Books for Children

This is the story of how NOT to get a book published. That it actually did get published (after eighteen years) is a testament to all the patient people along the way who gave me the benefit of the doubt, even when they shouldn't have.

1986.  I came up with a cool title-- Hotel Deep. I made a few sketches of underwater rooms and hallways. Immediately I knew that a great children's book was being born. Story? Not a problem. Anyone can make up a story, right?

1987. I threw together a perfunctory story about some frog sailors whose boat sank, stranding them in Hotel Deep. With that detail out of the way I plunged right into the finished art. Now, this was nearly two and a half decades ago, so I don't remember the exact thought process. But I knew nothing about how to make a book. And I didn't have the internet as an easy resource.

A quick trip to the Eugene Planing Mill got me some eighth-inch Masonite, which I asked them to cut into panels 18 inches tall and 12 inches wide. Why those dimensions? Not a clue. Probably that's just the size of a sheet of Masonite sawed into quarters. After a couple coats of gesso I was good to go.

At left is one of the four oil paintings I completed. The image you see has not been cropped-- that's the entire panel. It apparently didn't occur to me to leave a little bleed around the margins. Or that a publisher might not be thrilled to recieve two dozen Masonite panels in the mail. Luckily, at that point I found a How-To book at the library and learned that this was not the way to illustrate a children's book. I abandoned the lumber yard in favor of an art supply store.

1988. Thank God for day jobs. That's me at left, a Respiratory Therapist. You can just make out a tiny premature baby on life support in the incubator. While I was giving bronchodilator treaments to smokers in Oregon, an old friend from art school was in New York showing samples of my work to editors. And since that friend was Lane Smith, people actually listened.

One was an editor at Crown Books. He looked at some sketches for Hotel Deep and thought he saw something worth developing. But he didn't like the drawings, and thought the text needed a lot of work. So I rewrote. And rewrote again, and again. 

At right is a watercolor on illustration board, with a heavy application of colored pencil to mask my lack of watercolor skills.

1989. The editor stopped returning my calls. I anguished. Months later he resurfaced, having left Crown (which had just been bought by Random House) and taken a position at Harper&Row. He asked for another rewrite. This was March 1989.

In September, frustrated and feeling that I should have been published by now, I took a trip to New York. This was my second; when I had gone in '81 I had been totally clueless. One art director had asked me for a business card; not having one, I stalled him and went to an art supply store, bought some heavy paper, took it to my hotel room, cut it to the size of a card, and wrote my name and contact info on it. Eight years later I was better prepared, but not by much.

Lane Smith's agent very kindly arranged a few interviews for me. They went poorly. But my guy at Harper shut me into a vacant office to do a drastic rewrite of Hotel Deep. Before I left New York he offered a contract. I cut my hours at the hospital and painted for the next twelve months.

Was I a professional now? No. I was using poor quality watercolor paper, and it showed, but I plowed ahead anyway. Below are some of the results.

The intended book cover (center) illustrates my amatuerishness beautifully. I had an idea for the cover, so I painted it. Did I know that you have to run these things past the editor first? Or that he has to run it past the art dirctor, the marketers, the custodian, and everybody else? Covers are a big, big deal. I was blissful in my ignorance. 

1990. Eight of the paintings were returned to me; six of them were fixable. Two were junked and redone from scratch.

Meanwhile, Harper & Row became HarperCollins. My editor left. Four months later all my work was returned to me with a letter of regret. With mixed feelings of disappointment and relief (I knew my work had been substandard) I went back to being a Respiratory Therapist. But in my spare time I continued developing my underwater hotel.

The frogs moved out. Sea snails checked in. Surely people would love a book about snails.

                                                    And barnacles. 

1994. Burnt out at the hospital, I quit my day job, went to New York for a third time, and landed a contract for an entirely different book, Tangle Town. My career began for real. Did I give up on Hotel Deep? Of course not. Every editor I worked with was forced to suffer through some version or other, usually involving snails.

2002. My editor at Harcourt, Michael Stearns, suggested I drop the snails and make Hotel Deep a collection of poems. "What?" said I. "No snails? That's crazy. But it just might work."

2005. Hotel Deep, which was to have been my first book, became my ninth (including five that I illustrated but didn't write). It received good reviews and won some honors, but never did sell very well. Even so, it's a book I'm very proud of. And what an education it provided!