I just returned from an engagement with Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre, playing Leonardo DaVinci in their production of “Flight of the Lawnchair Man”. It was a great time spent with a really fun cast and the end result was well appreciated by the Cedar Rapidians. For them, it was a celebration of hometown composer Rob Nassif and writer Peter Ullian.

For the cast, it was a energetic, silly show about a guy who hasn’t made much of his life and decides to tie a bunch of balloons to a lawnchair and fly away. If you’re saying to yourself, “So it’s like that Pixar movie UP”, you’re not the only one to make that connection, but Rob Nassif will be the first to tell you that Lawnchair Man was written first!

Nassif, however, didn’t create his ballooner from scratch either. Larry Walters, or “Lawnchair Larry” made his helium powered flight in 1982. When asked by a reporter why he did it, he replied, “A man can’t just sit around.” In my opinion, it would have been much funnier if there were a question mark at the end, making it a rhetorical question.

Nassif added his own “why” at the close of the musical: “Why do we explore the air? Because it isn’t there!”

I knew I had heard that somewhere before too…

Which brings me to my point.  We can’t all be the first or only ones to do something like fly a lawnchair, write a story about balloon flight, or make customizable children’s books, but we can put our personal stamp on those themes and make them ours. This is the genius behind memes like Downfall, where the original spawns thousands of offshoots, each different from the next. 

This goes for life and not just art or internet memes.  Being original isn’t about being the first or the only, it’s about being uniquely YOU.

Tired of reading the same books over and over?  Making story time even more fun is easier than you think with story time flash cards.  A little while ago, I made a new deck of CLUE cards to accommodate an extra player to join Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet, and the gang: The Detective.  I realized that when you cut poster board into uniform rectangles and attach printed photos to them with a gluestick, you have a “Real” looking deck of whatever you please.

Students make flash cards all the time to help learn math, languages, and just about any other subject.  They are easy to make and best of all, though they stay the same, they recombine to be different every time!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 1 poster board
• 1 glue stick
• Scissors
• Any group of images (use old magazines or print images from the internet)

Cut the poster board into uniform rectangles, trace a deck of cards if you like.  Paste the images onto one side and allow to dry.  Shuffle and “Deal”.

Dealing means to try to connect the cards into one story. Here is my story:

There once was a pair of men named Tony and Ynot.  Tony always did things forwards and Ynot always did things backwards.

One day a traveling circus arrived in Tony and Ynot’s town by boat.  They were excited to start their next show.

Unfortunately, the devil met Tony on his way to see the circus and offered him a little box.  Tony was scared and ran away.

He ran away but the devil changed into a little man and followed him everywhere he went on a donkey.  All Tony wanted was to go to the Circus.

Ynot decided that he wanted to go too and got in his upside down boat (Ynot did everything backwards) and made sure that his wife rode outside the boat (Ynot did everything backwards).

The circus performers started to unpack their unicycles and juggling pins.

Tony gave Ynot a piggy back ride to the circus because, well, Ynot does everything backwards.

The end.

It’s not a great story, but it makes story time into a game and I promise you I had fun.  Your child can even get in on telling the story by describing what’s on the card.  If you make a good enough deck, your children can entertain themselves with it on long car rides.  Give it a try, you may find that you (and your children) have a better knack for making up stories than you realized.

• Windows XP, Vista, and 7 all have a nifty built in program called, oddly enough, Backup.  Use this program to backup all of your stuff to an external hard drive.  Why an external hard drive?  Because it’s “external” to your PC.  The theory being that it’s unlikely that both devices will crap out at the same time.   Unless of course your house gets hit by a meteor… but then you have bigger problems.   External hard drives can be bought just about anywhere they sell electronics and can be found for under 100 bucks.

• Back your data up online.  Now a days there are tons of companies out there that will for a fee backup your data and store it at their facility.  This is done via your internet connection.   Check out: http://mozy.com/  or http://www.idrive.com/ for a couple of examples.  The nice thing about backing your data up online is that your data is now stored at a separate location.  So in the event that something catastrophic does happen at your home (see meteor) your data should be safely resting at a quiet climate controlled facility for you to retrieve… once the fire department puts your house out.

• Backup your data to CD or DVD.  While a bit cumbersome by today’s standards, the tried and true method of copying data to a CD or DVD is still a perfectly acceptable means of storing your info that you’d rather not lose.  In some cases, say like for storing photos or documents, it is even preferred as there are no moving parts on said CD/DVD to break.  Thus for long term data storage, backing info up on those round coasters is a great idea.  Again, Windows XP, Vista, and 7 and Mac OSX all have the capability to copy info to a CD-RW or DVD-RW.  If for some reason your PC/Mac does not have a CD or DVD burner in it you can probably buy one online for 15 bucks.

