Children's Books

When I was in the sixth grade I was introduced to the world of children’s books. That is to say, I met someone who wrote and illustrated books, Jasper Tomkins.

The day I met Jasper Tomkins was the day I knew that I wanted to write and illustrate children’s books for a living. Now to an eleven year old I assumed I’d be able to be published while in middle or high school and be well on my way to a satisfying career choice. As you can guess, that never happened. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I wrote a children’s book or drew a picture of any of the many characters I’ve created over the years. I blame a couple things for this. First, I used to be pretty bad at taking criticism, which now that I’m older am way more appreciative of it. Second, I’m too much of a control freak.

While in high school I did a lot of research into the world of publishing children’s books and by that time young adult novels too. I even submitted a few of my books for review, which of course came back with rejection letters. I still have two of those letters because they are fine examples of constructive criticism, explaining their reasons why they felt it was not publishable and what I could do to bring them up to par with industry standards. And so I began working on both the young adult novel and the illustrated children’s book I’d sent in, finished my edits, rewrites and finalizations and tucked them away in a corner. By this time I’d read too many horror stories of authors losing the rights to their own characters to the publishing company. It was time to find an alternate route… self publishing.

I’ve been toying with the idea of starting my own publishing company since 1999. Funnily, I was unemployed then too. Okay, so not necessarily “funny-ha-ha” but interestingly connective nonetheless. However, one of my main problems is that I’m most creative when I don’t have time to be creative, like really busy with work or school or home improvement projects or sleeping, and least creative when I’ve got nothing to do. Whoever says God doesn’t have a sense of humor surely must not see the irony in the everyday. Anyway, so while self publishing is certainly more costly to the author, if you own the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) you are the publisher and therefore own the rights to your own work. Anybody who tells you different is lying. Now if only I had a way to pay for this option?

Alas, even when I was saving up to start my own publishing company while working at Crapmart, I knew that it would be a hard-fought battle. How could I justify spending money on a venture I couldn’t be certain would be at all profitable or, at the very least, be able to break even on? I guess this all breaks down to risk, and I’m not much of a risk taker. Again, it comes down to being a control freak. I like to know what the outcome is going to be when I step into a situation, I don’t like surprises and when it comes to money I’m quite frugal. Growing up poor will do that to you, but it also prepares you for how to make the most of the money you have when you’re older and find yourself in a craptastic situation.

And so with all this in mind, and my realization that perhaps I’m not the most savvy of business people, I’ve decided to turn a few of my children’s books into real books. Now, years ago I had a couple of them printed into photos and tucked the pictures into a small 4 x 6 inch 24 page photo album, which was great for what it was. But with today’s technology creating photo books with the look and feel of real books is much more cost effective than even a few years ago. I’m thinking instead of trying to find books for the kids for Christmas presents, I’m going to instead give them books I made and have them printed at Costco into soft cover photo books. Albeit, while I was in high school when I wrote and illustrated them, I feel it is some of my best work.

I don’t want to think that I peaked at seventeen, and someday soon perhaps my dream of becoming a published author will come true, so I’ll be patient. I mean, I have written a few historical biographical articles that were published, so technically I am a published author, but my passion is writing for kids and teens. Maybe I’ll find a way. Maybe I’ll save some money and buy an ISBN or ten. Or maybe I should just grow a pair, take the risk and follow through with something for once in my life.

North Pole Village

For as long as I’ve known my partner he has had pieces for Department 56’s North Pole Village. I finally convinced him we needed to put them out this year.

 

While we haven’t added to the collection in some years now as the newer pieces lack the charm and hand painted characteristics of the older ones, we do have quite an impressive village. I remember one year, because it was so large, we decided to try to display them all together on a long table. The problem with that was that they all got lost in one another and you were unable to appreciate them. The next year I made inserts for our multimedia towers’s top two cubbies out of blue and white poster board and hand stamped falling snow onto the dark blue to create a wintery background, which we used for a couple years before storing away. The last time we had any pieces displayed was in 2006, and at that was only seven buildings.

