Uncategorized – Diane Zahler

Category: Uncategorized

The Kid in the Nehru Jacket

Posted on February 18, 2024 by Diane Zahler

Eight years ago, I wrote this post for author Heidi Schultz’s blog series HEY KID! You can see the original and the rest of the series here.

Hey, Kid!

It’s me — future you. No, time travel isn’t happening yet. And I haven’t figured out Mrs. Whatsit’s tesseract. But I don’t need it. I can still look back and see you as if it were yesterday.

I can see you in fourth and fifth grade reading all the different-colored Andrew Lang fairy tale books, and C.S. Lewis, and Edward Eager, and wishing so hard for magic to happen that it almost hurts. You wish on coins, on four-leaf clovers. You push your way to the back of every wardrobe, hoping to come out in Narnia.

I can see you hiding under the piano in the hallway outside your sixth grade classroom while the boys in the class make fun of you. You’re overweight, and they’re despicable. How do they come up with those awful nicknames? But you don’t cry. They never see you cry.

I can see you huddled in the corner of the schoolyard at the alternative junior high, writing in your notebook. You really, really want to be Harriet the Spy. The notebook defends you from what the other kids might be saying or thinking. You could be writing anything; they all wonder about it. It’s your shield.

I can see you reading and re-reading all your favorite books, even when your parents shake their heads in bewilderment, wondering why anyone would want to read a book twice when there are so many books to read. But you love them so much – Betsy, Tacy, and Tib; Harriet; Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter; all of All-of-a-Kind Family; the Melendys; Meg and Charles Wallace; Ged the wizard; Claudia and Jamie. They’re your friends when real kids aren’t. Why wouldn’t you want to visit them over and over?

I can see you at the library every Friday night with your family. Your dad toting a big box of books to return, you and your brother and sister filling it up again with the new books for the week. Everyone in your family reads at every meal. You won’t even realize it’s weird until the first time you have a friend over for dinner, in seventh grade, and when you all sit down at the table with a book she just stares, her mouth open.

I can see you lonely and lost, and I’m sorry that you can’t see me. Because here’s the thing: that loneliness, that lostness – it all has a purpose. Your longing for magic leads you to invent your own magic worlds. You endure the bullies, and you figure out how to be brave and persistent. You watch people and write about them, and you begin to understand how to create a character. Your love of the library starts you on the path to what you – what I – do now. Because you hang out in the children’s room so much, you’ll wind up working there, all through high school and college. You’ll realize that you want children’s books to be your life. You’ll work in children’s publishing for a while, and then you’ll start writing yourself.

It’ll take you a long time – a REALLY long time – to get your first children’s novel published. You’ll get more rejections than you can count. You could probably paper a whole room with them. Or a whole houseful of rooms. But you learn, wishing on coins, hiding under the piano, sitting in the corner of the schoolyard, reading at the dining room table, working in the library, that children’s books are what you love, and that patience and persistence will get you where you want to be.

So listen, kid, don’t give up. Remember the feelings. Write it all down. And keep pushing to the back of every wardrobe. Narnia might not look quite the way you imagined, but you’ll get there.

Love,
Future Diane

p.s. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I can also see, from the future, that your Nehru jacket is a TERRIBLE mistake.

Pod Person

Posted on October 2, 2019December 26, 2020 by Diane Zahler

For the first time ever, I’ve been interviewed on a podcast! This one, The Not-Starving Artist, is out of New Zealand, which is 16 hours ahead (behind? no, ahead) of me timewise. It was a little difficult to choose a time when the host, Angie Noll, and I were both available. Luckily, she is a morning person and I am most definitely not, so we found a New Zealand morning/New York afternoon when we could both talk.

And talk I did! If you know me, you’re probably aware that I’m a little uncomfortable speaking in public. But speaking from my bed, with my computer in my lap and the dog at my feet, turns out to be no problem at all. It helped a lot that Angie had great questions. So I went on about publishing, the slush pile, submitting, agents, how I write — basically everything you ever might have wanted to know about how my career developed and how I work, and then some. After we were done talking — nearly an hour’s worth! — I had no idea what I’d said, and I had to wait anxiously while she edited it and readied it for prime time. But it turns out I didn’t use any profanity, didn’t insult anyone, and sounded more or less like I knew what I was talking about. Who’d have guessed?

Here’s a link to the podcast. Enjoy!