So I hope I’ve given you a couple of ideas on ways you can save yourself from a real headache when the inevitable computer crash comes around. Don’t be a slacker. If you’re not backing things up regularly… get on it. Remember, it’s not “if”… it’s “when”.

It’s all been fun and games up until now.  It’s been battles between Dinosaurs and Princesses, Fort Building, and Chore Shirking.  Well, that is about to be supplemented with “useful” information.  I know, I know, it will be a tough adjustment, but we must all grow up sometime!

Every so often, we are going to sprinkle in an informative and well-researched article that will be a part of our library of “Literacy Resources”.  We figured, “Why link to external sites when we already know everything there is to know about everything?”

Importantly, we’ll also be able to write a few articles about why Personalized Children’s Books are a bajillion times better than normal ones… Reason one, they’re customizable.  Reason two, they’re awesome… um…  I’m sure we’ll think of more reasons.

We have our work cut out for us, creating an original article to replace each of the links on our Resources page, so we are asking for YOUR HELP!  If you’d like to be a guest blogger on our site, contact us.  We also know there are thousands of Elementary Education majors out there with relevant thesis papers just gathering dust.  Send ‘em over and we’ll give you the attention you deserve! 

My wife’s 128 page thesis, “The Effects of Conjugated Linoleic Acid Supplementation with Resistance Exercise and Amino Acid Supplementation in Aging Women”.  Sadly, I don’t think it will be relevant.

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As an author, I am often asked where I get my ideas from. Some people assume that artists are born a higher quantity of a finite substance called “creativity”. It follows logically that regular folks, who were not blessed with whimsy, must safeguard their limited amount or it will run out like a depleted well.

Creativity is more like a Mogwai. When it is watered, it spawns more and more Mogwai, but never feed your Mogwai after midnight because then it will become a Gremlin.

  

Wait…  Let’s try again.  Creativity is like gardening.  You create a space and prepare it.  You make sure the soil is fertilized and that the area will get enough sun.  You decide what to you’d like to grow and plant your seeds.  You water every day and weed when needed.  You ward off pests to protect your crop.  You watch like a proud parent as your fruits and vegetables grow big, strong and beautiful.  You reap your harvest and lo, and behold, you have hundreds more seeds that you could plant over again.

You don’t need a designated space to be creative, but it helps. A space where you feel safe to explore and experiment is a protected, fertile environment to plant your ideas. Then you need to water them with attention. They can’t grow without you actively giving your time and energy.

You need to protect yourself and your ideas from others who may be negative or judgmental. They may destroy your creation before it is ever fully realized. When your creation is fully formed, it will be self sufficient and resilient, with a life of its own.

             PEST                               PEST

During the whole process, you will have discovered a hundred other opportunities to start again in another way and you will be nourished by your previous success.

It’s a corny analogy (get it, corny), but it is apt enough. Creativity takes follow-through on an idea and that same follow-through leads to more ideas. Creativity takes a risk. Some ideas may “die”, but others will blossom more successfully than you could have imagined.

You may have one idea that you’ve been saving, holding on to it because you’ve thought your creativity was finite. I suggest you plant it and create a garden teeming with life.

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In addition to authoring these books, it has been my extreme pleasure to work with our talented artists and to see them transform the black and white words into worlds of color and imagination.  I’m always interested to see details and scenarios emerge in the artwork that had never occured to me when writing the text.

The artists have been subjected to my terrible dictatorship as they work through draft after draft, page after page, and Sara (for some reason) came back for more punishment to illustrate our next book “RULER OF SPACE”.  Actually, the process is extremely collaborative and I think the results are fantastic.  In order to help you understand the time and effort our artists pour into their works, I invite you to follow the journey of Sara’s sketches to a final page.  It’s a lot like making a movie.

First, Sara sketched out numerous body and head shapes to find the right proportions and style for our main characters.  In the movies, this part would be ”casting”.

Then the characters went into wardrobe and makeup…

Then she started to build the set…  We realized we needed a throne…

and a throne room… we loved the living alien throne so Sara made it bigger. 

Then we rehearsed…

And… action!

CUT!  This scene is a wrap!  Stay tuned for more sneak peeks as we keep filming.

