WRITING STUFF FOR BIG AND LITTLE KIDS 6: FIRST PRO-SALE TO “THE LEXUS OF CHILDREN’S MAGAZINES” – “Mystery On Space Station Courage”

In these articles (about once a month on the third or fourth Monday), I’ll be sharing with you what I’ve learned in the past fifteen years from first trying to get short stories and articles published in the non-adult market to publishing pretty much whenever I submit a short story, article or essay to a non-adult market. I’m going to do this chronologically so that those of you who are beginning your journey can learn what I did as I did. This will also tend to make me more coherent as I cast back to those first days – and I won’t make assumptions about what I did and didn’t know…

This sale was perhaps my first real brush with the wisdom of remaining persistent in sending out manuscripts.

It was also my first serious attempt at writing SF for children – unfortunately one I haven’t managed to repeat, so there’s probably a lesson there or something.

First of all, the appellation above “The Lexus of Children’s Magazines” was coined by Marianne Carus, founder and executive editor of the CRICKET Magazine Group. That was in response to a comment I made in a letter to the then editor of CRICKET Magazine, Deborah Vetter. She’s not in that position any more, replaced by Lonnie Plecha (whom I hear speak at a recent Minnesota SCBWI Conference). The appellation is completely true when I factor in the notion that the Group pays $ 0.25 PER WORD.

I’d written “Mystery On Space Station Courage” for HIGHLIGHTS FOR CHILDREN Magazine after brainstorming on a torn sheet of paper I still have down in the paper file for this story. It involved an communication antenna on a space station that has a maintenance compartment underneath it. That was it. The original idea was boring. So I added some excitement and a condition.

A worker gets trapped, his oxygen is running out and the compartment is shielded against stray radiation. He starts banging on the nearest bulkhead in Morse Code (everyone in the station learns it in case of malfunctions)..

Still traumatized by the death of her father, Candace Mooney – all full of attitude and grief – is confined to quarters by her frustrated and equally hurting mother. She is also grounded from the ship’s “internet”. When she hears the banging, she has to do a 911 call to get her mother’s attention. The astronaut is rescued and she and her mother have a chance to do some healing.

Needless to say, the story wasn’t THIS brilliant when it first arrived on Ms. Vetter’s desk. Working with her through a re-write and a subsequent “editing for house style”, the story was published two YEARS later (two more stories later, I came to realize that this is SOP with CRICKET).

This was not my first attempt at writing SF for young people. Checking my files, I see that it was my eleventh attempt with one other published piece called “Test” (see previous entry at http://thefridaychallenge.blogspot.com/2011/05/first-semi-pro-test.html). I did know that CRICKET was the golden ring of writers. I tilted for it and hit it on my fifth try. After that, while I haven’t batted anywhere near 1000, I get a personal rejection almost every time I submit and am rejected by the Group. I have a piece there right now and another will be on its way, soon.

What I Learned #6: “I KNOW we all know this but this is another anecdotal story to encourage you to KEEP SENDING THINGS OUT TO THE TOP MARKETS! You have to break that ceiling someday!” (Law of Averages and all that, you know: “In illustration of the law of averages…as the number of trials increases, the percentage of successes approaches the expected percentage of successes while the difference between the observed and expected number of successes increases.”)

image: http://www.palmbeach.k12.fl.us/congressms/GAAjazz/what.bmp

WRITING STUFF FOR BIG AND LITTLE KIDS 5: EDUCATION ESSAYS FOR LOCAL PAPER – “Education: Easy Target”, “Hosterman Lands on the Moon”, “Parent Support”

In these articles (about once a month on the third or fourth Monday), I’ll be sharing with you what I’ve learned in the past fifteen years from first trying to get short stories and articles published in the non-adult market to publishing pretty much whenever I submit a short story, article or essay to a non-adult market. I’m going to do this chronologically so that those of you who are beginning your journey can learn what I did as I did. This will also tend to make me more coherent as I cast back to those first days – and I won’t make assumptions about what I did and didn’t know…

Decades of experience as a teacher plus having learned the craft of writing allowed me to stand in for Guest Editorials for a season.

I’ve been reading the “local” newspaper, The Sun Post for 30 or so years. It’s always been a good paper and a sharp contrast between the big city STAR TRIBUNE and PIONEER press. Their take on the murder, mayhem and the collapse of Government As We Know It and/or Want It To Be has always been behind stories on schools, community people, politics for the GOOD of the city and developments and at times even divisions within the community over various issues both serious and frivolous.

