually every school author visit and Skype Q and A session I do with kids who have read my books.  And the answer is tricky.

 No, none of them.  And yes…all of them.

 The truth is, I’ve never written a character I can point to and say, “See this guy here? That’s Bob Randolph, who drives our FedEx truck in my neighborhood.” But the character in the book might share Bob-the-Fed-Ex-guy’s quirk of singing loud country music with the windows down while he drives.  He might also have salt and pepper hair like my neighbor’s, a nose that I saw on a guy in Starbucks once, a secret love of gourmet organic salads like my brother, and a pair of muddy hiking boots with purple laces that I just made up.  My characters are more collages than anything else – made up of scraps and bits I’ve collected from life and imagination and cobbled together into a more interesting whole.

Do some of those collages contain bits of myself? Sure. Marty McGuire wears my muddy sneakers, Gianna Zales shares my love of running in the neighborhood, and Jaden Meggs has the same desire to simultaneously impress and pull away from her dad that I felt as a teenager.  So yes, I always tell readers who ask, there’s a little of me in every single character I write.

“Even the bad guys?” one kid asked during a school visit not long ago.

I had to think about that one for a second before I realized something.

“Yes, the bad guys, too,” I told him. “In fact….especially the bad guys.”

 That’s particularly true when I think about my mysteries and science thrillers, like EYE OF THE STORM, which just came out in paperback this week, and MANHUNT, the third book in my Silver Jaguar Society mystery series (June 2014).

Sometimes, as writers, we do things in our art that we don’t understand until much later, long after the book has been published and we’re standing in an auditorium answering questions from fifth graders. But in thinking about this kid’s question, I realized that the villains in my novels all seem to share a common element – passions that got away from them.

The people who know me well know that I am an incredibly passionate person. I have big opinions, big ideas, and big feelings – all of which can be overwhelming sometimes.  That quality has served me well in life, in many ways, but left unchecked, it would most certainly hijack my life and damage my relationships. And I think a lot of us are like this; our best qualities can also be our worst qualities.  Loaning those qualities to our villains not only lets us explore them more fully but also tends to create bad guys who are more rounded and more sympathetic.

 Think about it the next time you’re brainstorming character traits for an antagonist. What’s your very best quality? What would it look like out of control?  Answer those questions, and you’ve got yourself a pretty compelling villain.

This has been a whirlwind of a week for me so far in all of the best ways.  I spent three days as a visiting author in the Birmingham, Michigan School District, hanging out with amazing readers at Pierce, West Maple, and Quarton Elementary Schools.

On Monday morning, the Pierce kids and their librarian DaNita Bell greeted me with a flurry of American flags in honor of my mystery CAPTURE THE FLAG, which is one of Birmingham’s Battle of the Books titles this year.

After my morning presentations at Pierce, I had lunch with a small group of fifth grade readers, one of whom recently won a kids’ cooking contest. Gracie made her award-winning “Dice Up the Protein” sandwiches for our luncheon!

I loved my sandwich. It was an interesting mix of tuna and chicken salad with cucumber, lettuce, carrots, and tomatoe, plus a touch of horseradish for some added zing.  After the sandwiches, Alaina served a homemade cheesecake she made with her mom for dessert. Lunch heaven. And wonderful conversation, too!  My day ended with Pierce second graders interviewing me for the TV news program they put on the school cable channel.  Here I am with Amelia, who thinks she’d like to have a career in journalism when she is older. She’s off to a fine start!

On Tuesday, I visited West Maple Elementary. When I first arrived, some students were kind of hanging around the library. “They want to show you something,” their librarian, Mrs. Cornwall, said. It was this…

They’ve been working to create a Creativity Center in the library. It’s a place where anyone can go to write, or brainstorm, or just do any kind of creative work. The kids thought I might like to do some writing there during my breaks. (And they were right!)

I had so much fun talking with these students and answering questions that I forgot to take a photograph until they were all getting up to leave. But here they are…and you can see their lovely, bright library, too!

