Take the February 750word challenge. The website 750words.com challenges writers every month to write every day that month and make it at least 750 words.

Now, think about it. February only has 28 days; except this is a leap year, sorry. Still, that’s one day less to win this challenge. You can write 750 words for 29 days straight, right? Take the challenge!

And here’s the Table of Contents from January’s writing challenge, in case you skipped any or want to repeat one.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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I am now blogging a couple times a month at WOW-Women on Writing’s blog, The Muffin. Read an excerpt from my ebook, How to Write a Children’s Picture Book, Does EPub Change the 32-Page Illustrated Picture Book?

EBOOK Available on Nook Kindle PDF Now an iBook

For more info, see writeapicturebook.com

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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Tone is the overall feel of a story. Does this sound depressed, joyful, or hopeful?

Beyond that, though, tone can determine the audience for your story. One of the main differences between a middle grade and YA, or a YA and an adult story, is the tone of the piece. Tone reflects the author’s attitude toward the characters, the plot, the setting, and the theme of the story.

One of the easiest ways to signal tone and, as a result, audience is to control your sentence structure. A simplistic explanation would say that simple sentences are for younger audiences, while longer sentences are for older. But that’s too simplistic.

Tone of a Picture Book

It is true that picture book language is simpler, but it’s not necessarily simplistic.

Clarity is paramount. You can—I love to do this—interrupt a sentence with another sentence. When I was teaching college level courses and taught this sentence construction, one student came back to class and reported that her three year old daughter had done this. Even young kids talk in complex ways. But the connections from sentence to sentence must be absolutely clear. Using lots of introductory clauses, even when well used, can be confusing. Instead, be simple and direct. Make sure everything is clear.

Tone of a Middle Grade

The tone here is more complex and respectful. Never take the tone of talking down to a “little kid.” For sentence structures, you’ll still want to be clear, easy to understand. You can take more detours, for example, explaining a character’s motivations, or describing in more detail. But the tone is honest, open, fun, entertaining. Simple sentences are complemented by compound and complex sentences.

Tone of a Young Adult (YA)

The difference here is that, besides a full range of sentence structures, the attitude is more irreverent, questioning, “edgy.” This may mean experimentation with sentence fragments, POV, invented words, jargon—including cursing, lists, long sentences with plenty of semi-colons. The mandate here is freshness, in content and in presentation (your sentences).

A great book to shake up your grammar is Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guild to Bold, Contemporary Style by Arthur Plotnik.

Tone of an Adult Story or Novel

The adult story has sophistication, nuances and maturity as hallmarks of its tone, regardless of genre. The full range of sentence structures can and should be present and you may use whatever is appropriate for your story. For a brush-up on sentence structure possibilities, read this book.

This isn’t a call for simple sentences for picture books.
I write picture books.
I write easy picture books
I write boring picture books.

This is a call to make sure that in the tone—especially in how sentences affect tone—is a crucial part of your decision making as you write a story. Examine your typical sentence structures and shake it up some!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Logo art by http://bonnieadamson.net/

After flirting with the idea of doing NaNoWriMo, I decided instead to do PiBoIdMo, or Picture Book Idea Month, the 30 days of November in which I am supposed to come up with 30 picture book ideas.

It makes sense. I am attending the SCBWI Eastern NY Falling Leaves Master Class retreat where five picture book editors will talk to 30 lucky people, including me. Editors attending are Kate Fletcher (Candlewick), Dianne Hess (Scholastic), Sylvie Frank (Holiday House), Marilyn Brigham (Marshall Cavendish) and Kelly Smith (Sterling). Since I had decided to devote part of my fall to picture books anyway, the PiBoIdMo is right up my alley. Focus my efforts. And the writing exercises we do at the retreat will hopefully add to my ideas list. Late next week, look for reports on the retreat.

Meanwhile, I am visiting the dentist this morning, so I’ll think about a tooth fairy story. Not.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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Official Release Date: PRAIRIE STORMS

Celebrate with me the release of my new picture book, PRAIRIE STORMS.

Here’s a new book trailer, which has a chant about the weather in each month for kids to learn. This is an adaptation of an 18th century poem.