And so with all the crap coming down in our household this Christmastime, I felt, after spouting that I was cancelling Christmas because of my Scrooge-like, bah-humbug attitude, that I didn’t want our last Christmas in this house to be a bad one. So I decorated the tree and house and made the suggestion (not so subtly on this blog) that I would convince my partner we should put out the North Pole Village. After it was all set up, he’s glad I did.

Shepherds and Sheepdonkeys

Today is the day of our church’s annual Children’s Christmas Pageant. Today is the day I get to turn little children into Shepherds and Sheepdonkeys.

It seems without fail that I am in charge of making sure all the little munchkins in our church are dressed to play their parts in the annual Children’s Christmas Pageant again this year, which is great, because I love costumes. Halloween is seriously my favorite time of year for that reason. However, trying to dress so many kids requires special talents, ones that I unfortunately do not behold. That is why this year I will employ the mad skills of parents to dress their own kids. Why? Because while shepherds and angels are pretty easy to manage as we give those parts to the older kids, preschoolers are animals in more sense than one. Last year, for instance, one particular little girl wanted to be a sheep, and was dressed accordingly… until she saw the donkey hat that was for the donkey costumes and she unceremoniously threw the sheep hat from her head and replaced it with the donkey. Instead of arguing my point that such creatures simply don’t exist, I christened her the special Sheepdonkey.

Children’s pageants are a time for kids to shine, and if some of them want to be kids, complete with their wild imaginations and sometimes inappropriate but innocent sense of humor, why not let them? I mean, so what if last year one of the shepherds decided to sit in the Baby Jesus’s manger after getting up on stage? Pick your battles where you can, but if a kid is just being a kid and not causing themselves or others harm or annoying me to no end or asking me silly questions just to get me to talk to them during a particular concert because they don’t want to be there anymore and I ask them if they ever stop talking and they say no, let them.

Childhood is a time for kids to learn how to be good adults, just don’t try to rush them into adulthood too soon. You’ll have plenty of time to have adult conversations and expectations after they grow up. After all, childhood is such a short stretch in a person’s life. So I say if we have another sheepdonkey this year, I’m okay with that and everyone else should be too.

Ode to Lucky Bamboo

Oh, Bamboo
‘Tis my ode to thee
If only you were
Truly Lucky

Perhaps then I’d have a job
And money in the banks
And not be going through foreclosure
This Christmas time, so thanks

For nothing, that is
For the only lucky you’ve wrought
Is bad luck and for that
I thank you not

And so with your death
I bid to thee a farewell and adieu
But don’t think I will ever
Shed a tear for you

p.s. – I’m keeping your vase, for it has a frog on it and I like frogs.

p.p.s. – I suck at poetry, which is why I wrote a poem for my “lucky” bamboo’s death.

Rash Decisions

I may have gone off a bit yesterday and threatened to cancel Christmas this year. Okay, so I did, but after a few hours I calmed down, plugged the tree back in and started decorating.

 Sometimes circumstances in life cause us to become quite irrational in our decision making. Albeit, these are usually during times of great distress and therefore not totally outside the realm of possibility that a rash decision will be declared. However, a little perspective on our situation and a little time to calm the frak down, I was able to see that by cancelling Christmas the last year we are in our home would just be silly. Why wouldn’t we celebrate one more time here? I mean, who knows if our next living situation will allow us the freedom to decorate as much as we like during the holidays, or if we’ll even be able to keep most of our decorations when we move.

So with the tree plugged back in and naked but lit, I pulled three of the ornament containers out of the garage and started tackling the job of decorating the tree. I figured I’d put up all of our hand painted glass ornaments up as well as our collection of character ornaments and some of my childhood ones too, while leaving the Star Trek ship ornaments for my partner to put on if he so desired. After he got home from work and saw the tree, he said he was glad I didn’t pack it away and that I’d started decorating it because after a little time to think about it he came to the same conclusion as I… we were reacting to crappy news.