On Tuesday night, I visited the nearby community of Rochester, Michigan, which is hosting its Authors in April program this week. The organizers invited me to join them for the banquet, which was such a treat. I loved meeting the people in charge of this great program – all such great book lovers – and the librarians who host the authors, too!

School library media specialist Jenny Jones Bachman (center, in the photo above) was excited to tell me about some parent complaints that were filed after she started reading MARTY MCGUIRE to students at her school.  “She won’t wear cute clothes anymore!” one mom had lamented. Apparently, her daughter had decided to give up her princess outfits in favor of dressing like Marty for a while.

I’ve spent the past two days at school visits just outside Detroit, talking with kids about books & writing, and talking with their teachers and librarians, too. One thing I’m hearing over and over?  We need more diverse books for our students. CAPTURE THE FLAG, the first book in my Silver Jaguar Society mysteries with Scholastic, features three kid sleuths from diverse cultural backgrounds and is on the Battle of the Books list here in Birmingham this year. I’ve been telling kids who loved that book that they should look for this one in May…

I loved Varian Johnson’s THE GREAT GREENE HEIST and reviewed it in detail here.  This is the kind of book these Michigan readers will love; it’s the kind of book we need to see on the shelves more often in libraries and schools and bookstores everywhere. And while asking for diverse books is great, it’s not enough. That’s why I issued a bit of a challenge this week. Those of us who want to see more diverse books need to ask not only with words but also with our purchases, by supporting books like this one.

And a whole lot has happened since that blog post. After I ordered two copies of THE GREAT GREENE HEIST from one of my local indies, Flying Pig Books, a bunch of you commented to share that you were ordering books from your great local bookstores, too. (Yay! And thank you!)

Eight Cousins Bookstore in Falmouth, MA challenged fellow indie booksellers at Odyssey Bookshop to see who can handsell the most copies of THE GREAT GREENE HEIST in its first month.

Odyssey Bookshop accepted the challenge.

Author Shannon Hale blogged about that and urged other indies to join in the contest. 

Red Balloon Books in St. Paul, MN tweeted that they were up for the challenge, too!

The spoils for the winning bookstore have yet to be determined, but here’s a start…

I’m offering up a free hour-long Skype writing workshop that the winning store can use for an in-store event or give away to a great teacher-librarian customer.

And John Green has offered ten signed copies of THE FAULT IN OUR STARS to any bookstore in the U.S. that handsells at least 100 copies of THE GREAT GREENE HEIST in its first month of publication.

I suspect there will be more excitement to come.

Want to join us?

Let me know with a comment if you’re a reader or teacher/librarian who’s pre-ordering THE GREAT GREENE HEIST from your local bookstore.

Are you a bookseller? Let us know if you’re up for the Eight Cousins/Odyssey/Red Balloon handselling challenge!

Thanks to everyone who’s been tweeting and Facebooking and Tumblring (Tumbling?) to help spread the word.  Supporting books with diverse characters – with dollars as well as words – is the very best way to send a message that we want more colorful bookshelves for all of our readers.

There’s been a lot of talk lately on social media about diversity in the children’s literature community, and it is wonderful to see so many people asking for more of it. Authors, illustrators, readers, teachers, and librarians have had a lot to say about events like ReedPOP’s homogenous all-star panel of children’s literature “luminaries” proposed for BookCon. The message was clear – our world is more diverse than this, and many of us want the public face of children’s literature to show that. Census estimates show that about half of America’s five-year-olds are members of racial and ethnic minority groups now, and there has been a strong call for books that represent that reality.

Speaking up is one great way to ask for change. But buying books may be an even better way.

At the end of the day, publishing is a business that needs to make money to survive. Given that reality, the best way for readers to ask for more diversity in children’s literature is not with words and tweets and blog posts alone but also with dollars.