Prairie Storms: A Chant of Months
Snowy, Flowy, Blowy,
Showery, Flowery, Bowery,
Whippy, Skippy, Nippy,
Breezy, Sneezy, Freezy.

If you can’t see the embedded video, click here to see the first trailer.

This is the second book trailer. Here’s the first.

If you can’t see the embedded video, click here to see the second trailer.

What do you think? Isn’t it exciting?

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Ours is a business of ideas: unique, fresh, high-concept, sweet, outstanding. Without a great idea, your story has little chance of flying in “today’s crowded market.” One new source of ideas is the curriculum that is taking shape around the Common Core State Standards. In the past two years, education reform has swept across the nation as many states adopted these new standards, and many are beginning implementation this year. It will be the face of education for the next decade.

Good bye, No Child Left Behind!

Hello, Common Core State Standards!

What Do New Education Standards Mean For Writers?

Our concern here isn’t the standards themselves. For that, you can read these articles from my sister site, commoncorestandards.com.

• History of National Standards: Where Did They Come From?
• Who Wrote the Common Core Standards
• Authors of the Common Core Standards
• 6 Shifts in Learning: CCSS Sytle
• FAQ: List of Common Core Required Texts
• Text Complexity: Choosing Exemplar Texts
• To find out what YOUR state is doing for the CCSS, find a link here to the State Department of Education for your state.
  States: Links to State Departments CCSS Standards

Important for us as writers, though, it to know what teachers are teaching and at what grade level. For this information, there are two sites you should know. First is corestandards.org which is the official site for the CCSS, and home of all the pdf versions of the standards themselves. Read these as you find time. The second is commoncore.org which is a non-profit organization, supported partially by the Gates Foundation. They have written curriculum maps, documents which give flesh to the CCSS by suggesting topics and units for every grade level; overall, the combined units should cover all the CCSS standards. These are often recommended by state department of educations, but they are NOT the official standards themselves. Still–they are often recommended, and that means, they are a good source for knowing what is being taught around the country at each grade level.

Here are links to each grade level’s curriculum maps. Have fun reading through these to see what is currently recommended. Use it as a prompt to jump-start age appropriate ideas. Of course, remember that picture books can take 2-5 years to be published and novels can take a couple years. So don’t write something just to jump on this new education bandwagon; but if you find inspiration here, you can be confident that some teacher will be looking for your story and will be more likely to buy it.

Links to the K-12 Curriculum Maps

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

YA for Dummies and Prairie Storms

What sounds does a ground hog make? An earless lizard? A burrowing owl? Six months ago, I had no idea!

August, 2011 Release

Written by Deborah Halverson, founder of the writer’s advice website DearEditor.com, it has great advice on writing and publishing a teen novel. Deborah edited young adult and children’s fiction with Harcourt Children’s Books before picking up a pen to write the award-winning teen novels Honk If You Hate Me and Big Mouth.

The book is filled with great features, including:

• tips for targeting an audience, finding an angle that’ll make the story stand out, and writing a killer hook
• an extensive chapter on self-marketing to help writers move boldly into the realm of self-promotion–including book trailers
• techniques and exercises to shape plot, create teen-friendly characters, develop a convincingly youthful voice, write natural dialogue, and use setting to illuminate characters and plot
• 13 National Book Award winners and finalists, Newbery medalists and honorees, and other award-winning luminaries sharing their insights
• self-editing tools to transform a first draft into a strong submission-ready final draft
• insider tips for finding the right agent and/or editor and preparing a stand-out submission package
• answers to common book contract questions
• advice on self-publishing for YA writers

Read more at DearEditor.com

Finding Audio for a Book Trailer

To anticipate the release of Prairie Storms and celebrate the release of Writing Young Adult Fiction for Dummies, I’m debuting the Prairie Storms book trailer here today.

As the author of The Book Trailer Manual, I had some simple ideas on where to find public domain sounds and inexpensive audio tracks.

Sound Track. First, I knew that I wanted a sound track to back up the animal sounds. Jeremy Doss, my nephew, is a talented film composer with experience in creating the musical moods needed to accompany and enhance images. A graduate of Film Score program an University of Southern California, he also writes music for video games and other uses.

