#childrensbookswriting

[carriejonesbooks]

Here’s our biggest tip for beginning writers. Ask yourself this question:

What makes a story memorable?

It’s change. It’s how the hero of the story enters that story with something broken inside them. All the things that have happened before your story starts – the back story – has set up the hero needing to achieve something or needing to change something inside of themselves.

ET was a movie about an alien, but the reason it was so amazing was because it was a movie about a family in pain, a family that needed to believe in magic and love again. ET gave them that.

So, when you’re writing your book, think about the backstory of your character, what it is that put her/him/them in this place and what they need to do to change themselves or their world.

That’s what the heart of a story is.

That’s what makes it memorable. The internal change.

  Dog Tip for Life

Don’t be afraid to evolve. New places, new experiences, new life paths, are all ways to become something and someone better.

  Writing Tips of the Pod

Have Fun – Don’t write unless you love it or can’t live without it

Remember That Your Characters and Their Journeys Matter

Cut out Extra Scenes

Don’t Try to Write Like Anyone Else

Edit Like A God – Cast out all that doesn’t belong

Don’t Worry About Being Successful – Worry about the story.

SHOUT OUT

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website.Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.

  WRITING NEWS

I’m heading to Montreal this week and the Houston and Virginia Beach pretty soon to promote my picture book biography of Moe Berg. It’s called The Spy Who Played Baseball. 

And I’ll be in Freeport, Maine September 28 as part of a Nerdy Evening of Kidlit writers!

ENHANCED, the follow-up to FLYING is here! And it’s out of this world.

  Flying

The last TIME STOPPERS BOOK is out and I love it. You should buy it.

How to Get Signed Copies: 

If you would like to purchase signed copies of my books, you can do so through the awesome Sherman’s Book Store in Bar Harbor, Maine or the amazing Briar Patch. The books are also available online at places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

For signed copies – email barharbor@shermans.com for Sherman’s or email info@briarpatchbooks.comand let them know the titles in which you are interested. There’s sometimes a waiting list, but they are the best option. Plus, you’re supporting an adorable local bookstore run by some really wonderful humans. But here’s the Amazon link, too!

Art Stuff

You can buy prints of my art here. Thank you so much for supporting my books and me. I hope you have an amazing day.

What Makes A Story Memorable; Tips for Beginning Writers. Here's our biggest tip for beginning writers. Ask yourself this question:

[rowellpublishing]

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Children's Short Stories: 10 Illustrated short stories for inspiring young minds Kindle Edition by Jessica Fairchild This book provides 10 beautifully illustrated simple stories for children. Each can be read to the child within 5 minutes, allowing a moment to connect with the child and discuss with the messages within the story. Aimed at inspiring and cultivating young minds, through simple stories, simple values and morals of love, friendship, strength in adversity. These stories have been set classically, away from the modern world of technology, and aims to appeal to people with children all across the global. Buy the book here: https://amzn.to/2Z4PVa7 #childrensbooks #childrensbookillustration #childrensbookswriter #book #childrenreading #books #readers https://www.instagram.com/p/CLKEIbkAFiE/?igshid=14wnxuryg1x09

[carriejonesbooks]

Be the Flamingo of Change, Writers. Kindness Matters.

Be the Flamingo of Change, Writers. Kindness Matters.

There’s this Buzzfeed article, or Listicle, that gives moments where people were kind to strangers. Gasp! I know, right? Kind to actual strangers?  And we talk about this in our podcast, but it’s also kind of a silly concept as if there are only “21 moments” where this happens, or as if it isn’t sometimes easier to be kind to strangers rather than to the people who torture you daily aka your…

[carriejonesbooks]

Writer Sara Zarr once gave a brilliant speech about how it is the process of writing that should give you the love feeling, not if you make it on a bestseller list or get a Printz Award – Because honestly, they only give one of those out a year, so the odds of getting one is pretty rare.

I was okay with that, sort of, because I LOVE THE PROCESS OF WRITING.

But, let’s face it: Even though I’m not a perfectionist, I am a goal-oriented writer and human. So, I’m going to share my top five writing goals and life goals and if you could please, please share yours in the comments? That would make me ridiculously happy.

 This is Gabby, Carrie’s dog, asking you to please do this. Carrie gives more treats when she is happy. 

Warning: My goals are weird. They aren’t the nice MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE or BE A GOOD PERSON goals cause those are sort of givens, right? Right. (I love when I answer myself).