If you read my recent blog post on Varian Johnson’s new middle school heist novel, THE GREAT GREENE HEIST, you know how much I loved this book, because it’s incredibly well written, a page turner of a read, and full of diverse, complicated characters.  It is exactly the kind of book many of us have been asking to see more often. So let’s try asking with more than words.

THE GREAT GREENE HEIST comes out on May 27th. I am pre-ordering two copies from one of my local indies, Flying Pig Books in Shelburne, VT. I’m going to keep one for my family and give the other one away in a drawing here on my blog after it arrives.

Who wants to join me?

I’m not going to lie – I’d love to see this title on the NY Times Bestseller list. I’d like every kid to meet Jackson Greene and Gaby de la Cruz.  We may not accomplish that, but if everyone who has been asking for more diversity in children’s literature pre-orders a copy (or two) from a local independent bookstore in the next three weeks, it sure will send one heck of a message to the people in charge of our industry and our book tours and panels.  Let’s show them that we really do want to see more books like this – books with diverse characters, written by men and women of all different cultural backgrounds – and that we’ll support those books with more than just words.

P.S. Does it matter where you buy your copy? It does. local bricks-and-mortar bookstores are essential in getting all kinds of books in front of readers. Pre-ordering from an indie helps a book by a) making it more likely that title will land on the bestseller list and b) letting indie booksellers know that this is a book they’ll want to hand sell. Varian Johnson will also be signing copies of THE GREAT GREENE HEIST pre-ordered from one of his local independent bookstores, and I’ll add details about that soon.

I am really excited for this book to come out next month.

THE GREAT GREENE HEIST by Varian Johnson is an Ocean’s-Eleven-esque middle school heist novel, with a cast of characters that I love more than any I’ve met in a long, long time.

There’s Jackson Greene, the smart, charming eighth grade athlete and con artist who swears he’s reformed (and is mostly telling the truth). There’s his ex-friend-and-crush Gaby de la Cruz, the smart, socially conscious basketball player who gives Jackson a run for his money.  She’s running for student council president against Jackson’s nemesis, Keith Sinclair, and when word gets out that Keith might be planning to steal the election, Jackson and his team of co-conspirators plan a brilliantly multifaceted, high-tech caper to try and stop that from happening.

This book is smart, funny, and a real page turner – and it’ll be loved in different ways by different readers. Writers will study this one for its craft. I have a keen interest in the way writers of all ages use mentor texts to learn craft, so much so that I’m on a proposed panel on this topic for NCTE in the fall. I was intrigued by Varian’s nod to the works that served as inspiration for this book in his bio. They included OCEAN’S ELEVEN, THE WESTING GAME, SNEAKERS, THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, and STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN. I can imagine young writers using THE GREAT GREENE HEIST as a mentor text for their own heist and caper stories set in school. And writers of all ages may want to take note: this book is also an especially good example for how to write third person that slips seamlessly into different characters’ points of view.

Diverse groups of kids will be delighted to see faces on the cover that look like theirs, and when they open the book, they’ll find smart, authentic middle school kids who defy pretty much every stereotype known to man and woman. Athletic con artist Jackson is also a passionate member of the school’s underfunded botany club. That pretty cheerleader the boys are swooning over? She’s also a tech club member who knows how to code.

Teachers and librarians will appreciate all of that and more. This is the kind of book that I spent my whole middle school teaching career looking for, so I could put it into kids’ hands and say “This! You are going to love this one so much.”

THE GREAT GREENE HEIST comes out in May from Scholastic. I support independent bookstores, and if this title is on your reading list, I hope you’ll ask for it at your local indie.

I still remember when my daughter and I read our first graphic novel in Jennifer and Matthew Holmes’ BABYMOUSE series six or seven years ago. We read all of them together, passed them back and forth, and laughed like crazy. There are just a handful of other graphic novels for this age group that share that kind of specialness (Jarrett Krosoczka’s LUNCH LADY series among them) so I was thrilled to see a charming newcomer – Sarah Dillard’s spunky EXTRAORDINARY WARREN: A SUPER CHICKEN.

