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The Red Pen: Comma Chameleon
Perhaps no single keystroke has incited such violence of emotion as the Oxford comma. Also called the serial comma, it’s more or less grammatically optional in America—but don’t let our noncommittal adoption of the mark fool you. The Oxford comma has become something of a pop culture icon. It appears on t-shirts, drinking glasses, infant…
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The Red Pen: Deep Thoughts Edition
Inner speech, interior monologue, musings—a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and there are plenty of names to describe the process of getting inside your character’s head. But what do you do once you’re there?—and how can you bring your reader with you? Read on for thoughts on…well, thoughts. First, let’s lay…
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Author Kelli Call on Stereotypes, Superheroes, and Sensory Processing Disorder
Superman. Batman. Spiderman—oh, and don’t forget Clark, hero of It’s Not Easy Being a Superhero (Pink Umbrella Books, 2019). If author and mother of three Kelli Call has anything to say about it, you’ll put Clark in the pantheon of superheroes too. No, not Clark Kent. This Clark is a hero of a different sort:…
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The Red Pen: Save Yourself from Seven Deadly Writing Sins
Okay, bear with me. Here’s a first draft: FIRST DRAFT: She was clearly dolefully miserable. “How . . . how . . . how could you?” she sputtered out in a voice that was icy with shock and rage. He sank down into the couch and rubbed his temple, framed by thick, salt and pepper…
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The Red Pen: Meter Mishaps
Congrats! You passed Meter 101 in my last post and you’re ready to move into master class territory. Today we’ll look at two common metrical problems in drafting children’s books: forced emphasis and over-consistency (yes, there is such a thing). METER MISHAP #1: EMPHASIS I remember watching my then three-year-old daughter do a puzzle. The…
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It’s Not Easy Being a Superhero Blog Tour
Pink Umbrella Books is excited to announce the It’s Not Easy Being a Superhero blog tour, which will run March 18-28, 2019. About the Book: Unlike most superheroes, Clark’s superpowers aren’t a secret. And instead of just one, Clark has five superpowers he must learn to control: super hearing, super sight, super smell, super taste, and super…
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The Red Pen: Meter Matters!
Children’s books are deceptively easy. On the surface, the formula seems tried (or is it trite?) and true: a lovable character, a plot thinner than a fruit roll-up, a handful of sing-song nonsense words and a rhyming dictionary are all you need, right? If only! Let’s face it—if writing good kid lit really was that…
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The Red Pen: December is for editing.
Ready, set . . . edit. It’s December, and NaNoWriMo 2018 is history. Forgoing Netflix binges and holiday preparations alike, your retinas are seared by long nights of blinking cursors and you have emerged triumphant (if exhausted) 50,000 words later. A newbie novelist might be ready to slap a cover on that mess and CreateSpace…
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The Red Pen: NaNoWriMo & Editing? Blasphemy! (Or not. Keep reading.)
I know what you’re thinking. This is NaNoWriMo! There’s no editing in NaNoWriMo! And you’re right. The whole point of it is to produce a 50,000 word manuscript in a month. That’s about 1,600 words a day, and nobody said they had to be great words. Or punctuated words. Or even grammatically correct words. That…
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Little Women Legacy: Alcott, the Environment, and Real-Life Heroes
In this blog post series, we’ve featured contributing authors from our anthology, Alcott’s Imaginary Heroes: The Little Women Legacy. In this post, we’ll share some final thoughts from Julie Dunlap, ecologist, teacher and writer. Contributor Julie Dunlap reads Little Women in Old Ellicott City, Maryland. Little Women teems with uncomfortable truths. Hardworking families can fall into poverty;…
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