We talked about what sort of music I needed and Jeremy was fantastic to work with. Contact him at jersam1995@sbcglobal.net

Animal Sounds – FREE. Second, I needed audio of the sounds made by each animal. Any time I need audio or video for animals in the United States, I start at the Fish and Wildlife Multimedia Library. The government agency provides public domain multimedia, free for public use. Here, I found great audio for the American Bison and the Bald Eagle. However, none of the other animals had sound tracks.

Animal Sounds – Inexpensive. My next stop was www.SoundDogs.com, a site which has a wide variety of audio clips. Amazingly, they had every other sound I needed, except the ground hog. For these clips, I looked for short audio clips with clear sounds of the animal involved. You can sort by the length of a clip and I was looking for the shortest possible: I knew I wanted the whole video about one minute in length, so I would only need a 4-5 second sound clip for any one animal. I searched and listened to clips and made decisions. One disappointment was that the earless lizard had no sound; indeed, most lizards don’t make any sounds. I finally decided to go with a clip of a lizard running on wood as the most likely option.

After I put all the sounds into the shopping cart, I was a bit afraid to look at the total. It was a pleasant surprise to see that I had only spent about $20.

Ask Permission from Private Party. Then, there was that pesky ground hog. Fortunately, I found www.hoghaven.com, a site specifically about ground hogs, and they had a dozen sound clips of ground hogs. I wrote the site owner, explained the project and asked permission to use one of the sounds. They were gracious enough to give permission. That gave me the last sound that I needed.

Creating the Book Trailer for Prairie Storms

With Kathleen Rietz’s (www.kathleenrietz.com) watercolor images from the Prairie Storm book and the sounds, I set to work. I use Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope) to edit my video. No, it’s not a free program like PhotoStory, it has lots of flexibility and options. I searched and searched for a program when I started doing book trailers, until I came to Vegas. Here’s what sold me on this program: they have extensive tutorials right at your fingertips, built into the main screen. The learning curve for this program was minimal compared to anything else I tried, an hour instead of four or five.

To create this trailer, I made some decisions:
The trailer would run about one minute.
With twelve animals that meant about 4 seconds per animal, with the remaining time going to the opening screen and credits.

I set up the program with markers every four seconds and added the images on one track, the animal sounds on a second and the sound track on a third. Then, I went through and added to a fourth track the text that appears on the video. Vegas has the capability to scan across an image or zoom in and out, so I adjusted this. Initially, the images were full page, but the text of the book interfered, so I zoomed in on each animal, then panned across to create movement. Static images are weaker than moving images in a trailer, you lose the viewer’s attention.

After previewing it a number of times and getting feedback, I took my husband’s suggestion to create a bit of a splash at the end with the book cover. After the American Bison at the end, there’s actually a half second of nothing except the music track. This is followed by a thunder clap and the front cover of the book. To find the right thunder clap, I went back to www.SoundDogs.com and searched through their extensive offering of storm sounds.

The video ends quickly with credits to the publisher, Sylvan Dell, the film composer Jeremy Doss and thanks to hoghaven.com for the groundhog sounds.

Working with a publisher, I was careful to run drafts of the video past the editor, publicity director and publisher. Jeremy Doss approved the trailer, as did Kathleen Rietz, the illustrator. When all approvals were in, I uploaded it to YouTube. And waited. It was ready early June, but I knew that I didn’t want to show it until after I spoke at the American Library Association, where the trailer would have its debut. And now, here’s the debut on this site:

*|YouTube:uaUirE0ed6Y|*

TEACHERS: If your school blocks video through your server, please email me (darcy at darcypattison dot com) for a copy of the file to show to your class.

AUTHORS: Need more on how-to create book trailers? See my sister site www.booktrailermanual.com

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Over at Playing by the Books, the UK blogger (bilingual Dutch/English), is talking about picture books. The UK Secretary for Education, Michael Gove has suggested that kids read at least 50 books a year.

