I submitted my story FOR SHENANIGANS ONLY as an author/illustrator and was one of 25 entries chosen for the illustrator’s showcase.
The event itself has been a great experience, with or without the finalist result. I was paired with 6 other authors for a ranking group, where we all read through and critiqued 6 of each other’s manuscripts. I was also lucky enough to get a critique from past 3x finalist author/illustrator Ellen Seal. I loved the stories I was privileged to read, and the ranking process, and hope to see stories I critiqued get published soon.
The showcase goes live on March 25, I will be following up with a more in-depth recap of the experience once the dust settles!
One of the indoor activities my kids loved during the isolating years of the pandemic that we continue to do every so often is a movie night campout. Staying up late building pillow forts and watching monster movies without any mosquitos or hungry bears around is the best.
So I made a National Parks-style poster tribute to this simple bit of family fun.
One of the ways I brainstorm characters for my stories is to draw them over and over until I feel like I know them. My favorite original characters to draw are Noodle and Goofball, who appear in a few of my stories. They are toddler twins with different birthdays and ambitions to avoid bedtime and create shenanigans.
Goofball is the youngest, and the most rambunctious. He wears dinosaur pajamas, likes climbing things and identifies as a monster (especially when it is close to bedtime). He’s ready for adventures at a moment’s notice, but can be very sensitive sometimes. He is susceptible to joining in the precocious plots his sister concocts.
One of my goals is to make characters that wouldn’t be too hard for a child to draw.
Sharing a Procreate doodle video of my character Noodle.
She is a pre-school kid who gets a little overstimulated and diabolical before bedtime, so I was inspired by the manic characters in old sugary cereal commercials when I was designing her. Her hair is a spiky, like spines and horns on a monster dinosaur. Her face is all eyes and mouth to make her extra expressive.
For this doodle, I used Procreate, which records your drawings in a time-lapse video. I use a syrupy black ink brush for her line work, because I want the humor and cartoony expressiveness of old newspaper comic strip characters, and I color her in using bits of pink/orange felt and flowery blue & yellow fabric I scanned, to make her appear as if she has really comfy pajamas on and give her a children’s book quality.
Using real world textures for color was inspired by paper cutting illustrations in picture books like The Snowy Day, or Eric Carle’s tissue paper collages. Scanning textures and using them to color in my characters helps to make digital drawings feel more natural, I think. I offset the color slightly to give her a vintage printed look. Do you think she is ready for shenanigans?
On the first Thursday of each month, children’s book illustrators from around the world share illustrations across social media using the hashtag #KidLitArtPostcard.
Illustrator Gina Perry is kind enough to organize this event across many social media platforms.
Noodle (she has a real name, but her dad thinks this nickname suits her best) is a crafty, defiant young lady that appears in several of my stories, including INCREDIBLY BORING STORIES, FOR SHENANIGANS ONLY (where she takes center stage), HEY! THEY HAVE ZIPPERS, THE TICKLE FROM OUTER SPACE and others stories still to come. She identifies with draculas (all vampires are called draculas as far as she is concerned) and plans on world domination someday. She is opposed to early bedtimes, and enlists her twin brother Goofball in all sorts of shenanigans.
With X‘s tailspin into an unusable platform, I have really taken to Bluesky, where I am finding the most welcoming community I’ve encountered online in many years. It is definitely worth committing to build a presence there. I covered navigating Bluesky’s #kidlit community in my previous post, and wanted to follow up by highlighting a great tool that helps make my Bluesky experience better – mute lists. My first few days on Bluesky were a shotgun blast of oddball posts and NSFW images until I found feeds that suited my interests, followed more users, and discovered how to remove content that I has no interest in seeing.
Users are creating lists that you can subscribe to which will mute offensive accounts. Bluesky explains that “muting prevents you from seeing any notifications or top-level posts from an account. If they reply to a thread, you’ll see a section that says “Post from an account you muted” with an option to show the post. The account will not know that they have been muted.” These lists are curated by the individuals that created them, so there is an element of trust involved that the lists are maintained and vetted to follow through on their promise. With over 2 million users, there is definitely a lot to keep up with, but subscribing to these mute lists has made my Bluesky experience a more friendly one.
