Let’s Do Nothing!
Giddy to have an activity kit out with the brilliant folks at Candlewick Press. Nothing like working with the best designers in the country to make you look quite suave. To be exact it is a Non-Activity Kit for animation genius, Tony Fucile’s hilarious picture book, Let’s Do Nothing. Characters, Frankie and Sal have worn themselves out by doing everything so they decide to try doing nothing for a change. Poor bespectacled Frankie’s overactive imagination makes him anything but Zen. When told to “be the tree,” he imagines being peed on by the dog. When told to...
Read MoreFinding Your Way to The Never-Ending Mountian
I first read Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (in galley form) on a train being tossed by the fits of a winter Nor’easter. With mittened hands I read the last page, breathed out, and said, “perfect.” And it was and is after several re-readings. Make sure a copy is in your hands (mittened or not) on July 1 when the book is released.Curious City was proud to mine Grace Lin’s rich pages to create reader and classroom activities in science, math, art, calligraphy, cooking, ancestry, and the fine art of discussion. You can view and download that activity kit (designed by...
Read MoreAdventures with Adventure Annie
Just put the final edits on an Activity Kit with my kickin’ designer colleague, Jen Steele for the picture book, Adventure Annie Goes to Work. Author, Toni Buzzeo declares it “spectacular.” The fine folks at Penguin say it is the “best thing ever.” Adventure Annie’s superheroine adventures are thwarted when Mom gets called into work on a Saturday to find a missing report. Adventure Annie finds adventure, though, in the hunt for the report and in the many other distractions of the office. This book (illustrated by Amy Wummer) is a boon for working moms who...
Read MoreSpeedy Site
Website in a hurry? Okay. Website in a hurry and no money tucked aside to make it quite yet? No Problem…? Author, Peter Gould and I met on his sweet embankment above the Whetstone Brook in Vermont at the breaking of Spring and decided we had this wee problem. Peter was soon on his way to talk in front of the HPAlliance, an incredible international online Harry Potter fan group that has stayed together to confront the types of real world tyranny that their Hogwarts counterparts battled in fiction. How to speak in front of these brilliant readers with even more brilliant web connections...
Read MoreFollow the Yellow Brick Road
Curious City threw out the Wizard of Oz references with tacky abandon at the Spring New England Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. We liken the pursuit of publication to the trip down the yellow brick road meeting cowards, heroes, witches (good and bad), and a few flying monkeys or two. We likened NYC publishing to the Emerald one–for both its glitter and glam and for our ability to place more hope into our success there then the wizards of publishing could ever deliver on. We collectively cringed at the figures–the numbers of books published and the...
Read MoreHey, Little Ant Marches to Sailsbury U.
Phil Hoose and I are just back from a grand trundle down to Salisbury University for the Green Earth Book Awards and the Children’s & Young Adult Literature Festival wrapping up a year’s celebration of Hey, Little Ant’s (Tricycle Press) decade in print. So much frolic and logic to report, but first up was the surprise appearance at one of the events by one Ian Whisner, a second grader sporting a copy of Phil’s book, Hey, Little Ant. Ian had received an Honorable Mention for his essay in the Hey, Little Ant Essay Challenge last year. He stopped by to tell Phil that...
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