I have been the subject of more than one interview. It may be that that interview opened the door for me to submit my writing to this market.

I’ve been a teacher for 31 years. I’ve done stints in public middle school and high school; private schools; charter schools and we have home schooled. I have been the science teacher for special education classrooms, English Language Learner classrooms, standard classrooms, and International Baccalaureate – Middle Years Program/Honors classrooms. I was at one time certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, Early Adolescent Generalist. I have a good handle on the education scene, at least from the classroom side.

I thought I might be qualified to comment on the state of education in the nation, the state and on the local scene. The editors felt I was as well and my writing was presented as a Guest Editorial several times.

I didn’t get any cash for the work, except for once when I wrote an article about sending a group of my students on a mock-Lunar voyage. That time I got $30 for the piece.

As the years passed, the newspaper changed and they no longer include guest editorials nor do they do much with letters-to-the-editor except in support of this or that politician. Their editorials are mostly written by staff now. But the experience taught me how to write a story of a different type – using the “inverted pyramid” of journalism fame in which you make your point with its supporting evidence immediately and then allow the reader to go on their merry way without bothering to read any details. You DO however, have to provide the details in an entertaining style, but you still have to be concise and stop as soon as you’ve made your point.

Which is what I’m going to do now.

Image: http://asset3.learnhub.com/lesson/pages/7605/photos/22761-medium.jpg

WRITING STUFF FOR BIG AND LITTLE KIDS 4: First Work-for-Hire as a Direct Referral from the FIRST WORK-FOR-HIRE

Growing up in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area exposed me to a lot of energy when it came to the arts.

The Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Sculpture Gardens, Guthrie Theater, Science Museum of Minnesota, University of Minnesota Medical Center as well as countless other arts and science related institutes and organizations. Not the least of these was Minnesota’s Public Television, KTCA which (like WGBH in Boston) produced its own shows.

One of those was NEWTON’S APPLE, a precursor to the even more popular BILL NYE THE SCIENCE GUY. While NA was stronger on science and didn’t lean so much on “yucks”, their aim was still to bring science both to the masses and to the classroom in a way that was both accurate and entertaining.

My stint with the Science Museum’s DIVE INTO DARKNESS curriculum led me to receive that year’s Association of Science and Technology Center’s Teacher of the Year Award (with a trip to Washington, DC to the ceremony and interviews with one of our senators and one of our representatives (I got to talk to Paul Wellstone)).

It also led to an offer to be part of a writing team at KTCA that would produce a curriculum booklet accompanying the season’s offering that year of background information and experiments that would be sent out to every middle school and high school in the Upper Midwest.

It was again a work-for-hire situation, but the prestige and AMOUNT of money was impressive and again, I threw myself into the work. As part of a team of eight educators, I was assigned two episodes, one on aircraft fire-fighting and the other on the physics of in-line roller skates. We were given video tapes of our episodes at the first meeting and then a list of deadlines that would culminate in producing a finished product that would hit classrooms in September when KTCA began airing the new episodes. We had three more meetings planned along with appropriate deadlines for submission to the guide’s editor. (PS – there was no such thing as submissions via email in 1998, at least not as far as NA was concerned. Everything was PAPER!) and we were to ruthlessly evaluate each other’s writing and make suggestions, corrections and offer alternative experiences that came to us.

Everything went well, I produced the material, was paid and got a copy of the curriculum myself NOT as a contributor’s copy, but as a “science teacher in the state of Minnesota”. This was, in some ways, an even greater reward than the cash and freebie copies. My work, which was credited in small type on the last page of the booklet, is part and parcel of a library of knowledge and media that remains to this day in the files of countless science teachers in the area.

What I learned #4: Whatever you do well, be aware of the chance to turn your knowledge and love into saleable material.

image: http://www.worldclassinitiative.org/videos/newtons/newtons_intro_400.jpg

WRITING STUFF FOR BIG AND LITTLE KIDS: First Work-for-Hire and Non-Fiction Sale – “Dive Into Darkness”

A good friend of mine is a GREAT science teacher who had moved from the classroom into an administrative position. He got a call one day from the Science Museum of Minnesota asking if he wanted to be one of the science teachers to work on a project with the Museum, Argonne National Laboratories and a television show called THE NEW EXPLORERS. Argonne and NEW EXPLORERS produced television programs showcasing the “hottest” scientists working in the real world today, emphasizing underrepresented individuals in challenging fields.

