Tales from the Rushmore Kid

Waiting for Inspiration

from the Writing Files
of Children's Author and Educator
Barbara Jean Hicks

Birthdays are always good days for new beginnings -- especially Big-O birthdays! So last week, on the occasion of my latest Big-O, I started what I hope will become a lasting habit. It takes 21 days of doing something regularly, the latest research says, for an activity to develop into a habit. I'm five days in and committed: I'm writing a poem every night before I go to sleep. Moreover, I'm writing it in email, from my iPad right in bed, and sending it to myself at a second email address, where I read it first thing in the morning.

I don't expect these late-night poems to be works of art. I DO expect that some will be pure dreck! But it may just be that I find a few gems in the mix, and certainly lots of raw material for other writing.

The idea is to be spontaneous--to write about whatever comes to mind: things I've done that day, things I've seen; people encountered, emotions felt, thoughts pondered. But sometimes, already I've discovered, nothing comes. One night I started at 10:30, thinking I'd lay my head down by eleven. I made a dozen false starts. Delete, delete, delete. Again and again. Finally, getting close to one in the morning, I decided to write about the Muse who stood me up. It flowed. The next day I realized I'd met with a muse after all--just not the one I'd expected.

Is this experience familiar to any other writers out there--Waiting for Inspiration?

July Recommendations--Lynn Becker's Book Picks

Summer's here and maybe you have time for some extra reading? Here are my recommendations, based on books I've recently read:

Novels:
THE LAST DRAGONSLAYER, by Jasper Fflorde, features a funny, self-confident heroine in fifteen-year-old foundling, Jennifer Strange. She is working off her indentured servitude by running Kazam Mystical Arts Management for the benignly inept wizards who are employed there. They used to be powerful, but magic is fading. Or it was, until the predicted death of the last dragon begins producing odd surges of power, and lots of mayhem in general. A smart romp through an alternate universe.

The Tooth Fairy Meets El Ratón Pérez - Book Trailer - BOOK TRAILER SUMMER!

I love this charming picture book. The Tooth Fairy Meets El Ratón Pérez tells the tale of the Tooth Fairy and her Latin competition, a mouse called El Ratón Pérez.  I was thrilled and inspired when my buddy René Colato Láinez hired me to produce the book trailer.

Fact, Fiction and Facebook

from the inquiring mind
of children's author and educator
Barbara Jean Hicks

The 2013 Summer Double Issue of Time magazine is all about happiness, or more specifically the pursuit of happiness--or more specifically yet, as the lead article is titled, "The Happiness of Pursuit."

Author Jeffrey Kluger has some interesting things to say about happiness: among other things, that Americans are hard wired for it as the descendants of immigrants--peoples from all over the world who believed there was something better than the life they were living where they were living it and chose to pursue a dream. That, in fact, the pursuit is the thing, more important in the achievement of happiness than the reaching of a goal intended to make one happy.

Good stuff for a writer of fiction or narrative nonfiction. A story arc is all about the pursuit of a dream and the change that pursuit brings about in a character.

But I was especially intrigued by the answers Americans gave to two questions about social media asked in a "happiness poll" conducted by the magazine: 1) Do you believe that people make themselves look happier, more attractive and more successful than they really are in their social media profiles? 2) Do you believe your social media profile reflects what you are really like?

This Is Not My Hat--Lynn Becker's Book Picks

Jon Klassen won this year's Caldecott Award for THIS IS NOT MY HAT, which he wrote as well as illustrated, and he also won a Caldecott Honor for illustrating EXTRA YARN, written by Mac Barnett. So why did he win not only the most prestigious illustrator award for this year, but was also a runner-up, competing against himself for the same award? Just what did he do so well?

Hanging Off Jefferson's Nose - Book Trailer Number 2 - BOOK TRAILER SUMMER.

THIS IS BOOK TRAILER SUMMER. STAY TUNED FOR MANY TRAILERS THAT I HAVE PRODUCED OVER THE YEARS!

 

Here's one of my trailers for Hanging Off Jefferson's Nose.  The trick is to make each trailer different while keeping each engaging.