Rhyming Picture Book Month: An Interview with Bad Bye / Good Bye’s Deborah Underwood

A real post that has nothing to do with videos on a Sunday?  Am I out of my friggin’ gourd?  Maybe so, but today is a special occasion.  You see, today, I am pleased to announce that I helped write something . . . on another person’s blog.  Admittedly I don’t usually do that sort of thing but when Angie Karcher met me at an SCBWI Regional Conference in Indiana last November (my very first keynote!) she convinced me that this was a cool idea.

You see Angie’s been running a Rhyming Picture Book Month series over at her blog and she has some pretty darn big names involved.  Just take a look at the calendar and you can see a lot of familiar faces, as well as some newbies.  When she asked me to contribute something I was initially stumped.  Then an idea hit.  I have read a LOT of picture books in 2014.  Why don’t I just sift through them and find the rhyming picture book I liked best?

Easier said than done.  For all their charms, good rhyming picture books are near impossible to do.  At their worst they sound like Dr. Seuss in a blender.  At their best they shine like bright jewels in a sea of morass.  Fortunately, there is one book out in 2014 that struck me as particularly smart and beautiful.  None other than Deborah Underwood’s Bad Bye / Good Bye.

Deborah was a doll.  Head on over to Angie’s site where Ms. Underwood sits down (in the proverbial sense) and answers the ins and outs of how one goes about writing something that rhymes while telling a complete story at the same time.  Then, when you’re done with that, take a trip to Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast where Jules interviews artist Jonathan Bean and shows some truly cool behind-the-scenes sketches of the book in question.  Fun stuff for a pretty Sunday.

Filed under: Interviews