Five WRITING GOALS (also known as “I will feel successful if this happens” goals):

1. To meet Chris Evans and not have him pepper spray me but be like, “Hey, Carrie. You would look good in a tiara. Your dogs are so cute. Let’s make your book Girl, Hero into a movie.” 2. To write a really good poem that I can actually memorize myself. This is a big deal because I can never remember my own poems but I can ramble off Anne Sexton poems like a wild woman. 3. To actually have a rock group make a song about my book that isn’t a parody. Weird Al and SNL skits do not count. It has to be cool and not satire…. Like THE ALARM did with Stephen King’s THE STAND. Do you not love their 1980s hair? Peter Gabriel also wrote a song based on an Anne Sexton poem.

The hair is awesome sauce. You know it is! 

4. To go on book tour in Europe because …. um… .EUROPE! There are croissants there. Real croissants. Not supermarket kind. Plus, I am sort of in love with all my European fans/readers. 5. To be one of those cool writer people who makes enough money to buy a second home someplace warm where you do not have to shovel snow. Or, um, just have someone update the Wikipedia entry on me so it’s accurate. It’s not currently accurate, but I feel weird going in there and fixing it myself.

FIVE CONCRETE LIFE GOALS (also known as “This isn’t a bucket list because I’m not dying soon” goals): 1. To not fall in the slushy grocery store parking lot or get hit by a car for two years in a row. Cars tend to hit me, luckily this is always at super low speeds and in parking lots. 2. To not go bankrupt because that would be poopy. But honestly? Not end of the world. 3. To sing karaoke because even though I used to get PAID to sing, I still cannot do karaoke. 4. To be able to say things like, “Yes, my books are bestsellers” and not feel like a noodle, but strong and confident. 5.  To be in a Dr. Who episode because I am a geek like that. And she is cute. Or just having a teleport would be okay.

DO GOOD WEDNESDAY

So, I’ve been spending this past week amplifying the fact that the Abbe Museum’s Indian Market  is happening in my town (Bar Harbor) this week from May 18-20. It’s our first one. There will be 70 artists and performers. There will be a film festival. There will be comedians at the Criterion Theatre.

Why have I been so incessant about this?

There are a couple of reasons.

I’m super pumped about the market happening because it’s going to be amazing. It’s 70 artists and performers and it will be downtown and that’s a lovely economic driver for our town, but more importantly it’s good for the artists.

Art matters.

The art of people who have been oppressed matters and systemic oppression of art is still happening.  Native American Art won’t even be in the American wing of the Met in NYC until later this year. Yeah. It’s been in  The Met’s Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.

Amplifying artists is good. Art is good. Shouting out goodness is pretty freaking good.

So, I’m not going to talk about my own writing news in this post. Instead I’m going to share a couple pictures of some of the amazing artists coming to Bar Harbor this week.

And if you want to do good this Wednesday, you can give a shout-out to people who deserve one and whose voices might not be amplified right now. Amplify them. Spread the love. Spread the knowledge.

My Writing Goal is to be on a Doctor Who Episode. That makes total sense, right? Writer Sara Zarr once gave a brilliant speech about how it is the process of writing that should give you the love feeling, not if you make it on a bestseller list or get a Printz Award - Because honestly, they only give one of those out a year, so the odds of getting one is pretty rare.

[carriejonesbooks]

“Between stimulus and response there is a space.

In that space is our power to choose our response.

In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Victor Frankl

Heidegger said that “being” is always in relation to something else. Human life is “da sein,” which is often translated into “being in the world.”

How we experience our nows is part of what is necessary to live fully and presently as possible. Experience is part of being. (Gendlin, 1996).

But the thing is that so many of us forget to experience our existence, our being, our space in this world. Why should we do this?

It helps center us.

Focusing on our experience helps make us remember who we are in the moment and it makes us feel better.

Where is the space that our power is at? It’s in that focus, that attention to experience.

A pretty mellow exercise to do this is as follows:

Pay attention to your body.

How does it feel?

Are your feet on the floor? Does it feel right to be touching the ground?

Move on to your legs. How are you standing, walking, sitting in this world?

You have a back. It’s supporting you. How is it doing that?

Your arms, your hands, your fingers. Your fingers are pretty magical. They are sense magicians, bringing information from the outside into your brain. How cool is that?

How does the light or darkness feel against your skin? Do you smell things? Is there wind?

Now think about you in this space and say, “I am.”

You are.

I am.

Did you see anything? Feel anything? Release anything?

Now say, “I am here.”

You are. You are in this world.

Resonate

Dog Tip for Life: Dogs are always in this world, vitally connected to it. They know that their existence is part of everything. I am here pretty much oozes off a dog’s every moment.

Writing Tip of the Pod: Just like we have to fully feel our own existence, we have to feel our characters’ existence, what is like to be them, interacting with the world we’ve created for them. Imagine yourself as your character. Imagine yourself as your character doing that exercise. Now write down a paragraph as them, first person.

