A Moonbeam Gold!

Spillworthy won a Moonbeam Children's Book Award! And it's a gold!

I'm so excited and honored. I still don't quite know how to process this. It's amazing.

I look at the Moonbeam books and realize that this is exactly the kind of list that made me want to start writing, and it's exactly the kind of list that made me fall in love with independent publishing.

Pre-Internet, these were the books I would search for in catalogs and on pilgrimages to huge, urban booksellers. Today these books can be just as difficult to find because they get lost in the noise of publishing.

It's difficult to describe the feeling I get from these books. 

Have you ever savored a magazine with images selected because they did NOT look like stock photography? An old Mothering magazine? Or an old New Moon Girls?  I'm not talking about sloppy or unprofessional. I'm talking about real.

That's the feeling I look for in independently-published books. I'm looking for ideas that aren't changed to fit a preconceived idea of what an audience wants--the literary version of photoshopping.  I'm looking for stories and ideas that certainly could have been changed to make them more marketable, but they were tumbled into something organic and real instead.  They include a variety of characters, like those who actually exist in the world, without slimming or whitewashing or idealizing of dominant culture.  And the covers reflect the guts of the novels! They are beautiful not in spite of being real, but because they are real.

I already have a huge reading list shaped from Moonbeam lists from multiple years.  Now I must talk to librarians about getting more of these books on the shelves because my budget is too small and my list is too big.

Thank you, Moonbeam, not just for this award, but also for your dedication in bringing independent books to the attention of serious readers. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Spillworthy Writing Workshops

In Spillworthy, Ulysses takes his best writing and transfers it to pizza boxes to display in his neighborhood.  For this Hermit Festival workshop, I chose a smaller form--playing cards repurposed as trading cards.  Spillworthy says a medium pizza box is about the right size for a short essay.  For our group, the trading card turned out to be a great size for micro-poetry.

Kids created all their cards around Hermit Fest observations. If their cards referenced anyone in attendance at the festival, they could go get signatures on the cards.  The performers and vendors responded to the kids with such joy.  It was a gorgeous thing to see.

We're heading back to Indian Creek Winery for a second workshop day today, starting at 12:40 by the stump stage.  Any kids who can't make it to the stage on time, can find me and I'll set them up with a notebook and blank trading cards.  

Sale!

Spillworthy on Kindle will be 99 cents for one week, starting tomorrow! Yay! bit.ly/kindleworthy