Don’t Eat My Toes, OK?/ First Campaigner Challenge

I’m racing against the clock as I type this up in my editor. This Friday’s regular Perfect Picture Book Friday won’t be a picture book but my own story. And my back has given me fits all day. *feels terrible* *whine, whine* wa wa wa.

OK, I got that out of the way now on with the contest.

The First Campaigner Challenge is here in the Fourth Writer’s Campaign Feb 2012. Rachael Harrie http://rachaelharrie.blogspot.com/2012/02/first-campaigner-challenge-of-my-fourth.html  has given us the rules as follows: 

Write a short story/flash fiction story in 200 words or less, excluding the title. It can be in any format, including a poem. Begin the story with the words, “Shadows crept across the wall”. These five words will be included in the word count.

If you want to give yourself an added challenge (optional), do one or more of these:

• end the story with the words: “everything faded.” (also included in the word count)
• include the word “orange” in the story
• write in the same genre you normally write
• make your story 200 words exactly!

 I write in two genres. One is memoir and the other Children’s lit. The only group I joined on this campaign is children’s lit so I made this story children’s. I hope you feel inspired to go back and like it by clicking number 181. I barely made it this time around and hope I won’t get neglected by doing that. Hopefully some of you start at the back of the list and go around to the front. Thanks for reading!

Don’t Eat My Toes, OK?

Shadows crept across the wall. The bedroom looked scarier than usual.

She panted. Her voice didn’t come out even though she thought she was screaming. Her knees shook. She covered her head with her orange blankets and shivered with fear under them. She tried to call her Mom but nothing came out. Then she tried to call her Dad but her voice was barely a whisper. Even under the blankets her eyes were wide open, open to what?

Then she heard a voice. “Don’t eat my toes, OK?”

“Wwhhat?” Olivia said.

“Don’t eat my toes, please. “

“I won’t eat your toes, will you eat mine?”

Then, thinking,

“You’re not afraid of me are you?”  Olivia asked. “I was afraid of you. “

Then they both burst out laughing.  The monster had been afraid of Olivia. How had Olivia not seen that? Then Olivia’s mom turned on the light.  Everything faded.

The end

Clarbojahn Presents….Writer, Stacy Jensen!

Ladies and Gents, I present…. Stacy Jensen! I met her on my blog a while back when I blogged about my memoir. Yes, I write memoir. The entries have been far and in-between but slowly there is content growing. Stacy has been a stalwart commenter for me and when I asked her to do a guest post she said yes, to my delight. She has some wonderful insights to share with us.  

The Key to Social Media: Do What Fits You 

Social Media-Stickoutinacrowd

By Stacy S. Jensen

Social media is wonderful.

Social media is horrible.

I lean more toward wonderful, but some days it’s not so great.

Sometimes, I hear a bit of exhaustion in blog comments, Face book status updates and in Tweets. When a new social media site is mentioned, I hear groans, “Oh, please, not another one.”

I understand.

Here are some ways to lighten the social media load:

1. Write first, then socialize. Last year, I did the opposite. This year, I have more than 130 pages in my memoir written.
2. Turn off all email notification in your profiles. If you visit your Facebook or Twitter feeds, you don’t need the emails. Turn them off.
3. Change your blog schedule. Three posts a week is my magic number. Some bloggers post every day and others post once a week. Figure out what works best for you.
4. Say yes to what you want to do and no to what you don’t. There are a lot of fun, wacky and time-consuming events in the blogosphere. Evaluate what works for your writing schedule, your blog and your personal life.
5. Develop a social media schedule. Figure out how many blogs you want to visit each week, then divide that by the number of days you want to surf the Internet. Consider ways to show your love by leaving a comment, tweeting a link or sharing a link on Facebook. Use the share buttons on the blog to make it easy and quick.
6. Take a break. I took a short hiatus around the holidays. I’ve seen other bloggers take off weeks or months. It’s okay. I think it’s wonderful when a blogger, who is a writer first, says, “Hey, I need to focus on my manuscript. I’ll be back.” Many of your readers are also writers and should respect this. When I see a post about a blogging break, I cheer and comment, “I’ll be here when you return.”

