Why I Don't Write Cookbooks

Tonight I mixed up a glass of lemonade and remembered my brother's recipe for perfect lemonade. It goes something like this: Fill a glass 3/4 with water. Add 2 glugs of lemon juice. Put in one ice cube. Pour sugar on the ice cube until it tips over. Stir. (It came out perfect every time.)
This is how my family cooks. We add ingredients "until it looks right". Somehow I don't see a publishing company going along with those kind of directions.

Another Rejection

I didn't send out hundreds of article queries, only about five or six.  So far - no takers. 

I know there are more slots for magazine articles than for books.  But I don't spend a lot of time reading magazines, and I spend multitudes of hours reading books.  That's what I know best.  Odds are, I won't change my reading habits.

The logical conclusion to this postulate is that I should be writing books.

The (possibly) cool part of that is, even though my odds of selling a book to a traditional publisher are slim, I could, in this current technology, publish my own book as an ebook or Print On Demand. 

I'll see where the Spirit moves me.

Keep you posted.

Kathi

Getting Ideas

I've had the second lesson in my Writing for Children class. If I count correctly, there are about 30 people in the class.  We're sharing our favorite picture books at the moment.  The assignment is to read various picture books.

I found one which was a perfect rewrite of "Little Black Sambo".  The only things changed were that the black boy was turned into a white girl and the tigers were changed into rattlesnakes.  That book made me really angry.  "Little Black Sambo" is on the banned book list.  I've always wondered what was so wrong with the story.  As it turns out, nothing was wrong with the STORY. The problem was the name of the boy and the illustrations.  The story is perfectly fine.  Maybe I should revisit some other banned books and rewrite them!

Also, I sort of knew about wordless books, but I never really looked at them.  I never had my own babies or taught a young enough crowd of children for those books to be important to me.  When I was in college, I wrote a children's picture book and made up the illustrations.  The story came very near to being accepted, but the editor told me the story was too short.  What if I can get the illustrations published as a wordless book?

I keep getting ideas and I know enough to write them down on scraps of paper, if nothing better.  I'm keeping my ideas in a file folder while I immerse myself in more children's books.  Soon - I hope - I will start organizing my thoughts and write up several stories.  I remember one summer when I wrote 5 children's books in 10 weeks.  Here we go again.

I'm planning to get published again and again - God willing.  At least I will make a valiant attempt.

If I should vanish from this blog for a while, at least you'll know what I'm up to. 

Thanks for visiting with me.

Kathi Linz

My Other Blog

I haven't been successful at getting all of my stories published - and I've written a lot!  I admit that they aren't all gems, but some of them are more worthy than others.

Several times I participated in National Novel Writing Month - or NaNoWriMo - putting 50,000 words into Word during November.  Two of those times, I wrote stories that I was really pleased with.  One was a young adult book called Marc's Rebellion and the other is about a young woman called Time Walker.  Chapter by chapter, I am posting these two stories on my other blog http://kathisbooks.blogspot.com/.  I'm up to chapter 11 of Marc's Rebellion (should be on chapter 12, but I missed posting it yesterday.)

I thought I would check the statistics for that blog to see if anyone was reading my story or if this was only serving the purpose of taking up more space.  To my amazement, I found that someone in Russia is following my story!  I'm sorry that they were disappointed yesterday when I forgot to post a chapter.  I'll try to be more faithful from now on.

Thanks for visiting with me.

Kathi