BooKs

Once Upon
A Rhyme

Amy
Goldman
Koss:
No
waiting for
inspiration.

Author Amy Goldman Koss
teaches children about science
and still deals
and animals
with rejection.

your book for publication?
Southfield native Amy Goldman
You have to have nerves of steel.,
Koss is the author and illustrator of
This is a remarkably competitive
What Luck! A Duck!, Curious Crea-
1
business.
tures in Peculiar Places and other
rhyming books for younger children,
Have you reached the
and the author of the new The Trou-
point where you're confi-
ble with Zinny Weston (Dial Books
dent in your abilities?
for Young Readers). She lives in Los
It wavers still. I'll sit at my comput-
Angeles with her husband and two
er
and go back and forth 50 times
children, Emily and Bennett. She
between, "This is the best thing I've
will be signing books at 2 p.m. this
ever
written," and "This is stupid. I
Sunday, June 28, at Borders Books
should go back to school and
in Farmington Hills.
become a dental technician."

Was being a writer some-
Is there a routine to your
: thing you always wanted,
1 writing? Do you plan your
or did it come to you only
books or wait for inspira-
as an adult?
tion? Where do you get
I always wrote and I always
ideas?
drew. First I made my living as an
Where Fish Go in Winter is the first
illustrator, and every now and then I
book
I remember exactly how it
got my poems published. It took a
came about. My husband and I
long time to realize I could put the
were out for dinner and I was talking
two together. My first book was
about the huge holes in my educa-
What Luck! A Duck!, published by
tion, which were there in part
--1 Price Stern Sloan, the only publisher
because I was probably bored. I
in Los Angeles at the time. I did a
wanted
to find a way to make soi-
lot of freelance work for them,
laughed at all their jokes and finally 1 ence more appealing. So I compiled
a million questions [such as "How do
noodled my way in.
cats purr?" "What is the sound in a
1
sea shell?"] of which they used a
Did it take a lot of nerve
handful — and of course not every-
to ask them to consider

Elizabeth Applebaum AppleTree Editor

Now that you've had a
thing wanted to rhyme. I write every
number of books published,
day. I no longer illustrate my books,
do you pretty much simply
nor do I do covers or even have any-
submit your work to edi-
: thing to say about the covers. I get
tors, then it's off to the
up, make my coffee, sit at the corn-
press?
puter and work in whatever allow-
No. I still get rejected. Zinny got
: able time I have. Often, after the kids
two fabulous reviews, then I sent
go to bed I work, too. With two chil-
out
another book and it was reject-
1 dren, there's no waiting for inspira-
: ed. You are never safe. I still have
tion, though.
to pace and worry, worry, worry. If
the actual writing wasn't so wonder-
You recently had your first
I
ful,
this would be hell. And it does-
The
I. book for older children,
1 Trouble with Zinny Weston, : n't pay well.

published. Is writing for
that group different?
It's a slightly different process. All
my other books were researched. A
lot of time was taken learning
I whether ants sleep, then trying to
cram it into verse. Now it's all from
I inside. The hardest part is making
the transition from one world to
1 another, from "I'm completely
immersed in this story" to "I'm their
1 mother and they're .hungry." I'd also
read that at times your own charac-
ters bossed you around, and now
I've found that you can tell a char-
1 acter, "You go in and apologize,"
1 and your character says, "No
I way." It takes you over. It's a
wrestling match, but a fun one.

Is this a field in which
many think they are called,
but few are chosen?
Almost everyone thinks he or she
has what it takes to become an
author. I get a call at least once a
week from someone who has writ-
ten or has a friend who has written
a children's book. A phenomenal
amount of people think they can do
this. To make it, you have to be will-
ing to put up with an enormous
amount of rejection. And it used to
be that you would get it on an 8 x
12 paper; now it's just a little
postage stamp that says, "Nor
because they send out so many of
them. Ili

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