The importance of social media in the new publishing landscape whether it’s a Big Six publisher, an agent or a self-published author is clear. Reading all the expert and newbie blogs makes me understand it’s a numbers game of monthly blog hits and subscribers to establish a platform.

However, I cling to the idea that it’s really all about my writing. I need to focus on building a strong writing foundation or my platform means nothing.

Are you an out-of-control social media butterfly or do you have your social network under control?

###

Stacy Jensen

Stacy S. Jensen loves her social network time after she’s finished working on her memoir and picture book manuscripts for the day. She used to work as a newspaper journalist. If you have time, visit her blog, like her Facebook page or send her a Tweet. If you don’t, she understands.

Blog: http://stacysjensen.blogspot.com

Facebook:  www.facebook.com/StacySJensen

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/ – !/StacySJensen 

Photo: SocialMedia-stickoutinacrowd

I took this photo in Tanzania. Thought it might go with this. This zebra stands out in this crowd of wildebeest.

Thanks to Stacy Jensen for this informative and fun guest post. I am amazed at how small the world is. I recently organized a crit group from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators MidAtlantic conference goers. One of the members had come across Stacy’s guest blog on Julie Hedlund’s 12X12in2012 blog and asked if I knew her. It was with great pleasure to tell him I did. And it has been an honor having Stacy here on my blog. If there are any questions please write them in the comments below. We love comments.

If you enjoyed this post, I’d be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Twitter or Facebook. Thank you!

And if you’d like more of these posts just click the follow button or click the email subscription button on the right hand side of the blog post. That way you will get emails notifications of each new post in your inbox. Thanks for reading! 

Perfect Picture Book Friday/ Hoptoad

Title: Hoptoad

Written by: Jane Yolen

Illustrated by: Karen Lee Schmidt

Published by: Silver Whistle Harcourt Inc., Fiction,

For ages: preschool and up

Themes: Toads, Stories in rhyme, Nature, Father and son.

Resources: http://janeyolen.com/for-teachers/  and http://janeyolen.com/teaching-materials/ offer as it says materials for teaching. Another fun activity is just getting up with your child and hopping. A parent or teacher could put strips of colored construction paper down on the floor and have the child jump or hop from strip to strip.

From the Jacket: How does a toad cross the road? How does a toad cross a very wide road? How does a toad cross a very wide road in front of a truck with a heavy load? With a little help….

The first two sentences: “Hop toad. Hop— toad! Hop, hop across that road.” (That was two full-page spreads telling its own story. With full illustrations)

Why I love it: Stories in rhyme necessarily use sparse language and this one is no exception. Each page has only two to four words on it making it a page turner. The illustrations span the whole page in deep color from edge to edge, making the story come to life. As the story germinates a truck with a driver and boy come into the picture who are very concerned that toad doesn’t get caught underneath the wheels. As the story keeps marching or hopping along the father and son begin a whole other story in the illustrations. This is how a true picture book is promoted with both text and art telling their own stories. I loved it for it’s simplicity and because it was by Jane Yolen. (Yes, I have a soft spot for her)

For more books with resources please visit Perfect Picture Books at Susanna Leonard Hill’s blog. And if you’d like to be whisked away through cyber space to the resource page and the list of more marvelous recommended perfect picture books just click on the perfect picture book badge on the right.

Brand Yourself

“Being published is not the real end goal. Being published is only the means to your real end goal–selling books.” From Wana by Kristen Lamb

This article is written with a heavy credit to Kristen Lamb who’s “We Are Not Alone, The Writer’s Guide to Social Media” I read during Christmas break. I have rephrased parts of it for you and hope to make you see that having your name as a brand is a good thing and necessary if you want to sell your books. From it  I learned that I  made a tiny mistake in my blog name and in my twitter name because it’s a conglomeration of my own name not my full name, and it may confuse people. I will explain why in the following article.