This is a happy dog

WRITING NEWS

Yep, it’s the part of the blog where I talk about my books and projects because I am a writer for a living, which means I need people to review and buy my books or at least spread the word about them.

I’m super good at public image and marketing for nonprofits but I have a much harder time with marketing myself.

So, please buy one of my books. 🙂 The links about them are all up there in the header on top of the page.  There are young adult series, middle grade fantasy series, stand-alones for young adults and even picture book biographies.

Things We Haven’t Said

Time Stoppers Front and Back Covers – US versions

Moe Berg

CARRIE’S APPEARANCES

I’ll be at Book Expo America in NYC on June 1 at 11:30 – 12 at the Lerner booth signing copies of the Spy Who Played Baseball. A week before that,I’ll also be in NYC presenting to the Jewish Book Council . Come hang out with me!

The Podcast

Look, Mom! It’s a podcast.

And please subscribe to and like our podcast if you listen and spread the word. It’s kind of you and it makes us feel happy. The RSS feed is here.

The Space Where Our Power is At “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.

[institutewriters]

Children’s Books Writers have carefully designed bridge that takes students from a basic course level towards independence as a freelance writer of children’s books who also knows how to sell a book manuscript to a publisher.

[carriejonesbooks]

When Children's Book Writers Are Supposed To Dance Things Might Not Be Pretty

When Children’s Book Writers Are Supposed To Dance Things Might Not Be Pretty

Back before COVID-19, I went to my first big writing conference (as a speaker) in L.A. (California) and I learned that there was a big gala thing and all of us children’s book writers (published and prepublished) were supposed to dance and schmooze there.

Despite the fact that my aunt owned a dance studio and I started dancing when I was two and despite the fact that…

[carriejonesbooks]

Don't Hate the People You Write For, Writing Tip Wednesday

Don’t Hate the People You Write For, Writing Tip Wednesday

It seems pretty simple, doesn’t it?

You write books for readers. You shouldn’t hate your readers or think you’re better than them and yet…?

This is one of those blog entries you regret later, but I don’t care. I’ll erase it tomorrow morning if I get terribly regretful.

On a forum for Children’s book writers, a long time ago, a fellow student wrote, “Kids are morons.”

I had a really…

[carriejonesbooks]

WHY DO YOU WRITE?

WHY DO YOU WRITE?

A long while ago, on our Vermont College MFA blog, someone wrote about why they write when they know they’ll never get enough money to pay bills, etc….

Her reasons were interesting and somewhat inspiring, but had nothing to do with why I write. I write to make sense of things, because I want to believe that lives are part of a bigger picture, a bigger connection, and because it’s the only way…

[carriejonesbooks]

A lot of people love where they live or where they visit, but that doesn’t mean that they can write well about that place or include that town/city/cruiseship in an authentic way in the setting of their story.

I’ll use where I live as an example.

Tons of people claim that their piece of the earth is the most beautiful, and those of us who live here on Mount Desert Island are no exception, tiny mountains lift up the center of the island creating granite vistas in deep pine woods. The coast is full of dramatic cliffs where the sides plunge into the cold, gray Atlantic Ocean.

It’s so beautiful that a million people travel all the way up the coast of Maine to visit it this summer. If you google image Bar Harbor or Acadia National Park you’ll see photo after photo of distance shots of the town or photo after photo of Sand Beach and these two mountains called the Bubbles.

The same distant landscape shots appear over and over again. But when you live here, that’s not the town, that’s not the setting. It isn’t something felt or viewed at a distance. It’s up close. It’s details. It isn’t a static image but a movie full of depth and emotion and change.

And I can tell right away when someone writes about here but they’ve either:

Never visited

Never talked to anyone local

Spent a mere day

They’ll have the locals pronounce the town, “Bah-hah-bah.” They’ll stick in a ‘telling detail’ about the tiny town square or the carriage roads of Acadia. They’ll use a last name like “Higgins.” They will present a one-dimensional portrait of a small town that’s always beautiful.

But MDI  isn’t always beautiful, no place is, not to everyone. When we’re writing about place and including setting in a story, it’s good to remember that no matter how beautiful a place is – that’s not all there is to it. Or that your one moment there, doesn’t mean you get the whole of it, understand the big picture and nuance of the place.

Just like a character needs to have multiple dimensions, so does the setting of the story.

Mount Desert Island is a place where people write stories of fantasy and of survival, where people come to hike and bike the carriage roads and then decide to stay, choosing to live with the lobsters and deer and wild turkeys.  The main industry here is tourism and then there are two scientific laboratories, a small college, a wee hospital, and boat building places. People still lobster. People still fight fires and get arrested and work at one of the tiny grocery stores. It’s a place where churches have game night, breweries have trivia night, and there seems to be one nonprofit agency for every five year-round residents.