Thank you, Nebraska!

Posted on May 3, 2018May 3, 2018 by Diane Zahler

I’ve just learned that Baker’s Magic has been named a Golden Sower Award Honor book! nebraska2 This is the children’s book award given by the state of Nebraska. The books are nominated by librarians, and kids from all over the state — 71,939 of them! — read them and then vote for their favorites.

In my category, chapter books, the Golden Sower Award winner was Louis Sachar for his book Fuzzy Mud. It’s a thrill even to be mentioned in the same universe as the author of Holes, so I’m doubly honored.

So many thanks, readers of Nebraska! One of these days I will visit you — and I really hope I get to see that amazing-looking museum built over Interstate 80.

Perfect Post-It

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Diane Zahler

It’s always a little nerve-wracking for me to give a school presentation. (That is an understatement, but I won’t tell you how much of one.) I wonder: Will I be entertaining? Informative? Fun? Will I tell the students something that makes an impact? Those kids are the readers who matter, and I don’t want to leave them yawning. Or confused. Or permanently turned off reading and heading toward a life of darkness, despair, and criminality.

But a couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation in a school, and one of the students took notes on a post-it. As I left, she handed it to me.

On the other side it said:

Maybe next time I won’t be quite so nervous.

KidLit Bonanza

Posted on January 25, 2015January 25, 2015 by Diane Zahler

Everyone likes a best-of list, right? So when I heard about an exhibit of “One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature,” I had to go. Yesterday, despite a little blizzard, we made our way down to the venerable Grolier Club in Manhattan to view this small, wonderful, free exhibit.

I’d never been to the Grolier Club before. It was formed in 1884 by a group of Gilded Age bibliophiles obsessed with books and the graphic arts. It’s on East 60th Street, in a building that is probably lovely when not completely surrounded by scaffolding. Inside, there’s lots of dark wood and a large, high-ceilinged exhibition room lined with cases labeled by theme: Fairy Tales & Fables, Nursery Rhymes, Faith, Learning, Poetry, Girls and Boys, Animals, Fantasy (this got two cases), Adventure, Novelties, and Toys.

We got there just as the curator started a tour with a group of well-heeled Upper Eastsiders (and I mean this literally: I spent several minutes staring longingly at their gorgeous and very expensive boots before the tour began). The curator explained that the books, printed between 1600 and 2000, were chosen by their fame, though she didn’t go into detail about how “fame” was calculated. We got a clue, though, when she described how the place for the hundredth book was a toss-up between Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking; it went to Mary Poppins because the movie version had made that book better-known and more recognizable to the public. There’s been some blowback over the choices; that’s inevitable. And I was disappointed that some of my favorites were missing. But 100 is a pretty limited number, and the ones they did include were generally fascinating — mostly first editions, with original artwork. Many of the stories behind them were equally intriguing, at least to a kidlit nerd. (I wasn’t familiar with Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter, about a boy who, when he won’t stop sucking his thumb, has the offending digit chopped off by the ur-Edward Scissorhands. And I never knew that Where the Wild Things Are was originally intended to be about horses and called Where the Wild Horses Are. )

I took pictures like crazy with my ancient, faltering Kodak, and I apologize for their quality (the light was very low due to the fragility of many of the books). But you have until February 7 to see the exhibit yourselves, and it’s more than worthwhile.

100_8025 — Cinderella, 1919, with Arthur Rackham silhouettes

100_8024 — East of the Sun West of the Moon, 1914, illustrations by Kay Nielson

getImage — William Blake, Songs of Innocence, 1789

100_8036 — from Madeleine, Ludwig Bemelmans, 1939

100_8033 — One of my all-time favorites. 1902

100_8031 — But I was never lucky enough to have the game.

100_8030 — I kept this volume (1930) — and just about all the others — in a box in my parents’ attic until somehow the whole box disappeared.

100_8032 — Maurice Sendak’s gift to Ursula Nordstrom

100_8041 — This was Dodgson’s own copy of Alice — his markings (always in purple) are in the margin. The edition was withdrawn because he and Tenniel did not like the quality of the illustrations.

Quiet! Writer at Work

Posted on September 13, 2014 by Diane Zahler

It’s been quiet on the blog for a while.

I’m between books.

For the first time since 2009, I don’t have a book in the works. It’s a weird, unsettled feeling.