Getting published doesn’t mean anything if people don’t hear about you or don’t buy your book. And there are consequences if you don’t sell much. “If you fail to sell out of your print run, you hurt your chances of another book contract.”

In order to do what we love, writing, we must learn to do what we may hate which is sell. (Although it may not be as bad as I think. I think I am going to meeting a lot of cool and interesting people)

In order to maximize sales, we need a new goal – to become a brand. You see, brand equals sales. Brand lets us know what to expect. Like Levis means good denim products. Good working jeans. And Nike means good running shoes. Also think Patterson, Stephen King, and Jane Yolen. You automatically think suspense, horror and children’s books.

See, authors have brands too, and it saves a lot of time if your name is linked solely with your content. If we have good content and people know our name they will trust us without reading every review about our latest book before they buy.

Therefore before you sign up for any social media site, the very first thing you need to do is decide what your brand name is going to be. Remember my post about Pen Names?

It talked about how important our published name was. And the reason is branding.

The reasons are three-fold.

1-     The be effective

2-     To be able to link all your platforms together

3-     To begin building a solid platform

Writers’ looove being creative with their usernames. But if readers only know you by your username it will take research to find out who wrote that book they want to buy. And that may be the very reason they don’t buy it. They don’t want to work to make a simple purchase. You have to make it easy for them.

Avoid  making these mistakes:

1-     Branding the title of your book

a) Your agent or publisher may change the title

b) You may write other books and will have to do all that branding all over again

2-     Branding your content –

You are the brand not what you do.

3-     Branding the name of characters.

a) Same reason as branding your title, agent or editor may want revisions and the name may have to be changed. And what about a series? If the first book flops or you want to write something different than we are back to having to start all over again.

4-     Branding multiple identities — many authors do more than one thing and if they are known by their name it is simple to put on a different hat, as in writing a different genre or teaching a writer workshop.

So you see how important it is to brand your name. That’s how readers are going to get to know us. Branding our name makes us look more professionally focused. And it will save us time in building our author platform, leaving us more time to do what we love, write. Did you know I have a twitter handle called Cbojahn? Yes, you can find me on twitter and follow me using that twitter handle. It is part of my brand but since I didn’t know what I was doing I made it up from my name. Same thing with my blog title, Clarbojahn, but my published name is Clarike Bowman Jahn. See the conglomeration? Hopefully it won’t be too confusing but I am here to tell you that in building your author platform you “want to go with making your name synonymous with your (entertaining, interesting, informative) content. That’s the goal.”

If you don’t sell enough, you cannot quit your day job.

This post relied heavily on material from Kristen Lamb’s book “We are Not Alone, The Writer’s Guide to Social Media.” Thank you Kristen.

If you enjoyed reading this post and would like to receive future postings, please enter your email address and click the Sign Up button at the top right of this page. Thank you for reading!

Related articles

• How to Do Social Media Right (worddreams.wordpress.com)
• Kristen Lamb: 3 kinds of authors and the social media that fits them (karenwoodward.org)
• What Buck learned from Kristen Lamb (deboeybuck.wordpress.com)

Valentines Day Contest / Night at the Museum

Yes, Susanna Hill  has done it again. She’s organized a Valentines Day Contest for us suckers. She had the original word count at 150 words but yesterday upped it to 200 words. Since I have been busy with life I did not try to improve my story with the extra words so you will have to suffer through it. Luckily for you it is short, 150 words exactly as the first rule said. Here it is.:

Night at the Museum

There were three valentine cards in Clarike’s box; Princess Isabella, soldier Steve, and jack in the box, Jack. The sun set and magic happened. The valentines became alive!  Slowly they woke up and started moving,  Jack looked over at Isabella, the most ravishing princess he had ever seen, skin so soft and hair so shiny

Steve ran over to Isabella, knelt on one knee, held out a ring,  asked her to marry him. Isabella  happily said, “of course” and kissed him. Furious, Jack grabbed a sword, swinging at Steve. Steve parried the blow, knocking Jack to the floor.

