The Adventures & Misadventures Middle Grade Tour Spotlights Elisabeth Dahl

For the next several days, I will be highlighting the amazing authors on The Adventures and Misadventures Middle Grade Tour.  Today I feature - Elisabeth Dahl.

My question for all the authors:
A fictionalized character of you (as a middle grader) will be the main character in a book.  What author would write the book and what would it be about?

Elisabeth answered:
I was a kid living in the seventies and eighties and moving a lot (both on my own and with friends) around my city neighborhood. Although that neighborhood was in Baltimore and not New York and there were more mail carriers than time travelers around, I'd have to say Rebecca Stead would write my story.

Check out Elisabeth's debut book:

For more information about Elisabeth: website | blog | facebook | twitter

Don't forget that there is a giveaway happening too:
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FOSSIL Blog Tour & Special Guest Post with Bill Thomson

At the beginning of November, I had a chance to meet up with the amazing, Bill Thomson in person.  He emailed me to say he would be in town and did I want to get together.  Well, I didn't need to think about it.  Of course, I wanted to meet up.  I picked Bill up at a local artist's studio and we headed over to Kidspace Children's Museum in Pasadena.   It's a great space to hang and I wanted to introduce Bill to one of the staff at the museum.  As we walked around the museum, we talked about Bill's newest book, FOSSIL and about children and imagination and science and more.

After leaving Kidspace, we headed over to Montrose and stopped by Once Upon a Time Bookstore.  We were lucky that owner Maureen Palacios was in and I had a chance to introduce Bill to her.  I must have done a pretty fabulous job book talking Gris Grimly's Frankenstein because Bill picked up a copy while we were there.

We then headed to a small barbeque place for dinner where we managed to talk books and creative process for a couple more hours.

Here's a few things you need to learn about me...I will never make a great reporter.  I managed to not take a single picture or take notes throughout my whole time with Bill.  It just felt wrong somehow.  It would have completely messed up the tone of the afternoon/evening.  Another thing about me, I was plotting the whole time about how I might be able to create several events around Bill and his books.  Did you notice that I was taking him to places that could be potential event spots? *smile*

Now, here is the fun stuff.  During our dinner, Bill was talking to me about how he sometimes makes creative decisions with his art so that it will work better for children who are viewing his books.  I was fascinated with what he was sharing.  He then offered to share some images with the readers of my blog.  If you haven't figured this out yet, Bill is one of the nicest people I have ever met, and I am very blessed to have had the chance to spend so much time with him.  

This is what Bill shared with the readers of my blog about creating the Pteranodon in the book.

From Bill - Here are the steps used to create the illustration:

My initial thumbnail sketch establishes the basic idea.

Then I take the reference photos so I can make the details looks as convincing as possible. I shot photos from higher vantage point matching my thumbnail sketch, but I thought a lower perspective worked better. I shot over 10,000 reference photos for this book, and usually take multiple vantages for each illustration to see what works best. I have a very skinny nephew named Sam and used his back as the basis for my pteranodon. The pteranodon was a mix of a figure that I painted, Sam’s back, lizard photos, ptranodon research, and stuff I made up. I was originally going to make him brownish, but then opted for a reddish color so he would stand out from the other colored fossils and also to add more color to the book.

Looking at the reference photos, I make a tight pencil drawing.

Then I paint a light coat of yellow acrylic paint over my entire pencil drawing, and add black acrylic paint on top to establish the darkest areas.

I paint over the entire illustration with a light coat of purple oil paint and remove the areas of sunlight with an eraser. This creates a yellow and purple under painting, establishing base colors for light and shadow.

I always paint backgrounds first. The flat blue color of the sky was painted with an airbrush to keep it smooth, and the ground painted with a sponge to create texture. Many of the illustrations in the book had actual rock mixed in with the paint, but the ground in this illustration was from a farther vantage point.

Then I create a tight acrylic painting on top of the under painting. This is the most time consuming part of the process.  And finally, I go over the entire illustration with colored pencil to refine the illustration. This final step is also quite time consuming, but brings the illustration to life with subtle details and textures.

Other illustrations with closer views of the ground included actual volcanic rock in the paint:

To create texture in ground on the closer scenes, I mixed rock in with my paint and dabbed it on with a sea sponge.

While the printing process can’t reproduce the three dimensional aspects of the rock, it does capture how the paint reacts to it. I liked including actual rocks in the paint for the illustrations of a book about fossils.

And then you have this amazing book trailer:

For more information about Bill Thomson:

Bill Thomson has been called “a master at visual storytelling.” He is the illustrator of several children’s books, including Chalk (Two Lions/Amazon Children’s Publishing, 2010), which received many accolades. Thomson is also Professor of Illustration at the University of Hartford. He lives with his family in Connecticut. Visit Bill at www.billthomson.com.