Every winter a lot of the town vanishes. Shops and restaurants close. Snowbirds fly south. Restaurant workers go to Florida to make money before returning again in May.

It becomes an entirely different place than it was just six months earlier when it was brimming with tourists, crowding the sidewalks, bickering over where to eat, hauling bags of t-shirts around. A century ago, Bar Harbor was the town of the Rockefellers and Pulitzers, the elite white people of the United States. A century before that, it had Wabanaki camps along the bay.

Place, like people, has dimension. Place has a past beyond our present. To be the best writers and people that we can be, it’s good to remember that, to breathe in the nuance and the dimension.

*all photos by me.

Writing and Other News

I’ll be hanging out at Virginia Beach this weekend for an awesome book festival.

Art.

I do art stuff. You can find it and buy a print here. 

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Time Stoppers!

You can order my middle grade fantasy novel Time Stoppers Escape From the Badlands here or anywhere.

People call it a cross between Harry Potter and Percy Jackson but it’s set in Maine. It’s full of adventure, quirkiness and heart.

Moe Berg

The Spy Who Played Baseball is a picture book biography about Moe Berg. And… there’s a movie out now about Moe Berg, a major league baseball player who became a spy. How cool is that?

It’s awesome and quirky and fun.

FLYING AND ENHANCED

Men in Black meet Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You know it. You can buy them here or anywhere.

Flying

OUR PODCAST – DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE.

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!

Writing Coach

I offer solo writing coach services. For more about my individual coaching, click here.

Writing Barn

I am super psyched to be teaching the six-month long Write. Submit. Support. class at the Writing Barn!

Are you looking for a group to support you in your writing process and help set achievable goals? Are you looking for the feedback and connections that could potentially lead you to that book deal you’ve been working towards?

Our Write. Submit. Support. (WSS) six-month ONLINE course offers structure and support not only to your writing lives and the manuscripts at hand, but also to the roller coaster ride of submissions: whether that be submitting to agents or, if agented, weathering the submissions to editors.

Past Write. Submit. Support. students have gone on to receive representation from literary agents across the country. View one of our most recent success stories here. 

Apply Now!

  Don’t Make Your Setting A Stereotype; Writing Tip Wednesday A lot of people love where they live or where they visit, but that doesn't mean that they can write well about that place or include that town/city/cruiseship in an authentic way in the setting of their story.

[carriejonesbooks]

Three Hot Tips on Facing Your Fears When Things Get Scary

Three Hot Tips on Facing Your Fears When Things Get Scary

This past weekend was sort of scary.

TO HEAR THE ACTUAL PODCAST, CHECK OUT THIS LINK

Why was it scary? Carrie’s worst case scenario of presenting happened. She was scheduled to give a four-hour seminar on public image, but when she arrived the place wasn’t unlocked, there was no water, but worse- there was no A/V. It was not pretty.

And then…

We went to a party, a SNL-themed party, and because…

[carriejonesbooks]

Writing Tip Wednesday - Every Chapter Needs to Have a Purpose, Darn it.

Writing Tip Wednesday – Every Chapter Needs to Have a Purpose, Darn it.

It’s Writing Tip Wednesday and here is my big advice.

Ready?

Every chapter in your story matters. Write every single chapter like it’s the first chapter.

Wait. What does that even mean?

It means that every chapter needs to be an important part of the story. It needs to be there. If you can take a chapter out of the story and the story still makes sense? That means that you didn’t make that…

[carriejonesbooks]

Swipe Right: Writing is All About Relationships - DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE PODCAST

Swipe Right: Writing is All About Relationships – DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE PODCAST

Writing is all about relationships, right? The reader relates to the characters that the writer creates. The characters relate to each other.

Relationships are tricky things. They are expansive and minute all at once. They can completely surround you, dwarf you, push against you until all you think about is them. Relationships untended to can also be forgotten – just become nothing things.  I…

[carriejonesbooks]

Tips For Making a Thriller

Tips For Making a Thriller

Tips for Making a Thriller

  It’s writing tip Wednesday and I’m going to have some fast tips this week and next about making thrillers. Yes, you know those stories that make your heart pound with anxiety, where you aren’t sure what will happen next, where you are secretly saying, “Who comes up with this?”

Here are the pointers! Structure Matters

  First, structure. Thrillers have pretty dynamic…

[carriejonesbooks]

Writing Prompts For the Weird

Writing Prompts For the Weird

Carrie’s brain is not the sort of brain that needs writing prompts.

Carrie: I’m just weird. My brain needs constraints. Like when I wrote poetry, I loved forms like sonnets and sestinas and villanelles because they put limits and structure on my somewhat all-over-the-place brain. 

But other people – thankfully – aren’t like that and they look for writing prompts to free up their muse and their…