I’d seen some of Sarah’s early art for this book at a retreat we both attended a while back, so when she asked if I’d like to review the final version, I jumped at the chance, and I’m so glad that I did.

Warren is a chicken who’s tired of the same old clucking and scratching and pecking. But none of the other chickens understand why.  (As a kid who grew up in a small town, boy could I relate to this!). So he sets off to find something more, and like so many of us small-town kids with big dreams, finds himself in a bit of danger, even though he doesn’t realize right away that the hungry, double-speaking rat he meets intends to have chicken for dinner. (“Chicken SUPREME!” Warren says proudly.) The young chicken also finds a mysterious egg, too, and along the way discovers that he really is an extraordinary friend.

I love the way this book balances the playful art of a picture book with the character development and story arc of a chapter book. Its bright illustrations blended with just the right amount of text will have great appeal for kids who still love picture books but also want to start tackling chapters. Hand it to your BABYMOUSE and LUNCH LADY fans who need another great character to love.

(Especially since I just saw some good news for Warren – a second book in the series, coming in October!)

I support independent bookstores. If you’d also like to see your locally owned book shops stay in your community, please consider asking for Warren at your local indie!

When I was researching my science thriller WAKE UP MISSING, I spent a lot of time exploring the Florida Everglades, where the story is set. With my notebook, camera, and usually at least one of my kids, I went kayaking with alligators and hiking in some of Florida’s most gorgeous, remote (and also snake-filled) wilderness. Now that the book is out, I find that I can’t quite let go of my love for this place, so I convinced my family to join me on another Everglades adventure during our vacation last week.

The Shark Valley Visitor Center is the jumping off point for a fifteen-mile bike ride that loops through the Everglades and promises lots of wildlife encounters. We showed up bright and early one morning and set off on our bikes. It wasn’t long before we had our first encounter.

Mama alligator- note her striped babies in the background!

Because the bike path runs right along the water, we scared up some incredible birds, including an enormous blue heron that burst from the weeds just a few feet away from us as we were riding past. And of course, the alligators were everywhere.

When I say they were everywhere…I do mean everywhere. Including sprawled over the bike path. We saw this one from quite a distance.

The older man who rented us our bikes had warned us this might happen. “Just ride past them,” he said. “They won’t bother you.”

“It’s okay to do that?” I asked. “Even if they’re right on the path and there’s not much room?”

“If you’d feel better, you can get off your bike and walk it with the bike between you two,” he said. “But the alligator won’t care either way.”

The alligator in the photo above was on its way back into the high grass by the time we rode up to it.

After a few more miles, we got pretty comfortable “just riding past.”

Just before the halfway point on the Shark Valley Loop Road, there’s an observation tower. We parked our bikes and walked up to enjoy the view of the Everglades from above.

When we were just starting out on our ride, one of the regulars warned us that the return trip would be a lot more challenging with the wind against us. She was right; the last eight miles felt like twenty, but we were rewarded with one last surprise at the end of the trail — another mother alligator with her babies all around her (and on top of her, too!)

If anyone is spending time in South Florida and considering this bike ride, I can’t recommend it enough. If bringing your own bikes is an option, you’ll want to do that. (The rentals are just cruising bikes with no gears.) But either way, it’s a  spectacular way to see a truly amazing environment. If you want to rent bikes, get there early. We arrived right at 8:30 and all was well, but by the time we returned from our ride at noon, the parking lot was full, and there was a waiting list for rental bikes.Bring plenty of water, sunscreen, and a camera.

You may want to bring snacks, too, but don’t leave them in the bike basket when you go up to the observation tower. When we returned to our bikes, they were covered in birds who’d made quick work of our granola bars – unwrapping and devouring them – and were about to make off with my sunglasses, too.  We were impressed with their resourcefulness and decided that a few granola bars was a small price to pay for three hours of fresh air, exercise, and wonder.