My Next Big Thing

"The Next Big Thing" is a global blog tour to showcase authors and illustrators and their current work. It's a small art world after all, right? I was tagged by my amazing art friend and Mary Uhles. The art buddies whom I'm tagging to continue the blog tour are the talented Bryan Beus, Jennifer Eichelberger, and David Habben. I will update the links after they post around the 20th of June.

I thought I'd post about a Picture Book that I've been working off and on, in between freelancing, and chasing after toddlers, etc. So brace yourself for some good old fashioned Q & A:  

1) What is the working title of your next book? 

The Messy Bed. 

Final design & color palette still TBD :)

2. Where did the idea for the book come from? 

As a kid I was not fond of cleaning my room. I had better things to do really. Trees to climb, mud puddles to jump into, hills to roll down. My schedule was packed, so I did not want to waste any time on cleaning my room. When my mom insisted I clean it (the audacity!) I just shoved it under my bed,  made up my bed really nice, and pulled the bed skirt down really low. So I've been thinking, for quite sometime now, what would my room have looked like If I were a child hoarder?

3) In what genre does your book fall? 

Picture book.


4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie version of the book?
Easy peasy. Matilda McBean would be the actress who played the 1970's Veruca Salt from 'Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory' (Julie Dawn Cole, stuck in a time warp of course), and my sweet dog RADAR would do a killer job at being Matilda's concerned companion.     

5) What is a one sentence synopsis of your book?

Matilda McBean's mom keeps asking her to clean under her bed, but it's boring and stinky, and doing nothing about it is so much better than doing something... right?

This is a thumbnail for the book dummy, but if you squint your eyes really hard you can see the mess that Matilda shoves under her bed eventually lifts the bed off the floor.

6) Who is publishing your book?

I've got to finish the dummy, and shop it around.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I think a half hour, but I am certainly not on my first draft. Writing in verse is, shall we say... tricky. You can't just change a few words here and there. It's a whole stanza and then it's the whole story.

This sweet little English girl is reading one of my earlier drafts to the story. (Unfortunately the video is no longer on the web.)

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? 

I can't think of a specific book, but some of my literary heroes are Roald Dahl (my absolute favorite), and Shel Silverstein. Both wrote some wonderfully dark stories, and I always loved that as a kid. 





9) Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

To my mom's chagrin... me.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

The sheer absurdity of it all.


Well, thanks for the visit friends, and thanks for all the support I've already received on my "Next Big Thing!"