When you visit a list and click “subscribe,” you are now given the option to either mute all accounts on the list, or block them completely – you can also block each offensive account you may encounter individually, and report posts by clicking on the three-dot menu. If you wish, you can report an entire account by visiting a user profile and clicking the three-dot menu there, or add users to a mute list of your own and subscribe to that. To set up a mute list, go to “Moderation” and then hit “Moderation Lists.” There you can add “+New.” To populate it, go to a user’s profile, click the three-dot menu, and click “Add to lists.”
Below are some of the mute lists that I’ve subscribed to. There is overlap on many of the accounts each list blocks, but that does not create an issue. I’ll revisit this post and add more to this list as time goes on, I am sure. If you know of any useful mute lists beyond what I have listed below, please let me know.
Bluesky has been emerging as the easiest and most user-friendly Twitter alternative, but it is still in its early stages, and not exactly like Twitter. New users migrating over there might not know what to do once they sign in, so I thought I would share some information that would be helpful for everyone looking to connect with other kidlit types. And no invite is needed anymore!
I’ve been happy watching the kidlit community grow on Bluesky, there are both new people as well as people I’ve been following on other platforms who are regrouping. It is refreshing to interact and have actual conversations – something that has become hard to find elsewhere. The bot followers and AI/bitcoin ads are not welcome. My stats on recent posts on X/Twitter have shown that at best, about 3.5% of followers are seeing my posts – Bluesky is definitely reaching a more interested and positive group of like-minded people.
Hashtags like #kidlit have become clickable (and they are easy to follow via the wonderful 3rd party app deck.blue, which is akin to Tweetdeck), but there are lists and feeds that users are building that are extremely helpful.
Clicking each link on Kate’s list to connect to people is tedious work, so I created a custom feed that is aggregating kidlit-related users, using Kate’s Google doc as a springboard:
If you follow this feed, you can see the most recent posts of all active kidlit-related users on the list over the past 7 days – it is a great way to see who is active and what they are talking about – and not necessarily just kidlit business. Like/follow the feed, pin it for easy access from your home tab, and get to know everyone! It’s like a kidlit cocktail party.
Users are creating feeds to aggregate posts containing certain keywords, like #kidlit and #kidlitart – here are a few:
#kidlitchat has started up on Bluesky and is meeting up every Tuesday night at 9ET – it’s easy to follow along if you search “#kidlitchat” or follow this feed. Even better, use deck.blue to participate – it is by far the best way to join a live chat on BlueSky.
The feeds tend to lag a little for real-time conversations, so using the search function to refresh and be up to date works best for now.
#kidlitartpostcard happens the 1st Thursday of every month, with illustrators sharing new art. This feed aggregates the posts for 3 days, ranked by number of likes.
Skybrarian – Bluesky librarians and fellow GLAM travelers.
Picturebook – Aggregating posts that mention “picturebook.”
Author/Illustrator – Aggregates posts that mention author/illustrator keywords.
SCBWI – Aggregates post that mention SCBWI and Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators
#amquerying #kidlit – Aggregates posts that mention both the #amquerying AND #kidlit hashtags
Debbie Ohi has been putting the work in to build kidlit-related lists, she posted them here. She is on a mission! Follow her and take advantage of her resources.
These are a few of her lists:
Kidlit/YA Editors – Kidlit & YA editors & editorial assts who work for traditional publishing houses.
KidLit/YA Podcasters – Podcasters, YouTubers etc who talk about kidlit & YA books.
Kidlit/YA Agents – Agents who have repped YA and/or kidlit creators.
K12 Educators/Librarians – K-12 educators and librarians who work with young people in schools and libraries.
If you want to create your own feed, Kellie Nicely has posted a step-by-step guide with screenshots on “How to make your own Art Feed” and “How to make a Pinned Post.”
With Twitter failing, the best thing any of us can do to rebuild is to gather people – the platform will grow and change to suit our needs if there are enough of us congregating and putting in the effort to connect. If you need an invite code, there are many of us in the kidlit community who are able to get you one. Reach out and we will help. Ask educators and librarians you know if they are migrating to Bluesky, too. If they are posting on X/Twitter, it is increasingly a waste of time and energy:
