Kate Inglis's Blog, page 12

beginning

"It's been a dark winter. I haven't been doing much."

"Yeah. Me neither."

"Do you ever feel like you're not what you say you are?"

"Yeah."

"Like really, you're no good?"

"Yeah. I have no idea how to write a book."

"I have no idea how to draw."

We look at each other across his kitchen table and our beasts look at each other too. My robber-barons who spend all day whispering fraud, fraud, fraud into my ears, his into his.

He gets up to pour coffee and I watch absently, thinking He has no idea. I can't believe he has no idea. He's so gifted. He sits again with a mug and opens his sketchbook.

"I like this." He looks down at my pieces of paper, pieces of story. "Let's do it."

 

A 'rollicking, rowdy hoot of a book'...

Some books are written to be read aloud to an audience of children, and The Dread Crew definitely fits into this category. A rollicking, rowdy hoot of a book ... there are identifiable characters for both boys and girls, and humor akin to Roald Dahl at his most satirically anti-establishment.

Pencil-drawn illustrations are detailed and lovingly rendered, but the humorous, evocative language creates its own word pictures. The Dread Crew's very words echo Goldman's The Princess Bride. Purchase multiple copies of this book because demand will be strong, and I'll be very surprised if it doesn't end up in the finally round of honors books at the end of the year.

~ Lois Rubin Gross (Children's Literature)

 

a certifiable signing

[image error]Somehow it felt like graffiti to sign my name to the inside sheet of a book. My scrawl, for a while my whole name (which felt odd), then relaxed into my proper signature (not terribly legible, which felt odd). It needed to be made official. Something along the lines of THIS IS NOT GRAFFITI.

I began inserting a card into each book, more calling card than business. A bookmark, whenever I had a stack at home. And then the rubber stamp.

Here's the new one. I love the ka-chunk of it, the unpredictable ink, sometimes thick and bleeding, other times faint and interrupted.

THIS IS NOT GRAFFITI.

 

 

festivooliganism

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Stay away, stay away!

Don't touch it.
Do something else.
Don't write another word.
Do yoga
mindful breathing
beer
anything else.
Whatever you do

DON'T TOUCH IT.

Two weeks since the manuscript and I've left it alone, as per Penelope's editorial direction. The first draft is in her hands but it's a first draft with holes and soft bits and looseness and dubious underpinnings and while I've obeyed in principle (nothing is less efficient than a writer and an editor working, unknowingly, in parallel) I've reorganized and rewritten the story fourteen times in my head.

I remember how it felt to present unpolished, untested words for assessment. Up to my neck in caveats and doubt. Skin on inside-out. Anticipating the vastness of differences between the first draft, which exists, and the second draft, which is yet another gulag away from where I stand.

I want so much to be good at this. At the writing, sure—but at everything else. At patience, discipline, detachment. Submission, humility. The belief that the book is its own entity, that profound re-writing is not at all failure, but the natural and good growth of creative infanthood. At waiting, leaving it be, at least for now.

 

'Tardy but enthusiastic': the Sweet Juniper read

What is it I loved about this world Kate created? It bears some resemblance, I imagine, to the craggy, windswept place she actually inhabits on the Atlantic coast and captures so eloquently in her pictures. But what makes this world new is seeing it from the perspective of a boy still young enough to see possibilities his parents might long have written off. There are still pirates in Nova Scotia. They roam the barely-lit edges of his world but he has proof. It's a world filled with secret documents, maps, and mysterious totems. In other words, Kate has made a world where there is still adventure in the woods...

...See, these pirates are profane. They are the grossest pirates you will ever meet, and your kids will love them. Trust me. They fart and smell like outdated French cheeses and their behavior is more uncouth than any character's you will encounter between Robert Louis Stevenson and Roald Dahl. And their overall disgustingness is lovingly etched by Halifax native Sydney Smith who has a particular talent with stink lines, buzzing flies, warts, wrinkles, and glowering faces. Kids love stories about any creatures more poorly behaved than themselves, and the pirates of the backwoods will not disappoint even the most unruly jackanape under your roof.

~ James Griffioen of Sweet Juniper (the complete review lives here)

 

faith in scrawl

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I went to tear out a sheet for a grocery list and found the birth of a Dread Crew scene, written while curled up on the high side of a starboard tack because for a while, I had to write everywhere. So I did. I brought that notebook to waiting rooms, on long drives, on the boat.

These days I feel like a second book is downright implausible. This scrawl, both far and close to what became printed text, is proof that it's not.

 

Faith in scrawl

[image error]

I went to tear out a sheet for a grocery list and found the birth of a Dread Crew scene, written while curled up on the high side of a starboard tack because for a while, I had to write everywhere. So I did. I brought that notebook to waiting rooms, on long drives, on the boat.

These days I feel like a second book is downright implausible. This scrawl, both far and close to what became printed text, is proof that it's not.

 

Full-disclosure: on being afraid to suck

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for reference: the greatest gift you can give yourself is permission to suck and other handy tips for sucking less (sweet | salty)

 

full-disclosure: on being afraid to suck

[image error]

for reference: the greatest gift you can give yourself is permission to suck and other handy tips for sucking less (sweet | salty)