How To Read To Your Kids

by R.S. Mellette

A recent critic of Billy Bobble Makes A Magic Wand stated that her son kept having to ask questions about what was in the book. She said this like it was a bad thing, which got me to thinking about my childhood.

I have a distinct memory from first or second grade of me flipping the blades of my little toy helicopter in front of the TV. I watched as the direction of blades seemed to go forward, stop, then go backward. I asked my Dad about it. That must have been around five or six in the evening. By eleven o'clock, he had explained stroboscopic effect, the speed of light and sound, Einstein's theory of relativity, and a myriad of other subjects that might bore me today, but which I found fascinating then.

Another time, I asked what the stars are, and where they go during the day. He explained that the stars are just like the sun, only bigger, and some of them might have died out millions of years in the past. That led to another long series of questions and answers, ending with our living room blacked out, a solar system of a globe, a tennis ball, a basketball and a flashlight for the sun.

Later, when I was an adult, a friend of mine complained that her son asked too many questions. "He asked me why the sky is blue, and where the stars go during the day. I don't know any of this stuff, so I just tell him not to worry about it."

That broke my heart.

Each question a kid asks is a spark that can start a fire of learning. Not the kind of learning that is force-fed in schools, but the kind that comes from feeding a hunger for knowledge. Everyone likes to talk about "teachable moments," but there is none better than when a kid asks "why?" or "where?" or "how?".

How to read to your kids? When they ask a question, stop reading. Answer their question. That will lead to more questions. Answer them. You might not get back to the book until the next day. That's fine. It's a book, it'll wait. That's what books do.

In this day and age, there is no excuse for not answering a kid's questions. Sure, Wikipedia might not be the best source for a master's thesis, but it'll get you started.

As for the mom on Amazon with Billy Bobble; it's possible she answered every one of her son's questions, and he just got bored and walked away. That's fine. Not everyone is going to like my book.

But I do take pride in the fact that… I made him ask.

R.S. Mellette's new book is Billy Bobble Makes A Magic Wand. He is an experienced screenwriter, actor, director, and novelist. You can find him at the Dances With Films festival blog, and on Twitter, or read him in the anthologies Spring Fevers, The Fall: Tales of the Apocalypse, and Summer's Edge.

When I Was Eight

by Riley Redgate

Like most strange adults, I was once a strange kid. Back in my elementary school days, I had a knack for sleepwalking: I'd end up downstairs a lot, managing our staircase with ease, and sometimes I'd have conversations with people while asleep. One night, my father found me in the hall outside my bedroom, staring at nothing. When he asked me what I was doing, I helpfully replied that I was "looking." Looking at what? I don't know. I didn't elaborate. We chatted for a minute or two about why I was still awake -- it was about 1 AM -- and then I went back into my room. I remember zero percent of this.

Nighttime is when I do my best work. Unfortunately, it is also when I am weirdest. This has always been true. Once, when I was eight, I walked downstairs in the middle of the night, sobbing. My parents asked me what was wrong. My response was, "I just don't want to die!" If I were my parents, I would've been terrified of me. (Note: I have not yet died.)

People wonder why old fairy tales were so bloodthirsty, what with all the violence, cannibalism, etc. I feel like the answer is pretty simple: children are obsessed with darknesses and terrors. I have spoken with innumerable people who tell me they went through a Holocaust fascination phase as a kid (so did I). When I was in elementary school, my fellow students loved this Jingle Bells parody, which is a blood-soaked piece of rewriting if I've ever seen one. And kids, Neil Gaiman says, read his notoriously horrifying book Coraline as an adventure, while adults get nightmares. Let's be honest, though: all you need to do is crack open one of those Scary Stories anthologies to find something traumatizing. Those were always popular at my school libraries.

When I was eight, the ideas of death and pain were everywhere in the media I consumed. Kids' books and movies have a high body count -- dead parents, dead kids, people getting injured all the time. Harry Potter is the poster child for fictional orphaned kids, who have been trendy in literature since Dickens. Kids get devoured by the handful in Roald Dahl's The BFG, and tortured by Ms. Trunchbull in his book Matilda. Part of this is the dichotomy kids' books often draw between good and evil: evil people hurt others, and good people stop that from happening. But there's more there.

I'm still scared of dying, like most people. But when I was eight, the fear of it crippled me. I had huge fears that swallowed me up every night as I lay there, staring at the ceiling. I have a body of experiences now that help me cope with fears based on how my life has gone this far. But when I was eight, fiction was the only way I could understand most fears. Stories make awful things comprehensible to kids. It's an incredibly important part of growing up, understanding what bad things are, why they happen, and how they operate.

