Tag Archive for Along Came Spider

Inside Scoop: Book Covers, Along Came Spider

October 19, 2008 / / No comments

On Sunday night I began to write a post about my new “Jigsaw Jones” cover, but didn’t have all the info I needed to make it happen. So, instead, let’s just dub this COVER WEEK and begin here:

A while back, in May, I tried to discuss some cover changes that Scholastic went through for my book, Along Came Spider. Unfortunately, at the time I was less than adept at some technical aspects of blogging. So it failed miserably. But today I can show you the two covers, rejected and final, in one place. Please click the link above if you wish to read more background discussion.

Note that the “rejected cover” was the real cover until very late in the process. It was used in promotions, put into catalogs, everybody had signed off. Then, at the last minute, and practically overnight, it was completely redone with an entirely new direction.

The original (rejected) cover:

The final version:

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Category: Along Came Spider, the writing process / Tags: , ,

Fan Mail Wednesday: #15

October 8, 2008 / / 3 comments

Okay, imagine that I’m holding a large cardboard box filled with thousands of paper scraps. I roll up my sleeve, reach in my hand, stir things up a bit, and pull out a note. Wow — what are the odds? — this one comes from a young friend who lives in the area!

Mr Preller:

I read your book Along Came Spider. I thought that it was really great. I like how you added Sam L____ into your book. I picked up on that pretty fast. Why did you chose the name Satchel? I was also wondering did you use a part of the Bible in your book when Spider denies his friendship to Trey three times before feeling bad about what he had done?

Max

I replied:

Dear Max:

My compliments: You are an astute reader! Yes, our mutual friend, Sam, did inspire one attribute of the book character, Satchel Lewis. Not that Satchel is much of a presence. He is referenced only once, in a brief paragraph on page six:

Next to Joseph sat the kid in shorts, Satchel Lewis. He took pride in being the first boy in shorts after winter and the last in pants in the fall. He basically wore shorts unless it was, like, twenty degrees below and windy.

My feeling is that there are kids like that in every school. I’ve met so many boys who refuse to wear winter coats (too bulky), who walk around on snowy days wearing shorts and a light sweatshirt. (They are, I say with a shiver, certifiably insane.) I figured he was a type of kid that readers would recognize and think, “Yeah, that’s just like _____.” The trick with writing this type of realistic fiction, which is set in a typical school environment, is that it’s important for readers to identify with that world, to say, “Yes, I know this place; and I know a kid just like that.”

As for why I chose the name Satchel, no real reason, though I do admire the old baseball player, Satchel Paige, who once advised: “If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.”

I grew up on Long Island and went to St. Frances de Chantel, a Catholic elementary school in Wantagh, from grades one through six. From a young age I was aware of the Bible and the gospel stories concerning Jesus. When I was writing that particular playground scene, where Spider tries to distance himself from Trey, I was reminded of that moment in the Bible when Peter three times denies his association with Jesus. Also, I have to admit to being influenced by the soundtrack to the 1970 rock opera by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber, Jesus Christ Superstar. There’s a song on there called “Peter’s Denial.” I listened to it countless times while gawking at the lyric booklet, full of shock and amazement. Back then, as a nine-year-old, that album seemed so rebellious, so dangerous; my mother did not approve, but my four older brothers thought it was the coolest thing ever. Just listening to it seemed like a revolutionary act. So I put that echo in my book, that connection, loosely tying Peter and Spider together, because it felt right to me.

The core of Along Came Spider is about trying to do the right thing, trying to be a decent person in the classroom, on the bus, out on the playground. You know that question, asked by Cain to God: Am I my brother’s keeper? What is our responsibility to our “brothers,” in the broadest sense of the word? But sometimes even the best of us falter (yes, even future saints like Peter), because it’s not always easy to be good, and right, and just, and fair, and loyal, and true. The value is in the struggle. In the trying.