I wonder if there is any hope of being able to convince my partner that we should also set up as many pieces of our Department 56 North Pole Village today after I get home from a job interview? Perhaps. I suppose I should also tackle getting some presents under the tree to keep our cat from using the tree skirt as a bed or hiding place as she did last night while howling like she was being attacked because our Shelf Elf fell from the valance.

Bah-Humbug

There are no Christmas decorations up. I even went so far as to unplug the tree we set up already because I’m no long in the Christmas spirit.

After coming home from dropping off my resume and filling out an application for a veterinary receptionist position I was informed about, my partner and I received not one, not two, but three certified letters from the bank to inform us of our default on the mortgage and that we are in foreclosure. My partner then spent over an hour talking to various people who all have no idea what is going on and can’t answer simple questions like where the money we were sending them and they were cashing was actually going if not towards our mortgage. One person actually transferred him to a voicemail box because she was apparently tired of “helping” him. One person was able to tell us that our loan modification was denied back in September which was news to us since we’d been in contact with the person helping us with that up until late October. And yet another person was actually able to tell us where the payments were going and explain quite a few details.

Why is it that you have to jump through so many hoops just to get a straight answer from corporations these days? Are they simply so large the right hand really has no idea what the left hand is doing? A trip to a local branch practically confirmed that. My partner asked if there was somebody who could verify we had all of our documents in order this time around and the customer service person brought out the branch manager to explain that nobody in the branch is knowledgeable in home loan modifications and that the people on the other end of the phone simply were not prepared for the current predicament. She also told us it is, plain and simple, utter chaos right now and that from what she has heard from other homeowners is that going to a Homeowner Center and talking face-to-face with somebody will get you much further than dealing with anybody over the phone, and that the closest one is in Seattle.

With the insane hurdles and the fact that yet again I’m unemployed, I don’t even know if going through the process again will be worth it. But according to the last person my partner talked to on the phone simply keeping in contact and constantly asking, “What else do you need?” will, at the very least, show that we are still interested in finding a way to keep the house… even if right now we are looking into packing up and moving into an apartment and leaving everything we’ve put into this house to make it a home behind.

So I’m seriously considering cancelling Christmas in our house. I’m not in the mood, and I can’t get over the anger, frustration and guilt I have over causing the situation we are currently in. My partner said he is tired of the stress of the uncertain outcome of our situation and simply wants to just close this chapter of our life and move on. As much as I hate to admit it, he’s right about that stress, which has been eating away at me for far too long. But my problem is also the stress of having to move, relocate the chickens, go through all of our stuff to find out what we want to keep and what we have to get rid of, and how in the world am I going to keep what little sanity I have left while living in an apartment again, assuming we can find one that will allow us to have both a cat and a Great Dane. It almost seems appropriate now that our lucky bamboo is dying as our luck is running out. Bah-humbug.

Christmas Decorating

Instead of being in a humbug mood due to the crappiness of our situation, I’m planning on getting as much Christmas decorating done as I can today. We already unboxed the tree and plugged it in.

I know that many people prefer “live” trees (also known as dead trees since they’ve been cut down) but after years of being unable to find fresh cut trees to our liking we finally decided to go the fake tree route and haven’t returned since. Of course, the best time to buy a fake tree is right after Christmas, which is when I purchased our current one after it was 75% off. Yes, that meant that we wouldn’t be able to set it up until the following year, but we also saved an assload of money by going this route. More than likely it will be decorated with its customary blend of glass and Star Trek ornaments.

The stockings will be hung, the valences dressed in foliage and décor and the wreath on the front door. I’m uncertain what else we’ll do, but I’m looking forward to listening to Christmas music from our replica Crosley radio while decorating. And perhaps if I get really ambitious, I’ll start putting together my Christmas Quilt.