Books taught me the best way to beat the monsters, too: keep going. Keep reading to the end of the story. Keep moving forward until something changes, or until you understand. That's why my favorite kids' books, from chapter books to YA, have heavy or dark elements -- these books help readers deal with hard truths, and persistence is always the way to tackle them.

It's understandable, wanting to shield kids from the worst parts of the world. Still, in my opinion, kids shouldn't be sheltered from scary topics. There's a time and a place for everything, obviously, and kids' literature has boundaries that adult categories don't. All the same, loss, pain, and death are part of being alive, from the youngest age, and in my life, books have been the weapons I've used to fight back the fear of them.

Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She is represented by Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sporadically and with occasional weirdness, she blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.

Super Cool!

by Matt Sinclair

“Super cool!”

It was a phrase I’d never heard my four-year-old daughter say before. I have no idea where she heard it. She jumped in place for a couple seconds, then zipped around the kitchen while I tried to put groceries away. She was a distraction to say the least, but I think her joy was easily the most thrilling distraction I’d had in months, if not years.

What was the reason for her excitement? We weren’t going anywhere special for vacation. I hadn’t bought her favorite meal for dinner. I hadn’t even given her a kiss on the forehead yet – not that it would have caused her to jump for joy; the girl won’t even talk to me on the phone.

No, this was the joy of Daddy arriving with new books to read.

I’d called from the library to determine which Berenstain Bears stories she had her heart set on. We were limited to two, however, since the series is on her school’s summer reading list – a list she has no idea exists, mind you. The ones she really wanted weren’t available. But when I arrived home with books, she danced and screamed and jumped and ran. I dare you to keep up with a happy four-year-old.

I don't when I last felt such joy over a book. Elephant’s Bookshelf Press just released our latest anthologies, and I’m certainly happy about both Summer’s Edge and Summer’s Double Edge, but as I pressed "publish" on the computer screen, I told my wife that it was happening. I did not jump in place. Granted, the corners of my mouth probably rose.

But I can’t get the image out of my mind: the sheer honest joy. New books! Super cool!

Matt Sinclair, a New York City-based journalist and fiction writer, is also president and chief elephant officer of Elephant's Bookshelf Press, which recently published Summer's Edge and Summer's Double Edge, which are available through Smashwords (SE) (SDE) and Amazon (SE) (SDE), and include stories from several FTWA writers. In 2012, EBP published its initial anthologies: The Fall: Tales from the Apocalypse, (available via Amazon and Smashwords) and Spring Fevers (also available through Smashwords, and Amazon). Matt blogs at the Elephant's Bookshelf and is on Twitter @elephantguy68

New Visions Writers Award

by J. Lea López

Here at FTWA we don't endorse or promote products, contests, services, etc. because... well, we just don't. We share resources and info that we personally find valuable, and that's generally the only reason we pass along links. However, we were recently contacted by our friends at Lee & Low Books, publishers of children's literature focusing on diversity, about a new award. Since we know they're legit and have such a great reputation in the kid lit world, we felt it was our duty to pass this info along to our readers. About

The New Visions Award, established this year, will be given for a middle grade or young adult fantasy, science fiction, or mystery novel by an author of color. The Award winner will receive a cash grant of $1,000 and our standard publication contract, including our basic advance and royalties for a first time author. The deadline this year to submit manuscripts will be October 30, 2012.

We strive to give authors of color the chance to have their voices heard, so we are very excited to share this amazing opportunity for aspiring YA authors to break into publishing. The New Visions Award is modeled after our New Voices Award for picture books, which was established in 2000 and has led to the publication of many respected authors including Zetta Elliott, Don Tate, and Paula Yoo.

The award is for unpublished, unagented manuscripts in the genres listed above. For complete eligibility requirements and submission guidelines, please visit their web page.

And by all means, if you enter and win, let us know!

J. Lea López is a writer with a penchant for jello and a loathing for writing bios. Find her on Twitter or her blog, Jello World. She has had some short stories published, most recently in the Spring Fevers anthology.

Family Manuscripts Found: Now What?

by Cat Woods

Over the years, I've frequently been asked about old, family manuscripts. Often times, somebody cleans out Great Grandpa's attic and runs across a collection of stories. Most often, they are children's stories. Almost always, the writer in us wants to preserve these memories forever—in the traditional publishing world.

"How do I get them published?" is the question I hear over and over again. But I have a different question. "For whom do you want to publish them?"