One last thing: Yikes, all of the above sounds like heavy sledding. I wanted the story to be light, and easy to read, and funny. A sugar-coated vitamin, I suppose. Hopefully it reads that way.

Thanks for writing.

JP

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Category: Along Came Spider, Fan Mail, the writing process / Tags: , , , , , , ,

Backstory: A Sense of Smell

September 16, 2008 / / No comments

Like most people, I have a nose. But mine doesn’t seem to work very well. Smells don’t really register with me on a conscious level. I mean, sure, I get the big unavoidable ones, like fresh brownies in the kitchen or dirty diapers on a toddler. But I’m not a guy who is going to smell a glass of wine or a bowl of soup; I just throw that stuff down the gullet and move on. I’m sure that on an unconscious level I respond to many smells. Who knows, on some animal level I’ve probably formed personal likes and dislikes, felt attracted or repelled, based on odors — not that I’d know it.

Good writers, I think, strive to engage all the senses in their writing. For me, when it comes to the sense of smell, that means work. It doesn’t come naturally. When I was writing from Trey Cooper’s point of view (POV) in Along Came Spider, I knew that I was writing about a sensitive kid. A boy who smells things. The book loosely alternates POV between Trey and Spider Stevens. In Trey’s chapters, I made an effort to bring the sense of smell into the descriptive passages. Part of his affection for crayons comes from that comforting odor, that sweet olfactory sensation, entangled in childhood memory, the smell working on him on some deep level. Crayons feel safe. Therefore in this book, when Trey encounters people, smell is often part of the description.

Of the classroom aide, Mrs. Mowatt: “She was large and overflowing and smelled of cocoa butter.”

Of Ryan Donovan: “Ryan was loud and his face was too near and his staring eyes hurt and his mouth smelled like garlic.”

On the night sky: “The air was cool and smelled of pine and moved like a panther from rock to rock.” And: “The smell of decayed leaves and the corpses of flowers filled his nostrils.”

On the library: “Trey glanced at the shelves that lined the walls, the new books, the smooth polished tabletops that smelled of Lemon Pledge, the chairs tucked in and neatly arranged.”

And so on. It was just a little thing I did to build character, nothing major, one attribute that I gave him which seemed consistent with his condition. He smelled things . . . even if I didn’t.

By the way, my daughter Maggie has a heightened sense of smell. She’s always commenting on various odors (some of which her father carries, alas, and Maggie frowns upon — she hates peanut butter breath). We were in the car the other day; I was driving Maggie and a friend to gymnastics. The subject of the mall came up. Maggie stated that she did not like the mall. Her friend, Katie, an enthusiastic shopper, was surprised: “Why not?”

“I don’t like the way it smells,” Maggie said. “It’s all . . . buttery.”

Funny, right? But then you think of those pretzel shops that are everywhere, and the movie theaters with buckets of popcorn drenched in a yellow liquid vaguely butter-ish something, and the overall pungent queasy smell that pervades, and realize that Maggie is absolutely right.

The nose knows!

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Category: Along Came Spider, the writing process / Tags: , , , , , ,

Book Signing: September 27

September 12, 2008 / / One comment

Book signings can be uniquely depressing events, the classic party where nobody comes. You go to a store, someone hands you a Sharpie, you sit at a desk behind a short stack of books . . . and nobody shows. Most every author could tell you that story, between muffled sobs and shots of bourbon. (Muffled shots and sobs of bourbon?) Even worse, there are the ordinary patrons of the store who did not come for the “special author appearance” but, instead, arrive solely to purchase a new cookbook for Cousin Muffy. They wander near the author’s table, curiously sniff, give a tight-lipped (suspicious) nod, then perambulate over to Paperback Bestsellers.

Or you have this conversation, while they gingerly pick up your book as if it were an explosive device:

Patron: “Did you write this?”

Author: “Yes, it’s a children’s book.”

Patron: “I don’t have any children myself.”

Author: “I see.”