With the Museum and a group of local teachers, they were looking to create school curriculum to use alongside the broadcast episodes.

He said he’d love to, but he was extremely busy – but he had another person in mind who was a pretty OK science teacher and was a writer to boot.

That person was me.

The Science Museum took the bait and hired me for a summer to view the unaired episode, meet the researcher – Dr. Jill Yaeger, who had discovered the first totally new class of animal of the 20^th Century – and with a group of kindergarten through high school teacher to write curriculum that would involve both the television show and the Museum.

Working as a group, we toured the Science Museum of Minnesota numerous times as well as visiting the Forestville/Mystery Cave State Park – both the public tour and a more complex private tour. We watched a large part of the Museum’s IMAX movie collection as well as spoke with Dr. Jill Yager. We pulled together ideas for experiments as well as developed ones we’d never seen before designed to introduce concepts important to the TV show. For example, with another teacher, I devised a way of creating a thermal/halocline in a 2-liter soda bottle using green colored, icy cold salt water and transparent, hot fresh water. I had to write it up, have my partners vet it for fact and efficacy then draw sketches and make a step-by-step plan that was easy to follow. As well, we had to test every lab created then write material connecting the labs back to the television show.

We were expected to provide about 600 pages of information, labs, experiments, background material and everything from simple fact-recall questions through teamwork synthesis questions and research projects. The questions that directly related to the content of the movie were easy and took up about 400 pages. What would we do for the rest? Become creative: how to make caves from Jolly Rancher® candies; learn underwater sign language (there IS no such thing, I had them learn regular sign language – and had to draw the pictures of the hand alphabet myself in order to avoid complicated usage and licensing costs). We had to write scenarios for students to role-play, create art projects, and compose both factual and fiction writing projects as well as create more challenging science experiments and questions for students who were gifted and talented.

Research (in the days before easy internet access) followed discussion and long writing sessions. Jill Yager flew in from Ohio to speak with us at length and we took copious notes, incorporating them into a “speaking to the scientist” kind of interview as well as a set of questions I wrote asking students what they would do “If you were Jill Yager and…” something happened. They were to discuss the situation and brainstorm.

Of course, this was a work-for-hire situation and I was paid when we concluded. HOWEVER, this little project gave me a pair of perks. One I’ll talk about next time, but the other was being nominated for and receiving the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Association of Science-Technology Center’s 1994 Teacher of the Year…my only comment there is, “Sweet!”

What I learned #3: When you’re lucky, do everything you can to make the most of it!

WRITING STUFF FOR BIG AND LITTLE KIDS: First Semi-Pro Sale – “Test”

In these articles (about once a month on the third or fourth Monday), I’ll be sharing with you what I’ve learned in the past fifteen years from first trying to get short stories and articles published in the non-adult market to publishing pretty much whenever I submit a short story, article or essay to a non-adult market. I’m going to do this chronologically so that those of you who are beginning your journey can learn what I did as I did. This will also tend to make me more coherent as I cast back to those first days – and I won’t make assumptions about what I did and didn’t know…

In 1994, HiCALL was the teen magazine of the General Council of the Assemblies of God Church; a sort of eight page flyer that could be handed out to the youth in a church. I found it in the CHILDREN’S WRITER’S AND ILLUSTRATOR’S MARKET GUIDE where the editor had listed that she was interested in science fiction.

I wrote a couple of stories that were rejected without comment. Determined to break into this market, I made drive-by visits to all of the Assemblies of God churches I could find in our area. There weren’t many. Entering the churches in the summer during the weekday, I didn’t find many youth directors around. But one was all I needed and she provided me with a few back issees of HiCALL. I studied the stories then wrote a letter to the editor listed on the magazine asking her what kind of science fiction she wanted.

A short time later, I got a response from her! She told me that she hadn’t seen my stories, but that, as a science fiction fan, I could submit another story to her, marking the envelope “Personal”. This would get past the first reader and go directly to her.

I hastily wrote “Dance to Change the Universe” using a world I’d invented in college called Enstad's Planet, for a friend of mine (Tom Enstad was my next-dorm-door-neighbor in college. We became friends, organized a group of eight young men to hike in the Rockies and got closer. Several years later, he was killed while stepping off a curb in Washington, DC; so stories on this world are a legacy of his provocative questions).

This time, the story made it to the head editor. She responded that while she liked it, she couldn’t use it. Because I’m Lutheran, I didn’t know that in 1992, in the Assemblies of God, dancing was a taboo subject. She also added, “…we cannot print a story about a girl studying ballet – even if she’s in space.”