Playing by the Books took up the challenge:

I approached six brilliant UK-based illustrators and asked them to contribute towards a list of books every child should be read. Tim Hopgood, James Mayhew, Jan Pieńkowski, Katie Cleminson, Viviane Schwarz and Clara Vulliamy all very gamely accepted my challenge of producing a list of 10 or so books each that they love.

The result is this post:
50+ picture books every child should be read – a non-prescriptive list for inspiration

In a follow-up, though, Playing by the Books realized that many of the books on the list were classics. She wondered what a list might look like if the titles were restricted to the last five years.

To help me in this quest I turned to this year’s winners of the Booktrust New Best Illustrators Award. These illustrators “represent the best rising talent in the field of illustration today, [they] demonstrate remarkable creative flair, artistic skill and boundless imagination in their work“, so who better to ask for some suggestions as to the best, fresh picture books?

Here’s the list of 49 recent, recommended books:
49 brilliant picture books from the past 5 years as chosen by award winning illustrators

Yes, these are UK books, but what a visual feast both these lists are. The short descriptions are instructive, too, in how to pitch a picture book.

What books, published in the last five years in the US, would YOU recommend?

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

We’ve done several 30-days series over the last few years. I’m considering topics for a couple “30 Days” series this year, probably March and October. What topics would you like to see? Plot, publicity, career, voice? Something else? Leave a comment, please, and let me know what interests you!

Newly updated 30 Days series

30 Days to a Stronger Picture Book

Favorite 30 Days series

• 30 Days to Stronger Scenes
• 30 Days to Stronger Characters
• 30 Days to a Stronger Novel

Other Popular Resources

• The Book Trailer Manual
• Novel Diagnosis Series
• Psychology of Revision
• Villains: 3 Part series

What other resource would you like next?

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Stop! Before you send out that picture book manuscript, cut it by at least one-third. Really. Make that revision.

Biggest Mistake in Picture Book Manuscripts

I recently read a picture book manuscript from a novice writer and it had the usual problem: too long.

In a picture book manuscript, every word counts, so you must test each and every word to see if it belongs there. Here are four places to cut:

• Repetitive words. Never, never repeat a word unless you absolutely must, or unless it adds to the story. Sure, when you write a first draft, you often repeat something by accident. But you should go through a picture book manuscript with a fine-toothed comb to make sure you’ve cut out any extras.
• Adjectives, Adverbs. Picture books need action; leave adjectives to the illustrator. Because it includes illustrations, you should only include the adjectives that make a difference. Grass is green. Duh. Only use adjective if, for example, your grass is purple.

  For adverbs, please replace them with a stronger verb.

  • The boy walked slowly.
  • The boy limped.
• Clauses, Prepositional Phrases. Leave out the extra commentary (unless it’s part of the mss’ voice).
  • Well, in the end, it was a day that pleased me greatly.
  • I enjoyed the day.

  Try rephrasing prepositional phrases by moving a word to an adjective position:

  • It was a day of joy.
  • It was a joyful day.
• Dialogue. Dialogue is unlike real speech; it’s compressed speech. Leave out the pleasantries and get to the heart of the conversation.

• Hello.
  Hello.
  Why are you so late? I was waiting and waiting, just sitting on this bench, waiting for you. Why are you so late?
  Well, I had a flat tire and I couldn’t get the lug nuts loose. So I had to wait until a policeman stopped. He was really nice, a big tall policeman and he was strong enough to loosen the bolts and finally I got the tire changed.
  Oh.
  Yes, well, I’m sorry I was so late.

• Hey, what’s up? Why so late?
  Sorry. I had a flat and couldn’t change it by myself. A cop stopped and helped and now, I’m here.

STOP! Cut Your Mss by 1/3. At Least!

Before you send out your mss, try to cut it by 1/3 without changing the story. Then try to cut another 50-100 words. Compare the before and after. If the story has changed (for the worse), you can add back a few words; but I’ll wager that the story will be much stronger with the revision.

While there are no hard and fast rules, picture books that run 500 words or less tend to sell better. For pre-school stories it’s a stricter limit than for school age (K-3).

Need more on how to write a children’s picture book? See our eBook, How to Write a Picture Book. Immediate download. $10.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win