Patron: “They should all be cooked in boiling lard!”

Author: “Okaaaaaay.”

Which is why I’ve pretty much sworn off the humiliation of book store signings.

However!

I’ll be at the Open Door Book Store in Schedectady, New York, on September 27th, from 1:00 – 2:30.

Stop in for a chat.

JP

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Category: Happenings / Tags: , , , , ,

More Backstory: Writing Spider

September 9, 2008 / / One comment

Teachers often ask about “the writing process.” That’s an uncomfortable thing for me, since it seems fertile ground for pretentiousness. But to answer the question honestly, “my” writing process is the only one I can speak about with any author/ity. I can’t really talk about IT without dragging MYSELF into it. So apologies in advance if I come off as just another self-absorbed, belly-gazing ninny. I’m not, really. Honest. I mean it!

So in the interest of discussing “the” writing process, I have to talk about my own. When I began Along Came Spider, I started by sitting in on a fifth-grade classroom (previously discussed here). At one point, after a few months, I tried a different classroom of fourth-graders taught by Mary Martin at Glenmont Elementary. Now one of the things I love to do is look at everything hanging on the walls. I copy a lot of it down, word for word. One of the posters I found, evidently penned (markered?) by Mary, was this:

CREATING SOME SMILES

Say Something Nice to Someone

You look nice * Hello! * Thanks for your help * Way to go! * Nice day, isn’t it? * A-OK * Bravo! * Well done * You are awesome * Keep up the good work * Remarkable * You rock * I know you can do it * How are you? * Super * You’re the best * Cool!

Somewhere along the line I combined that poster with a specific character and a specific event. The character was Trey Cooper, a boy who struggled with social cues. I imagined what he might make of such a poster, how he might interpret it, find it helpful, or possibly confusing.

Then I remembered a moment in Chris Porter’s classroom, something I had scribbled about in my notebook weeks previously. This is exactly what I wrote on 2/2/07 while in that classroom, here in it’s crude form, lifted from a spiral notebook:

Here’s Ms. Porter getting the class’s attention for a social studies lesson. She’s explaining something when — whirrrrr — you can see the eyes spin in her head like the wheels of a slot machine. She stops and looks, there’s Lee , sharpening a pencil. Ms. Porter had a rule about that, and it made her crazy when it was broken. She gave her students a lot of freedom — they were fifth-graders after all, the crowned kings and queens of Erstwhile Elementary, and, in turn, Ms. Porter expected her students to behave maturely, to act further along the evolutionary spectrum than the chimpanzees they sometimes resembled.

Of course, none of that survived even the first draft of the book — except for the basic dynamic of the scene. Here’s how that scene actually concludes in the final version, Chapter Two, pp. 14-15. Note that I moved the point-of-view closer to the character (now named Trey, not Lee), and away from the adult teacher’s perspective:

Mrs. Wine was looking intently at him, hands on her hips, lips tight, like she was sucking on a Sour Patch Kid. The tips of her ears had gone bright red. Three rhyming words — hips, lips, and tips — all signaled Mrs. Wine’s unhappiness. Trey was getting better at figuring these things out. Hips, lips, tips. Hips, lips, tips.

“Are you finished?” she asked.

Trey thought for a moment, considering Mrs. Wine’s question. He decided that it was a trick question, one that he had better not answer (since, of course — obviously! — he was not finished, nowhere close, for he still had seven pencils to go). At the same time, she expected a response of some kind. Mrs. Wine stood looking at him, that sour expression still on her face, waiting for something.

Thinking of the poster, Trey blurted, “A-OK!”

“Excuse me?”

“Super!” Trey exclaimed, beaming.

“Please take your seat, Trey. We’ll discuss this later.”

“Mrs. Wine,” Trey answered, “you are awesome . . . and you rock!”

Strange, Trey thought as he made his way back to his seat. Mrs. Wine didn’t smile back.

Something must be wrong with that poster.

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