It’s not that I’m not writing! My hands still ache from typing at the end of the day. I’m churning out textbook materials at a furious rate, now that the industry has picked up a bit. I’m writing Common Core readers’ guides for trade publishers. And I’m working on something completely new and different that’s both exciting and unnerving for me.

Still, I miss that rollercoaster of ms-to-bound-book. The elation of acceptance. The despair of the editorial letter (four single-spaced pages of criticism? How could there be THAT MUCH wrong with it?). The nerve-wracking fascination of seeing a story change with every revision, becoming more and more itself. The pleasure of a manuscript copyedited by someone who notices that the truffle-hunting pig is the wrong gender. The elation of the first cover viewing. The pure joy of a box full of bound books. The anxiety of the days leading up to publication (the reviews! the reviews!). It’s a wild magnification of emotion, and without it, things are…calmer. Flatter. Quieter.

But the upside is, that calm is a place where I can write. Its flatness allows me to create my own imagined hills and valleys. In its silence, I can hear my characters’ words — and even, if I listen closely enough, their thoughts.

Fabulous Fourth-Grade Filmmaker

Posted on June 12, 2014June 12, 2014 by Diane Zahler

So…an amazing fourth-grader named Gabrielle did this:

She chose the images, the music, wrote the voice-over, and put it all together herself. And she did it after school was out — just for fun! Thank you, Gabrielle!

Dumbing Down; Or, You Get What You Pay For

Posted on May 21, 2014June 20, 2015 by Diane Zahler

I love writing children’s books.

LOVE IT.

But almost no one who writes children’s books makes a living at it. Unless your initials are JKR, you’re probably going to have to supplement your income. That’s just how it is. I’m incredibly lucky that my “day job” is writing — or at least I considered myself incredibly lucky until pretty recently.

I write textbook lessons, mostly in ELA (English Language Arts) for kindergarten through twelfth grade. When I started out, decades ago, there weren’t a whole lot of us. We were good at what we did. We knew the difference between a gerund and a participle. We knew where commas did and did not belong. We knew that Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” was really not appropriate to quote at a commencement. We could define and identify a theme. We could write, on demand, a 250-word essay on penguins, a one-act play set in outer space, a rhyming poem in iambic tetrameter, and a magazine article about earthquakes, along with the composition lessons teaching those forms — all in the same week. We got our assignments directly from editors at publishing houses, and though our names didn’t appear in the textbooks, we were paid relatively well for work that was, for the most part, enjoyable. And it was IMPORTANT.

We wrote the materials that educators used to teach your children to read and write.

In the late 80s and early 90s, the economy suffered a downturn. Educational publishing companies laid off a lot of editors. Many of those editors opened what they called “development houses” and what we called “packaging companies.” Now the packagers got the assignments from the publishers and called us to do the writing. We did the same work, but our pay was cut because of the packager’s overhead — by a quarter to a half.

Some of these packagers weren’t very good at what they did. Many went bust — often without paying their writers what we were owed. Educational publishing continued to downsize, with mergers of companies adding to the number of out-of-work editors. Many of them became writers, and some of them were not very good at what they did. There were fewer textbooks being published and more writers to do the work. The result was that our pay was cut still more.

Then came the crash of 2008. Publishers lowered the amount they paid packagers, and packagers passed the pay cut on to us. Now we were making about a third of what we had made twenty years before — for the same amount of work. When the economy started to recover, our pay didn’t. Publishers and packagers had realized they could get the work for less, and they had no reason to change. It didn’t seem to matter to them that a lot of the writing they were getting was inferior, because many of the writers who had started out in the business had given up or found other career paths. So now, at a time when the entire industry is undergoing enormous changes with the implementation of the Common Core, many of the people who could best write the materials urgently needed for a new curriculum have disappeared. Those who have stuck with it are faced with the task of writing two or three times as much as they used to, just to pay the bills.

In the last two years, I’ve been on a number of projects that have all had the same trajectory. I get a call from a packager asking if I’m available. I ask about the project and the pay, get an answer that’s feasible (barely). I sign on.

The project is delayed — sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. Having signed on, I often turn down other jobs. I scramble for work to fill the gap.

The project starts up. Half the writers have dropped out. They are replaced by second-choice writers. The end date hasn’t changed, so we have to write the same amount but twice as fast.

