Blog Archives - Centipede Dragon

Who's a DUMMY?

5/29/2015

Before I get to a thought-provoking review I received recently, I want to talk about another step in producing a children’s book: making a dummy.

A what?

Take half as many sheets of paper as the number of pages for your book, stack them, fold them in half, and staple at the fold.

Now with this mock book, divide your text over the pages. And guess what? You have a dummy!

We have accomplished a lot more than you think. A dummy helps us work out the pacing of the action in the book, so that all the action isn't bunched up in 4 pages of a 32-paged book. Dummys also give us a sense of where we can create suspense and tension, to keep the reader turning the pages.

You likely begin your story with setting the scene and introducing your characters. Then you introduce a problem. Then the problem comes to a crisis point. Then there’s the “A-HA!” moment where the problem is resolved, and finally, there’s the wrap-up. This general storyline arc is like a bell-curve of action, but it doesn’t mean that all action takes place at the top of the curve. The dummy helps clarify how changing the placement of information can have a great effect on the storytelling.

Here’s my first formal dummy made in Feb 2012, where I also started generating images to go with the words that were on that page. As you can see, A LOT changed in terms of location of imagery within the book, but what else can you see that I’m working out with this dummy?

What's YOUR review?

5/22/2015

Centipede Dragon facial expressions

At this point in our journey, I just want to do a check-in with my readers! For those of you who have purchased and/or read the book, WHAT DO YOU THINK? Did you like the story and the characters? Did you find Centipede Dragon too passive, or didn’t understand his motivations for helping others? Did you find Ariel a strong role model for your daughter? How about Ben to your son? Would you like to see more cheekiness in the animals? What about the illustrations? Do you like the stylized graphics, or not? How about the color palette?

I would be very grateful for any feedback, and if you have purchased a book. If your purchased on Amazon.com, please leave a review there, or, feel free to contact me using the "Contact" page on this site. And thank you for your support!

Role models

5/19/2015

Brian Lies Bats in the Band

Brian Lies signature

It's come to my attention that many aspiring children's book authors/illustrators are in denial about the "public life" aspect of selling books. Regardless of whether you are traditionally- or self-published, this responsibility rests squarely on your shoulders, and can make or break your book. It's not easy to schedule, plan for, advertise and execute each presentation. They are vital and exhausting, and the time consumption leaves me to wonder how I can get the next book written and illustrated as I promote my first book.

Politics and Prose in DC was hosting a presentation with Mr. Brian Lies, a children's book illustrator/author most notably known for his "Bats at the ____" series. Mr Lies was in town for the Annual National Book Festival, gave a fantastic presentation where he talked about how the "Bats" books came about, revealed secret "Easter eggs" within the book, showed original art, present and past (one he did in the 2nd grade, spelling errors and all), and got dared by a child to pick up his over-sized, over 30-lb book that he had made especially for presentation purposes.

Not many showed up for an 11am Sunday presentation, but he still sold a number of books that he frankly may not have (including one to me, and I was NOT planning on buying one). Most importantly, the experience reassured me that it doesn't really matter how famous you are, you STILL might not get a huge audience. You will still have to talk over children and chaos, and you will still have a lot of prep, set-up and breakdown. After everything was over, I watched as he, his wife and one or two others loaded his over-sized book and his musical instrument prop (which was bigger than a bicycle) into a truck. I'm guessing it took at least a half-hour AFTER a half-hour presentation, to accomplish this. He had also been there at least 15 minutes prior to presentation time signing books, so in all, likely had spent at least 1.5 hours NOT presenting. If you factor in travel time, you're frankly looking at 3 hours per 1/2 hour presentation, PLUS prep. time.

As an aspiring author, it is important to see these presentations to get a sense of what authors ARE doing to promote their books. Do they talk about from where their ideas came? Do they draw during their presentation? Do they engage the children in a brainstorm-writing exercise? What are they doing to convince the kids and the parents to BUY their books?

Now, what would YOU do if you were presenting?

What's in a Name?

5/15/2015

Did anyone notice that my maiden name, Alice Y. Chen, is on the cover of the book? Anyone do a double take?

Along with the 2,479 (-ish) other decisions to be made in the creation, production and publication of a book, my name also became a significant decision. I started this book when I was Alice Y. Chen in 2005. I finished this book in 2012, years after I got married.

Why are names important? How important is it to attribute the work one way or the other? I chose to take my husband’s name to “be” a part of his family, but I included my maiden name in my legal name, so that I’d still have that identity associated with me.

So, why else are names important?

The answer for me surprisingly, is LEGACY.

I have thought about what I will leave behind, on behalf of the family who raised me. All of my father’s male siblings had daughters. So I realized that this generation may see the end of my father’s surname, and that made me a bit sad.

So here is my humble “legacy” to my family, a crazy idea in the form of a children’s book!

More feedback, AND still a good thing

5/12/2015

Although I didn't make the changes that either Annika nor Anthony requested, it's important to hear WHAT confuses your target audience, so that you have the chance to figure out how to address it, or, make the choice to not address it and accept the consequences. Here are a couple questions I got that had more to do with confusion over the artistic style than the story itself:

Q: Audre was confused when on page 4-5, all the objects are drawn in blue, while the rest of the images in the book are in full color.
A: This particular image was a stylistic (and unfortunately confusing) way to introduce the reader to the peaceful, quiet village that Centipede Dragon lives nearby. But I wanted the village to recede into the background in order to draw your eye to the upper left and right corners where Centipede Dragon first appears in full color, and then in the upper right corner, where he’s camouflaging himself.