Night faded, taking magic with it.

Clarike opened her valentines. The princess had “I do” written on it and the soldier said “be mine”. The jack in the box valentine was blank. A mistake she thought.  the end.

Thanks for reading. All of you, thanks for reading. I appreciate it.Happy Valentines Day, Everyone!

Perfect Picture Book Friday/ Let’s Count It Out, Jesse Bear

Title: Let’s Count It Out, Jesse Bear

Written by: Nancy White Carlstrom

Illustrated by: Bruce Degen

Published by: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, fiction, 1996

Theme: Counting Numbers 1 through 20, Humor, Rhyming.

Appropriate for: Preschool through first grade

Resources: The obvious learning tool one would suspect from this book is learning how to count one through twenty. The humor in this book and the giggles found here make learning to count painless and fun.  I found a resource on another blog for learning how to count, scroll on down to the craft :  http://viviankirkfield.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/ppbf-leo-the-late-bloomer/  for a daisy chain necklace. A little one can learn to count to thirty using this craft with a parents or teachers help. Here is a list of other Jesse Bear books.

Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

Better Not Get Wet, Jesse Bear

It’s About Time, Jesse Bear, and Other Rhymes

How Do You Say It Today, Jesse Bear?

Happy Birthday, Jesse Bear

Let’s Count It Out, Jesse Bear

What a scare, Jesse Bear

Where is Christmas, Jesse Bear?

Guess Who’s Coming, Jesse Bear

Climb the Family Tree, Jesse Bear 

First Sentence: It started out a tickle, Deep down inside of me; it turned into a giggle and came out a Ha! Ha! Hee!

What the jacket says: Jesse Bear is off on a rollicking trip to an amusement Park—and he’s counting on you to join him! Everyone’s favorite bear is at it again, showing off new shoes, bumping in bumper cars, and –oops!—even getting a few bumps and scratches of his own. Nancy White Carlstrom’s fanciful counting poems and Bruce Degen’s bright, cheery illustrations make Let’s Count It Out, Jesse Bear, the sixth in the Jesse Bear series, a guaranteed hit for read-aloud sessions. This rhyming, rambling jaunt will have readers counting, and chuckling, in no time!

Why I love it: Kids ages three through seven are sure to get the humor in this old-time favorite as Jesse Bear counts out the numbers one through twenty in perfect rhyme. Kids and adults alike enjoy the rhythm of each poem of numbers and the cheerful, happy story that goes with it.  Bruce Degen out does himself painting the illustrations in a vision that tells another story beside the text.(I know I often say that but creating another whole story that supports the original is tough and the hallmark of a good illustrator.And makes for exceptional picture books.)

For more books with resources please visit Perfect Picture Books at Susanna Leonard Hill’s blog. Or if you want to wisk on over to the resource page and see lots of other recommended books just click the Perfect Picture Book Badge on the right.

Clarbojahn presents…Author Margot Finke

Hi Readers!

Today I have a quest visiting whom I met on Linked In and asked it she would like to appear here and share her story. I am indebted to her for the following article.

Margot Finke is an Aussie transplant who writes midgrade adventure fiction and rhyming picture books. For many years she has lived in Oregon with her husband, children, and grandchildren.  Gardening, travel, and reading fill in the cracks between her writing. Her husband is retired, and very supportive.  He gives her lots of time to write and promote her books

Margot didn’t begin serious writing until the day their youngest left for college. This late start drives her writing, and pushes her to work at it every day. Margot said, “I really envy those who began young, and managed to slip into writing mode between kid fights, diaper changes, household disasters, and outside jobs. You are my heroes! “

She has 11 published books + the follow-up for Taconi and Claude is due out soon.  All her books, and Video readings, trailers, reviews and sample pages can be seen on her website: http://www.margotfinke.com

Her Manuscript Critique Service attracts clients from all over the globe, and her website offers a great deal of help for new writers. Nothing gives Margot a bigger thrill than to hear that a book she helped polish has been published.  “This is always a huge YAY moment,” Margot says.