I queried again and she responded that she’d love to see the story – but that they could no longer respond to my queries. Essentially, “Just send us the story, already!”

I wrote “Test” about a girl who had overcome sexism to become a licensed paramedic. She’d also overcome religious prejudice, as she was a Christian in a Muslim field of endeavor. But her excellence has given her a position on a paramedic team. Disaster strikes and she chooses to help one of her antagonists despite his proclamation that he’d rather DIE than be treated by a Christian woman.

She loved it and bought it in October of 1992. I was paid and then I waited with bated breath.

And waited.

For a year, until in 1993, “Test” appeared in the October issue of HiCALL magazine.

Thrilled with my first practically-professional publication, I quickly discovered two things. The first was that the writer has NOTHING to do with the art. My main character as interpreted by the artist was a…busty…Hispanic woman! Not at ALL who I had in mind as I wrote. The second thing was worse though – no one outside of my family noticed. There were no calls, reviews or fan letters. THIS was my first taste of the loneliness that would dog me until, at the dawn of the second decade of the 21^st Century I would write a certain author and ask him, “What’s it like to be famous?”

Who knows, I might even share what he said someday. But for now, victory was MINE! I had finally published my first science fiction story in a teen magazine!

What I Learned #2: Research your market COMPLETELY before you fire off your story.

WRITING STUFF FOR BIG AND LITTLE KIDS: First Sale "Friends Forever, Lisa"

In these articles (about once a month on the third or fourth Monday), I’ll be sharing with you what I’ve learned in the past fifteen years from first trying to get short stories and articles published in the non-adult market to publishing pretty much whenever I submit a short story, article or essay to a non-adult market. I’m going to do this chronologically so that those of you who are beginning your journey can learn what I did as I did. This will also tend to make me more coherent as I cast back to those first days – and I won’t make assumptions about what I did and didn’t know…

Sometimes publication is a matter of being in the right place at the right time. I had traveled with a Christian band from June 1977 through August 1978. Our group had grown quite close, but when we were done, we were ready to move on. A pair of our group got married and the wife, after several years of marriage and having kids, decided to start a children’s magazine. She got support from local churches, advertising and a bit of self-funding and put out a few issues of SONSHINE MAGAZINE in 1983.

I had been writing for a number of years but had little to show for it but a story accepted by a “mimeograph and tagboard, three-color cover” called ANTITHESIS. It was my first acceptance, but I’d gotten nothing since then. When Ruth, the editor of the new magazine, shared with me in a letter (this is 1984, remember? It was a PAPER letter…) what she was doing, she asked if I would be interested in writing a story for it.

“Would I?” I leaped on to my IBM Selectric (I was writing on an electric typewriter at the time!)…and stared at the blank sheet of paper.

I’d long planned on becoming a science fiction writer. Everything I’d written up to this point had been SF. I’d been submitting to ANALOG and other magazines since I was old enough to type and had received nothing but pre-printed rejection slips. I had also been a substitute teacher for three years and knew something about kids, though I had none of my own. I knew ABOUT kids, I just didn’t know them real well. Ruth didn’t want science fiction. But as a science teacher, I knew even less about literature than I did about kids.

So I picked a genre I could navigate in, albeit not with any great knowledge: I wrote a mystery about a girl whose best friend had moved away without writing and telling her. She had to figure it out from an abandoned ocean-side cabin at a resort they shared during the summer. She eventually found a note from the friend, Lisa. Did I plan carefully? Nope. Did I draw a map of the beach? Yup. THAT was something I understood. But the whole planning thing was something I didn’t do well.

I had to go back and RE-write the whole story because it was so full of plot holes, it didn’t make sense; and it certainly wasn’t a mystery! I was working against a deadline and I had to be DONE with the story. I tacked on a religious message (SONSHINE MAGAZINE was a Christian magazine) and sent it to Ruth. She sent it back.

What? WHAT!

She asked for some changes – mostly about integrating the message with the story, I laboriously made them, typed the whole thing up again, sent it – and she bought it! Several months later, the magazine showed up at my house and an artist had rendered a drawing based on my words. I was ecstatic and I found I’d learned my first lessons about writing for children: Write what you know and INTEGRATE your message because EVERY kid story has a “message” that should be INVISIBLE to a child’s critical eye. (They are WAY more critical than adults are!)

What I Learned #1: Be ready to go in a direction you’d never considered.