Q: From August on page 10, why does the cord goes into the bubble?
A: You found one of my “Easter eggs,” where I connect what’s really happening in the scene to what Ben is imagining. It was meant to be a “sight gag” for adults.

There were suggestions I did take, honestly, like August's, where I put Ben in this scene and made the dream bubbles come from his head, to signify that the shearing sheep was HIS imagination. Also, another kindergartner asked that the cursive in the "worries" pages be removed, because kids are no longer taught to write in cursive. Never would've thought that!

And, the feedback over the kids' favorite part of the book was "...when the kids helped the centipede dragon to get better." Music to my ears!

Feedback is a good thing!

5/8/2015

I want to get back to the importance of feedback from your target audience. I've spoken about how you need to be aware of the parents' impressions of your book, because they are the ones after all who will buy your book. But the target audience feedback is critical, because you are writing and illustrating a book that is meant to be understood by those kids. And if they don't understand your book, they won't even bother to pick it up for the parents to see. So, make sure they get how brilliant your book is. And absorb and address what they say about it.

Here are 2 more brilliant pictures from those kindergartners from my 2013 visit. Keep in mind that the children saw a different version of the book that is published, so hopefully, my changes have mitigated the issues they pointed out.

And here are my answers!

– Q: From Annika, (on page 10), are the sheep dreaming to shear themselves so that they can make the food that Ariel dreams about?
A: I see why this is confusing, because the threads that make up Ariel’s imaginary worries are drawn in the same color and thickness of line that comes from the sheep’s sheared wool! I’m sorry for the confusion, but no, the shaving sheep in the bubble is a part of Ben’s imagination; Ben’s thinking of any number of impossible things that can happen since the impossibility of his sheep mysteriously reappearing after disappearing happened.

– Q: Anthony wanted me to color in ALL the empty spaces with the humans.
A: Anthony, YOU certainly do a great job coloring in all the spaces, but I like to keep the empty spaces in order to be able to show off the line details in the art! Were it all filled in, you couldn’t see the lines.

May is Asian American Heritage Month!

5/5/2015

Lee and Low Books We Need Diverse Books campaign, diversity gap in children's books

Copyright Lee and Low Books.

Remember my Centipede Dragon post regarding my decision (at the brilliant and gentle insistence of my librarian friend) to finally make the kids Asian in my book? I stated as fact that "children's books featuring minority kids don't sell," and pretty much didn't go any further; my attempt to tiptoe around the flash-point topic of race. In case you want to delve a bit deeper, All Things Considered did great reporting about this topic almost a year ago:
http://wamu.org/programs/all_things_considered/14/08/20/to_achieve_diversity_in_publishing_a_difficult_dialogue_beats_silence

It's 8.5 minutes long, and probably the most honest discussion I've heard in mass media about why diversity in children's books has not yet taken hold.

All Things Considered then interviewed a Vermont bookstore owner who advocated activism for diversity in books:
http://wamu.org/programs/all_things_considered/14/08/21/how_to_sell_diverse_books_a_bookstore_owners_advice

This one’s about 6 minutes long. This too is a very level-headed response to what could be a hot-button topic, from a pretty proactive book seller!

But I hope these 15 minutes will give a great background to what this surging movement to get more diverse books published is about, and what diversity really means, as Ms. Bluemle defines it:

Diversity means …”[ ] the book must feature a main character of color in a story that is not driven by racial issues. So mainstream stories of kids having all kinds of adventures and different genres of literature.”

To go back in history, NPR first reported about this on June 2, 2014: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/06/02/318098926/-weneeddiversebooks-campaign-comes-to-inaugural-bookcon

To leave you with a visual sense of why this “weneeddiversebooks” movement came about, I’ll leave you with this graphic from: http://blog.leeandlow.com/2013/06/17/why-hasnt-the-number-of-multicultural-books-increased-in-eighteen-years/

Creating pictures that say something.

5/1/2015

Alice Y Chen childhood art, Bumblebee, 1976-77

I have to re-post this picture because I want to dissect out the traits of this drawing style that have influenced/predominated my overall artistic sense. What I want to point out here is the repetitive pattern, how the connections between objects are made, and how very graphic, iconographic, and FLAT, this inherent style of mine is. The echoing stripes on the bees and the dots of the eyes are all working to create visual balance and harmony, while visual interest is brought about by all those parallel stripes. Bright bursts of green and blue are also visually balanced throughout to dispel any discordance the color fields themselves may introduce. These are traits that in general many of us appreciate in art. But these traits have literally dominated my art.

I used to think that I drew the art for Centipede Dragon in this manner because I can't draw any better. But as I was clearing out my old artwork from my parents’ house, every time I picked up a piece, I noticed that this style was persistent throughout the years of learning 1- and 2- point perspective, contour drawing, and core and cast shadows.

I know children start out drawing in this very flat manner anyway, but I seem to prefer drawing this way. Not that "Glomerulus" from the previous post wasn't satisfying, especially at 3am in the morning when I was painting the highlights on all those individual cells. But I impart of piece of me into pieces like "Bumblebee, circa 1976-77," whereas with "Glomerulus," my job is NOT to do so. And maybe that's the ultimate reason why one type of style is more suited to me than another.