This Is the Game

I’m soooooo excited!   Just this week I received the artwork for my spring 2011  picture book, This Is the Game, about the history of baseball.  It’s historical non-fiction and written in the same rhyme scheme as This Is the Feast and This Is the Dream.

The illustrator, Owen Smith, did a wonderful job of bringing that old-timey, 1940′s  feeling to the book.   I googled Owen and found out that his artwork has been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Time, Rolling Stone, and the New Yorker, for which he has created 15 cover illustrations.   Take a look!

Happy New Year!

Dear Readers (and I do mean readers!)

I have decided that my New Year’s Resolution is to update my blog on a regular basis.  I was pretty lax in 2009 and failed to journal some very important events.   So…  my new goal :  “20-10, blog again!”

I have to start with December 2009 and tell you about an amazing school visit I had at Paine Primary, situated front and center in a little town by the name of Trussville, Alabama, where Rachel Brockman is the media specialist extraordinaire.   It was a very cloudy day outside, but inside the sun was shining.  As I approached the media center,  the wall above and the walls on each side of the library doors were painted with scenes from all of my books.  I felt like I was entering storybook land!  Above the doors were the words: “Vivid Verbs and Colorful Words, and surrounding each scene were vivid verbs and colorful words that the kids had found after reading the books.  Is that not the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow, the elephant’s instep!   (Ohhh, now those are some colorful words!)

The phrase Vivid Verbs and Colorful Words is one I repeat time after time when I give my Write On! writing workshop. As a writer I try to paint pictures with words, in other words,  I try to create visuals in the mind of the reader.  That is what writing is all about!   And Ms. Brockman got it!!  The kids at Paine Primary are such lucky pants to have Ms. Brockman as their media specialist!

But that wasn’t all that was amazing about Paine Primary.   It was the kids!!!   So smart and eager to learn, and not only that, they were very, very polite.  My favorite combination!  And wow!  are these kids readers.  I signed book after book after book, almost 300 in total!  What a way to end 2009!