Ask the Author: Nancye Thomas
Answered Questions (6)
Nancye Thomas
I deal with writers block (which is usually not a problem for me) by going to something entirely different until I can get interested in the current work. Even then I keep a notebook and jot down things I want to include which helps jar my memory when I return to the writing project.
Nancye Thomas
The best thing with being a writer is the entertainment you enjoy as you convert your thoughts to words and sentences that others might enjoy.
I would encourage a writer of children’s books to have a top-notch illustrator to work with. When my sister died I contracted with an illustrator who was a wonderful, imaginative person. I took each chapter of Picky and described as best I could what illustration would represent the story. He was so creative, had a sense of humor and whimsy that he managed to draw what was in my mind’s eye almost perfectly. I count this one of the best things about the book.
I would encourage a writer of children’s books to have a top-notch illustrator to work with. When my sister died I contracted with an illustrator who was a wonderful, imaginative person. I took each chapter of Picky and described as best I could what illustration would represent the story. He was so creative, had a sense of humor and whimsy that he managed to draw what was in my mind’s eye almost perfectly. I count this one of the best things about the book.
Nancye Thomas
Aspiring writers should either have a vivid imagination OR write about something that is dear to their hearts and intimately affects them to want to share with others.
Nancye Thomas
I am currently working on a book for older children that will compare the current communications and electronic age in which they live to the mid-1900s in which I was raised in a small southern town. My uneducated parents were lower-middle class and relatively poor. However, I had loving relatives, neighbors, and community resources that shaped my early life during that time and throughout the years of World War 2. Although I am 82 years old I have many vivid memories of that decade. I plan to title that book “Footprints on the Ceiling.”
Nancye Thomas
I am not a professional writer. My training as a scientist as well as an accountant is about as far from writing a children’s book as one could imagine. Scientific writing is written in third person, past tense without any embellishment. Accounting is numbers and statistics. But I was on a mission and that was my inspiration.
Nancye Thomas
I got the idea for Picky the Marvelous Chicken from the owner and trainer of the chicken. The chicken belonged to my sister, deceased in 2009. The story is true. Over the years she trained Picky and she would call me or write me to tell me things that Picky could do or that happened to her. I kept all the notes re: Picky’s antics. We would laugh and talk about her and vowed we would write a book about her at some future time. I was going to write, and she was going to illustrate the book since she was an artist. Unfortunately my sister died unexpectedly in 2009. I decided to write the book as a tribute to her memory.
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