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Ugh! Look at that blank page.  Curser blinking mockingly, “I’m ready… ready… ready… what’s the hold up?”  You are physically unable to write. Frozen. You’ve got writers block!

Fortunately for you this problem is not even real.  That’s right, it’s not real.  You are still thinking in words (probably something along the lines of, “It was a dark and stormy night… nah, it’s been done… It was a sunny and temperate brunch… ugh”) and this is good news because it means that you can still write.

You still know how to press keys down and in which order to correctly spell out all the words you’re thinking (well maybe not “conscientiously” but that’s what spell-check is for).  So there you have it, you are not faced with an INABILITY to write, you are suffering from an attack of confidence.

Don’t be such a baby.

No one is going to read what you write right now.  You’ll make sure to that.  But you ARE going to write SOMETHING and it’ll go something like this:  “I don’t know what to write.  None of my ideas are any good.  I wanted to write about the struggles of maintaining morality in the hard, wild West, but the only character I can think of looks and sounds exactly like John Wayne.  I’m not a writer, writers come up with original characters.  My whole book will populate all of Wyoming with 6 foot tall carbon copies of John Wayne, each one being more brave and upstanding than the next.

Hey, there you go.  John Wayne shows down with John Wayne to see who’s more brave and righteous…”

Okay, what I just wrote is TERRIBLE.  But you know what?  I want to write now.   I want to write about a land populated exclusively of damsels and heroes with no one to play the bad guy or bartender.  Moral: there is no good without evil.  It could be fun.

Just start and let the rest take care of itself. My friend Sylvia Plath put it this way: “Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

My pal Scott Adams (the guy who does those “Dilbert” comics) put it this way: “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

And my neighbor’s uncle Ray Bradbury (the sci-fi guy) wrote me a telegram to give to you, it reads: “Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”

They all basically say the same thing.  What’s stopping you is your doubt about the quality or value of your ideas.  Don’t kill them before they get on paper.  KILL THEM AFTER!  Have NO MERCY on them!  But give them a shot at least.  They may lead you somewhere unexpected.

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Above is a sample picture from my wife’s keepsake children’s book collection.  They are from a series called “Alice in Bibleland” which aims to educate young children about God and good behavior.  We’ll come back to them in a moment. 

Some children’s books, The Berenstien Bears being the biggest culprit in my mind, aim to teach a moral or lesson through their stories.   Little Timmy learns to tell the truth, Silly Sarah remembers to brush her teeth and so on. 

Too often, these stories are corny or, worse yet, “preachy” and kids can see right through them.  Given free choice, how many kids say, “Read me ‘Tommy Turtle Learns to Respect His Parents’!”   Not many.  What is it that so often makes these stories fall flat?  I believe that it is because these stories are not “true”. 

Even in fiction, we want our stories to have a ring of truth to them even as we acknowledge that they may have never happened at all.  We want stories that we believe could happen, or, given a universe where bears and rabbits talk and play poker, would likely happen in a similar fashion.  

This is called the suspension of disbelief, but it doesn’t mean believing anything and everything in a story.  It means allowing for the possibility and “playing along”.  Let’s pretend I’m reading a story (suspend your disbelief for a moment) whose setting is in a world exactly like ours except that bears and rabbits talk and play poker.  Now let’s say that the bears discover that the rabbits have been cheating and say, “Gee Whiz, Rabbits.  Your cheating has cost us our entire month’s salary of honey.  We would kindly like it back.”   “No way, Jose,” say the Rabbits, to which the Bears reply, “Oh well, forgive and forget.  Another hand?”

This story is unbelievable.  Not because the bears and rabbits are talking and wagering large sums of honey, but because we don’t believe that, GIVEN all those facts, the bears would react in that manner.  The same goes with a lame story about Little Johnny stealing from the cookie jar.  He does so because he wants a cookie, and feels good when he succeeds in getting it.  But when his mother tells him, “You shouldn’t steal from the cookie jar, it will spoil your dinner,” he wouldn’t believable say, “You are right, Mother.  What a naughty boy I’ve been.  I will listen to you from now on.”

We might believe if, however, Little Johnny continues to eat all the cookies, gets an upset stomach and misses out on his favorite meal, Pizza Night!  Nothing sets of alarm bells in our brains more than a character who is forced to act counter to her nature by an author with an agenda.