==================

My First Book Illustration and What Came After. . .

When my husband and I first came to the US, I wanted our 3 children to remember their homeland Down Under. So I hung up a map of Australia, one that also showed their critters, and every night I would tell them a story about one of the animals – right off the top of my head. After I became a teacher’s aide, I also began telling classes about Australia and their weird and wonderful collection of animals.  Sometimes, I would forget how I ended one of my stories the last time I told it. The kids were real sharp, and would call me on it.  A teacher friend said, “For goodness sake write them all down – that way you’ll remember the endings.” So I did, and the rest, as they say, is history. My little stories became a series of 7 rhyming e-books that told fun facts about US and Aussie critters. Educational too, with each one delightfully illustrated by a different and talented artist. 

The first in my Wild and Wonderful series was titled Kangaroo Clues.  This rhyming story is particularly memorable, because of how I found the illustrator. Imagine this: the illustrator was from Turkey, he spoke no English, and did not own a computer.  How was this possible you ask?     

An online friend, also Turkish, and famous for her own children’s books, suggested I use her illustrator, Mustafa Delioglu.  NOTE: this story pays homage to the value of networking – both locally and worldwide.  My friend sent me some of the books Mustafa had illustrated for her, and his work was awesome.  Much of Mustafa’s other art hung in galleries over Europe.  I shouted, “YES!” 

This friend acted as translator for both of us.  Talk about a marathon effort.  I will always be grateful to her.  Fortunately, Mustafa lived near her, so she went back-and-forth for months with my e-mails, and his replies to them.  How do you argue with someone in another land, when you can’t see, hear, or speak his language?  Oh boy, trust me, we found ways to argue.   Almost a year went past before the illustrations were completed, and the book was finally published.  I was thrilled with the results – worth every hair tearing moment.  His magical illustrations came together with my rhymes in a delightful marriage of fun reading. Kangaroo Clues offers information kids will think fun, while learning about Aussie animals.

These six complete my Wild and Wonderful series.

(The starred titles contain 3 separate stories about 3 different animals)

* Don’t Eat Platypus Stew – *Never say BOO to a Frilly – Mama Grizzly Bear – Humdinger Hummers – *Prairie Dog’s Play Day – *Squirrels Can’t Help Being Nuts. 

Of course Wild and Wonderful was just the beginning.  Our son was a reluctant reader, and one of our daughters had mild dyslexia.  So I started to write stories with a WOW factor that would HOOK kids on reading – especially boys. 

The books that followed are in soft cover, e-book, Kindle or Nook readers:

**Horatio Humble Beats the Big D (dyslexia – rhyming PB that encourages early help )

**Ruthie and the Hippo’s Fat Behind  ( how sudden change can affect kids – rhyming PB)

   Both these include helpful parent/teacher guides.

**Rattlesnake Jam  ( fun rhyming PB – especially for boys )

**Taconi and Claude – Double Trouble ( Set in the Aussie outback of 1950)  This historical young teen adventure offers a coming of age story, aboriginal lore, Dreamtime Spirits, and big decisions for young Taconi to make. Helped by Claude, his chatty cockatoo: spouter of wise and funny oneliners at just the right moment.

IF you want to write for children the following are the most common problems I find when I critique a manuscript:

#1 – Waffling on too long.  Waffles should stay in the kitchen with the maple syrup.
#2 – Limp and over used words.  Powerful and active words make a powerful and active story.

#3 – Lack of focus. Allowing your plot to wander off down side tracks that lead nowhere.

** Any one of these three is sure to earn your MS a rejection. 

You can e-mail me < mfinke@frontier.com  > and can chat about books and writing them. 

Thank you Clarike for hosting me on your blog. It’s been a lot of fun.

It’s been an honor, Margot. So glad you could come visit today and share yourself here with us. If any of you have questions for Margot ask them in the comments and we will do our best to answer them.