The project is halted. It must be rethought. A couple of weeks go by. The packager calls — the work has changed radically and now we can only get half the page rate we were originally promised. The end date, of course, is still the same.

When I can, I quit these projects. When I can’t, I have to do my best to deliver as skillful a job as possible, at half the price in half the time. And I do it, because I take pride in my writing. And because textbooks are IMPORTANT.

But the next time you hear horror stories about educational materials that are badly written or full of errors, you don’t have to wonder what happened. The bottom line has replaced any desire for a job well done. The confusion in planning and implementing these projects results in a product that is rushed and poorly developed. Writers are a dime a dozen — almost literally. We aren’t valued, and our work is no longer as valuable. In the scramble to make a buck, educational publishing seems to have forgotten the one thing that really matters:

We write the materials that educators use to teach your children to read and write.

Travels with Diane: Where Are the Beers for Men?

Posted on April 28, 2014June 10, 2014 by Diane Zahler

450px-Basílica_de_Santiago_02 — Basilica de Santiago

I spent a chunk of time this weekend booking my husband and son’s walking trip on the Camino Frances to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Looking at photos of the spectacular landscapes, the ancient churches and monasteries, the weary pilgrims in their Tevas and backpacks, reminded me how much I LOVE to travel. (Not with Tevas and backpacks, but still.)

100_5299 — Wall o’ Beer Labels in our apartment, Gent

I’ve been lucky enough to live in Belgium at three different times. Since Belgium is close to pretty much everything in Europe, during those years I visited as many places as time, energy, and budget would allow. I even created a travel blog during our last stint in Gent.

But there have been downsides to our travels.


: my error in France

We’ve endured bouts of food poisoning. Mussels in France. Something we never figured out in Belgium. Most viciously, in Greece, where I realized we were on the wrong ferry heading twelve hours in the wrong direction at the exact moment that my husband realized he should NOT have eaten that rabbit stew.

mass — happening accidentally on the Mass of the Presanctified in Split, Croatia

We’ve spent endless hours, even days, hopelessly lost — but often being lost led to wonderful discoveries.

: unheated youth hostel in Slovenia

We’ve passed nights in hotels without heating. We’ve shared rooms with insects I couldn’t begin to identify.

We’ve had more than one incident with a rental car that we survived but the cars didn’t. (Take the extra insurance!)

amigos-y-cerveza — hombres, with cervezas

We’ve lived through humiliations beyond counting (asking for the “cervezas por hombres” rather than the “servicios” ranks pretty high — most bars have a men’s room, but for some reason they don’t think it’s funny when you ask, insistently and repeatedly, for the location of the beers for men).

But one of the best things about my travels is finding settings that I can use in my fiction. I’ve taken bits and pieces of places I visited for each book, and each location becomes more vivid in my memory as I work it into a story.

: Chateau de Chenonceau

The castle in The Thirteenth Princess is based on the chateau of Chenonceau in the Loire Valley in France. When I first saw this fairy-tale castle decades ago, I was completely entranced by it. The Loire River runs right underneath. In every room, you can hear the rush of water. I wanted to live there — so I did the next best thing, and made it the home of my main character, Zita.

: northern Norway

A True Princess is set in a fairy-tale version of Scandinavia. I’m half Norwegian, and I have family who live on a farm above the Arctic Circle in Norway. I visited them years ago. It was such a magical place — the mysterious forests, the fjords, the craggy mountains. So that’s where my character Lilia lives.

Glendaloch (ancient monastic site) — Irish countryside

My main character Meriel in Princess of the Wild Swans is Irish at heart. I’ve been to Ireland twice, once to Dublin, and once spending a week in a farmhouse on the Dingle peninsula. I loved Dingle. The green of the Irish landscape and its contrast with the gloomy, lowering clouds, the uneven cobblestones I tripped over in every town, the sense that behind each mossy stone wall might lurk a magical being — this is the feeling I tried to bring to that story.

The setting of Sleeping Beauty’s Daughters is, in my mind, the coast of France. I haven’t been to Brittany, where the chalk cliffs I describe in the book are. Not yet, anyway. But I spent some time in Normandy (before I ate the evil mussels that laid me low), so I mined my memories of those rocky beaches, those salty winds, those dark, choppy waters for details to use in Princess Aurora and Luna’s desperate journey.