Now, back to Alice in Bibleland.  The book that particularly appealed to me was called “Psalms and Proverbs”.  As moral instructions, Proverbs are very good because they represent wisdom and truisms passed down for hundreds of generations.  The same goes for Aesops Fables (a good site full of these fables can be found here).  Everyone knows someone like the greedy fox, or the shortsighted grasshopper and the lessons they teach from their follies ring true because we’ve observed people or situations like them for ourselves.

Whether or not you are aiming to teach your child about God, the above pages are universal.  “A soft answer turneth away wrath,”  and “Pleasant words are as a honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.”  They are moralistic and illustrated in AGONIZING sweetness, but they don’t read as “false”, like some other books that strongarm their stories to fit the moral or lesson.

I hope I’ve helped you put your finger on why some of those books you’ve come across (you know the ones) are so dang CORNY.

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Sometimes, the limitations of reality just get in the way of a good story. That’s why there are plenty of fictional lands to which we can travel in our storytelling. To help you spiff up your storytelling, we’re providing a handy list of some good settings that can not only set your characters on unexpected journeys, but provide you a chance to get creative when describing your customizable scenes.

NeverNever Land: Sure it’s been used, but that’s what makes it so easy. Just forget Peter and stick with the Lost Boys. There is no wish-fulfillment story better than flying! Pirates, Indians, and fairies abound in NeverNeverLand. What happens when the Lost Boys and the Indians accidentally stumble upon the Pirates’ treasure?…

Wonderland: What is Wonderland without Alice? Amazing! For those who can’t stand a wholesome story with a normal plot and normal bad guys, Wonderland is the place for you. Crazy tea parties, Uptight Rabbits, Homicidal Playing Cards, Hooka Smoking Caterpillars, the list goes on. The trick to wonderland is that the crazy characters must THINK that they are perfectly normal. It also isn’t important to drive the plot. Just watch them be themselves.

Timbuktu: Technically, Timbuktu is a real city in the African country of Mali. It was once a thriving center of trade and Muslim scholarship in the 14th-16th centuries. This in itself is a good start for a story, but the best part about the place is the name. It sounds foreign and magical, so make it that way. Who knows what kind of nefarious characters lurked in the markets plotting to kidnap the King’s daughter. If only there were a brave beggar boy in the right place at the right time…

Atlantis: We can go two ways with this one, an Island above or under the sea! Under the Sea opens up a lot of possibilities with scary sharks or squids, as well as sunken ships and treasure. The unsunken island can be fun, too. In order for it to be undiscovered so long, it must be moving around. A little princess on a floating island could go some pretty fun places.

Mars: Sure there is no air or water on Mars, but don’t let that spoil your fun? Maybe all the good stuff is underground. Finding a robotic puppy in the Martian subterranean city might take several nights of storytime…

Center of the Earth: There are definitely dinosaurs down there… ’nuff said.

Candyland: Everything is delicious, edible, and colorful. The only problem? The lollipops are at war with the gumdrops! I see a candycane battering ram in the distance… Of course, the lollipops and gumdrops will both realize that the best thing to do is share the chocolate lake because there is will be plenty for everyone now that the chocolate chip rain has returned…

Shangri La: A more awesome version of Brigadoon, this city can come and go as it pleases. It also has dragons, gold, monks, and (what the heck) Lygers. I imagine the monks have been desperately looking for some children who can help them with their terrible Muppet infestation. Yeah, that’s right, they are there filming “Muppets Hit the Himalayas”.

EXTRA HINT: Make a MAP! Before you start, make a map like the handy one of Never Never Land of YOUR far, far away land. Throw in The Lair of Ninjas, The Chasm of Cave Bears, The Fields of BrushYourTeeth, and the Castle of DontHitYourSister and use it to chart the course of your little adventurers!

Writing good children’s books is about seeing the world through the eyes of a child.  So when my wife, who is a rising star in the field of Dietetics, was put up for 4 nights at the Amalfi Hotel  in downtown Chicago for an intense weekend of committee meetings, I decided to tag along and PLAY.

My goal is simple, rather than having my staycation resemble this movie:

I decided it should be more like this Disney TV show:

As my wife tries to slogs her way through daylong meetings, I’ve gone on a knee-high photo safari throughout the hotel to ”see through the eyes of a child”.  Let’s see what we discover!

These Beds are Huge-mongous!

The Elevator is Faaaaaar Away

Almoooost...

What's THAT do?

The floor is Hot Lava, how can I make it across?...

Can't Reeeeaaaach!!!

Things are just more artistic down here.

I think I’ve gained some pretty good insights.  I’ll let you know how crazy I get after regressing to childhood over five days of being marooned in my hotel!

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