To download a copy of the educator guide or student activity guide click on the images:

To check out all of the stops for the FOSSIL Blog Tour:

Sat, Nov 9	Booking Mama	http://www.bookingmama.net/
Mon, Nov 11	NC Teacher Stuff	http://ncteacherstuff.blogspot.com/
Tues, Nov 12	Just a Little Creativity	http://www.justalittlecreativity.com/
Wed, Nov 13	There's a Book	http://www.theresabook.com/
Thurs, Nov 14	Sharpread	http://sharpread.wordpress.com/
Fri, Nov 15	Kid Lit Frenzy	http://www.kidlitfrenzy.com/
Mon, Nov 18	Once Upon a Story	http://www.novalibrarymom.com/
Tues, Nov 19	The Children's Book Review	http://www.thechildrensbookreview.com/
Wed, Nov 20	5 Minutes for Books	http://www.5minutesformom.com/category/feature-columns/5-minutes-for-books/
Thurs, Nov 21	Geo Librarian	http://geolibrarian.blogspot.com/
Fri, Nov 22	Growing with Science	http://blog.growingwithscience.com/

For a chance to win a copy of FOSSIL, complete the form below.  Winner must be 13 or older and have a US mailing address.

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Thirty Days of Thanksgiving - Day 14

For the next few days I am going to keep things a bit short.  Somehow with my lack of planning I have several blog tours and giveaways happening.  It's amazing how sometimes I have nothing exciting to post and then I hit a week or two where I have a ton of stuff.  Regardless, I am amazed that my blog has been around for over three years and that there are people actually reading it.  For this, I am thankful.

....and since this is also picture book month, here is my daily picture book recommendation which I read with the 7 year old tonight:

Night Flight: Amelia Earhart Crosses the Atlantic

by Robert Burleigh; Illustrated by Wendell Minor

Simon & Schuster (February 2011)

Markus Zusak and Writing The Book Thief

Check out our coverage of the movie release of The Book Thief! This is part of a series by my friend David Yenoki, who also blogs at cleverbee.org. He had the opportunity to meet the lead actors, the director, and the author of the book on which the movie was based. He will be posting about their interviews over the next few days, so check back again soon!

I haven’t read The Book Thief. Well… I haven’t finished it. I did start reading the book, but it’s an intimidating length. And heavy. Full of pages. And full of thoughts.

The Book Thief was written by a charming Australian author named Markus Zusak in 2006. He grew up in Sydney with German and Austrian parents who had immigrated to Australia. His parents’ stories of growing up during World War II provided inspiration for the events written about in The Book Thief, such as stories of cities burning and having to run to bomb shelters during air raids in the middle of the night.

I was lucky enough to attend a talk Markus gave at the Barnes & Noble at the Grove in Los Angeles. He regaled us with amusing anecdotes, including one about his older brother who constantly tormented Markus as older siblings tend to do, and how Markus got revenge by replacing his brother’s hard boiled eggs with raw eggs.

Markus discussed writing and gave us some tips. When he told us about the raw egg prank, he was pulling from personal experience. To be a writer, you don’t need to possess a great intelligence; you just need to do the simple things well. You need to make people believe you when you tell a story: include small details that make the story yours and make audiences believe you. Then he discussed the climax and the unexpected. The climax of the egg prank is not when his brother smashed an egg on his face; instead the audience had the best reaction when Markus told his dad and the audience expects his dad to be upset, but instead his dad is sympathetic and supportive. The last important part of writing was editing. Revision and editing and rewriting. He rewrote the first part of The Book Thief 150-200 times because he believes it makes the writing stronger.

There was a question and answer session where we learned about Markus’ interesting method of writing. He keeps notebooks with him and uses them to make notes. When he starts a book he’ll start by thinking up the beginning and the end of the story. And then in the notebook he’ll make lists of chapter headings. He’ll keep on making these lists and it helps him because he knows what happens in each chapter. “I wish I could write a book that was just chapter headings.” He showed us from a notebook he brought with him.

Early drafts of The Book Thief had narration by an unsympathetic Death character. Having Death as a character made sense because people associate death with war. But this Death started out with a voice that sounded macabre and sleazy. So then Markus tried switching to Liesel narrating the story in first person. He noticed while rewriting that that too had a problem: “Despite having German and Austrian parents, Liesel to me still sounded like the most Australian-sounding German girl in the history of books.”

Next Markus tried writing the story in third person without narration, but that wasn’t compelling enough. He came back to using Death as a narrator but with a twist: “What if Death was actually haunted by us. By humans.” And that’s how the book started to come together. Markus started over yet again and wrote all the way through. (And then revised and revised and revised some more).

Later after the publication of The Book Thief, Markus’ dad had the opportunity to read the book translated in German. His dad read both the English and German texts in parallel to compare and commented: “It’s not exactly that the book is [expletive] in English. It’s just that it’s so much better in German.”