Is the intention to get Great Grandpa's words out there into the literary world as a historical reference, is it to make a fortune or is the intention to preserve the memory of Great Grandpa via his words? These are vastly different questions and require careful thought on behalf of the writer in us.

Commercial Considerations

What exactly is the collection of writings and how does that translate into the current market? Stories were written very differently back in the day (think A.A.Milne's wordiness in the Pooh stories compared to the pared down 500 word picture books of today).

• Consider word count: picture books run about 300-500 words. Chapter books have a sweet spot of 7,500 words and are cohesive stories. Many of the old manuscripts in question run eight to ten handwritten pages—too long for your typical picture book and too short for your average chapter book.
• Consider the style of writing: long-winded, highly descriptive tales are out. Colorful prose used to be the norm, but todays' kids run on the short and punchy side of writing.
• Consider the theme/plot/premise: gone are the books as teaching tools. Back in the day, books were blatant, cautionary tales. They had distinct messages that were spelled out in a way that hip readers and editors are no longer interested in. If the entire storyline is a teaching tool, it likely has little place in commercial publishing today. It needs to meet all the criteria of a contemporary story: robust characters, conflict and resolution—in a way that speaks to the kids, not at them.
• Consider illustrations: often, family-found stories come with hand-drawn pictures—beautiful renditions by Great Grandpa's own hand. Treasures for certain, yet almost guaranteed to be incompatible with current styles and formatting. Picture books average 28 pages with one to two illustrations per double page spread. The manuscripts I get questions about have anywhere from one to ten total illustrations.
• Consider your openness to editing: no writing is ever ready to commercially publish without some kind of tweaking. It's hard enough to play around with our own words, but changing Great Grandpa's may be next to impossible from the emotional stand point. If you're not willing to edit, commercial publishing will not be your best choice.

But...

There may be some contemporary options for these traditional stories. Depending on word count and writing style, they may make a great collection of board books. Simple, chunky stories with a cohesive theme or character can accommodate those 8-10 pages quite well. And the good news is that some small/niche publishing companies specialize in board books and are open to unsolicited manuscripts.

Another option for a 300-800 word tale may be the magazine market. But before you start shooting off Great Grandpa's words, please carefully research the magazine market. It is very nuanced and each mag is specialized in their needs and/or themes. They also have VERY specific word counts to consider.

Harder for the first-time writer would be publishing the collection in chapter book/novel format. Longer works may be consolidated into one, two or three volumes depending on the cohesiveness of the stories and the targeted age groups. As a caution: the manuscripts would have to be stellar.

Little Golden Books might also be a viable option for really well-written stand-alones. They have a line of stories that maintains the old-fashioned story-telling feel that might match Great Grandpa's words and illustrations.

Otherwise, Consider Self-Publishing

Self-publishing is wide open and can really create a nice edition of stories for close families and friends. It may also fill a regional niche and could potentially be sold at local bookstores, museums, Great Grandpa's church or other stores that support local artists. If money is the motivator, you will need to learn all the marketing skills of a traditional publisher to sell to a broader audience.

• POD: many print-on-demand companies would be a fabulous option to get a paper copy into the hands of those who knew and loved Great Grandpa. Books could be bought as needed and could even be a fundraiser of sorts for family reunions or organizations that Great Grandpa believed in.
• Electronic Publishing: Smashwords or Amazon would be a quick and inexpensive way to share Great Grandpa's stories. Potentially, it could also mean an accidental outside sale or two, or if done right, could be a small money maker.
• Heirloom Binding: some stories are just meant to be preserved naturally. Depending on the paper and ink, these pages could be leather bound into an original story, and preserved for generations to come. I've created several heirloom gift books for families and have found the options infinite and the craftsmanship stunning.
  

Whatever you decide, don't jump into the project quickly. First, review your motives, then your time commitment, and finally, your options. What do you want to get out of this endeavor and how can you best achieve it? How does the quality of writing compare to the contemporary market?

Have you ever found stories from yesterday in a trunk, attic or basement? If so, what did you do with them? In your mind, what value do old stories have and how best can we preserve them? Or, is there even a need to preserve them? Do you think writing from days gone by has a place in today's market? If so, how can we best get these found manuscripts into the hands of today's readers?

Curious minds want to know.

Cat Woods prefers her stories to be published within her lifetime. However, should they gather dust in the attic until she no longer blogs at Words from the Woods, she would love for her manuscripts to be illustrated by her great grandchildren, bound in leather and shared at future family gatherings.