I’m still traveling and still using what I see in what I write. I don’t know if taking part in a Lobster Quadrille in the Budapest baths will make it into a book, or if a character will ever sit in the Pickle Chair from our Belgian student apartment. But just the possibility gives those experiences a depth they wouldn’t have otherwise. (And, of course, it makes the trips tax-deductible.)

Here are some pictures of places that are making their way into what I’m writing now. Just a taste of setting, to make you wonder…

Villains and Monsters and Princesses, Oh My…

Posted on March 27, 2014February 26, 2015 by Diane Zahler

Every year one of our local elementary schools hosts an author/illustrator day. This was their ninth year — and the first year I was invited. There were at least fifteen other writers and illustrators there, and we were treated to a huge and fabulous lunch before going with our student escorts to classrooms to give presentations. I talked about villains and monsters in my books to two fifth-grade classes. The teachers were helpful and eased me through my embarrassed ignorance of smartboards and Powerpoint. The students were attentive and asked great questions, and every single one had an opinion about which of my villains was the scariest.

Afterward, the authors and illustrators convened in the library, and parents came in with their kids to buy our books. I loved chatting with book-loving kids and parents, meeting new author-friends, and signing books for readers who were thrilled to be there.

The event was beautifully organized and a lot of fun. But something happened that disturbed me. There was a boy, eight or nine years old, who came running over to my table and announced, “I want a princess book!” I was really pleased — I’ve gotten enthusiastic emails and handwritten notes from a few boys who read my books, but not too many. But his parents were not pleased at all. They tried to steer him to other tables, claiming he wouldn’t like my books, that there were other books he’d enjoy more. The boy was quite insistent: “No, I want one of these princess books.”

Other parents joined in. One ventured the opinion that maybe it was the idea of knights in armor that interested the boy. Another pointed out that the books might have scenes with scary dragons that would be exciting and adventurous enough for him. The boy’s expression became more and more uncertain, but he kept repeating, “I want a princess book!”

At this point, I did something that I’m not proud of. I’d been listening to all this, unsure of what to do but pretty certain that I should maintain a low profile. Then I said — to the parents — “There are boy characters in each of the books who go with the princesses on their adventures.”

This wasn’t enough to convince them. The boy left without the books (though with a few princess bookmarks I managed to give to him). I was left with a bundle of reactions that I still haven’t completely sorted out.

There were so many things wrong with the scenario:

♦The boy wanted a princess book and wasn’t afraid to say so. But the adults, by trying to distract him, make excuses for his desire, and eventually refuse it, made him feel uncertain and ashamed. For wanting to read a book. A children’s book. A book about a princess.

♦I allowed myself to become part of the wrong. By pointing out that the books include boy characters, I showed tacit approval of the parents’ belief that the kid shouldn’t read princess books, or books that only have girls in them. I hate that I did that, because I don’t approve at all.

♦The parents judged my books by their covers. Because each cover features a princess, they automatically assumed that there would be nothing inside them that might — or should — appeal to a boy. Why should a book cover with a girl on it be only for female readers? Why shouldn’t a boy read a book about a princess?

I love my book covers. I think they’re absolutely beautiful. Yes, maybe the publisher intended them to appeal predominantly to girls. Maybe they could have instructed the cover artist to include the boy characters in each story on the cover. But should they have to? Is there something wrong with books about princesses that show princesses on the covers?

There is an online movement called Let Books be Books, discussed here in the Guardian, that protests the idea of gendered marketing in children’s books. I wholeheartedly agree that no book should be labeled or marketed “For Girls” or “For Boys.” But this article, by the literary editor of The Independent on Sunday, takes the protest one step too far by stating that the editor will no longer review certain books. She writes:

Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.

That’s a lazy, unthinking position. It lumps all books with glittery pink covers together. It assumes that only girls will like certain books, and only boys will like certain other books, creating exactly the kind of compartmentalizing that it claims to revile. And worst, it excuses the critic from the far more difficult and important task of censuring the social mindset that allows people to assume that books with pink or sparkly covers with girls on them are for girls only (and books about snot are only for boys). It focuses on the symptom, not the disease. It marginalizes my books and other books like mine in exactly the same way that boy’s parents did.

The boy who wanted a princess book was being true to who he was. The rest of us — parents, reviewers, me — are the ones who were false. We did the wrong thing, and for that boy, the repercussions may be far greater than we know.