Markus was asked about the The Book Thief film adaptation which he had seen already, and he said that he got very emotional watching the film. He wasn’t directly involved in the production of the film; he reasoned that by imposing opinions and demands on creative people you detract from the art.

“Generally, it’s about how on one hand in that period of time you have Hitler destroying people with words and what you can do with words, and Liesel is stealing the words back and writing her own story with them and it’s a beautiful story.” And he thinks that’s what the film is about too.

I was in a panel with Alethea Allarey of Read Now Sleep Later and we got to talk to the director, Brian Percival, and the actors, Sophie Nélisse and Geoffrey Rush. I’ll get to that later. But in these panels we also got to talk to Markus again and some of this involves spoiler content at the end. So warning, if you don’t know what happens, then stop now, lest the visceral raw emotional content be robbed of your heart when you see the film or read the book.

Markus has been asked about happens next after the book and he doesn’t want to write a second Book Thief book. “They say never say never, but I’ll never write Book Thief Part 2.” People will ask or suggest that Liesel and Max get married after the book. They don’t. Markus has at least four reasons why they don’t; the biggest, and what I think the best reason, is that “her real love in the book is Rudy. He’s sort of like a true love for her, to go the whole corny way. And my feeling was if Rudy can’t have her, no one from the world of the book can have her...”

And at the very end I briefly asked a question. One question. Everyone else had left the room. I wish it had been a better question. When the book was originally published in Australia, it was published as fiction. In the United States, The Book Thief can be found in bookstores as Young Adult Fiction and I asked Markus if he knew why there was a difference. His response, and I should have made better notes, was that the United States is the only market that made the choice to categorize The Book Thief as Young Adult. He did explain that if you go into a bookstore in Australia, you’ll find a separation between children's books and adult books. No separate Young Adult section.

I think it’s important to remember that a book can be categorized as (Adult) Fiction in the rest of the world but in this country it might be placed in Young Adult Fiction. And there are people who think that because a book is in Young Adult it will exclude them because they don’t view themselves as young adults. They might miss out on a book that adults around the world in other countries are reading and enjoying and praising because they don’t realize that Young Adult is inclusive, it includes adult readers and younger readers alike. I would like as many people as possible to join me in finishing this book.

---

For more information, check out the official website www.thebookthief.com
Like the movie on Facebook
Follow @thebookthiefmovie on Twitter
Use the hashtag #TheBookThief on Twitter and Instagram

Based on the beloved bestselling book, THE BOOK THIEF tells the inspirational story of a spirited and courageous young girl who transforms the lives of everyone around her when she is sent to live with a new family in World War II Germany. It stars Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, Sophie Nélisse, Ben Schnetzer, and Nico Liersch. It was directed by Brian Percival (Downton Abbey), with a screenplay by Michael Petroni, based upon the novel by Markus Zusak. The film was produced by Karen Rosenfelt and Ken Blancato for Fox 2000.

Adventures and Misadventures Middle Grade Tour Giveaway

Seven Middle Grade Authors go on tour.  Check out who will be on tour and if they will be stopping by your town.  If you aren't able to join them in person, enter the giveaway below to win a prize pack that includes one signed copy of each book from each author. 

Stop by tomorrow to discover how Elisabeth Dahl and Kristen Kittscher answer the following question:  What author would write a novel about you as a fictionalized middle grader and what would the book be about?

Seven "Lucky 13" Middle Grade Debut Authors

Elisabeth Dahl (GENIE WISHES)

Kristen Kittscher (THE WIG IN THE WINDOW)

Caroline Carlson (MAGIC MARKS THE SPOT)

Melanie Crowder (PARCHED)

Kit Grindstaff (THE FLAME IN THE MIST)

Jennifer Mann (SUNNY SWEET IS SO NOT SORRY)

A.B. Westrick (BROTHERHOOD)

The stops:
Elisabeth Dahl and Kristen Kittscher will be at each of the stops.  They will be joined by several of the other authors throughout the tour.  Check out if they will be stopping in your town over the next week.

November 14: Richmond, Virginia -- bbgb tales for kids at 4 p.m. 

November 15: Alexandria, Virginia -- Hooray for Books at 6:30 p.m.

 

November 16: Baltimore, Maryland - Cockeysville Library -  Writing Workshop from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. (Book sales by the Ivy Bookshop)

November 17: Doylestown, Pennsylvania - Doylestown Bookshop - 2 - 4 p.m. 

November 18: Children's Book World, Haverford, PA (actual event is at Haverford Free Township Library), 4 p.m. https://www.facebook.com/events/1432375636985764/

November 19: Stevens Cooperative School, Hoboken, NJ, 6:30 p.m. - book sales provided by Word Jersey City

Giveaway:
Classroom teachers and librarians - Enter to win a prize pack that includes a signed copy of each of the books listed above.  Eligible to those with a U.S. mailing address. 

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