if you want to know one reason why it is very rewarding to write books for children (especially ones that are old enough to write), just one. It is letters that end like this.

I read a good book called ” The Secret Garden” but it was not as good as yours.

aaaah. Thank you smart girl from outside of Chicago whose name starts with a P!

A little story told with silhouettes especially for you

watch?v=DOZyMGPMPVU&feature=related

Thumbelina, Tiny Runaway Bride in kindle-on-iphone DYSLEXIA-BUSTING version!

I have been wondering for a while why nobody else  seems to think that reading books on an iphone is the greatest thing since the invention of the french fry. The rest of you do not appear to be engrossed in Anna Karenina as you sit on the subway—or perusing  free samples of randomly enticing Amazon books. Or trolling through art at the Louvre for gosh sakes, (oops, now my A.D.D. is showing.) I can’t figure it out for the life of me.

Kindle is a free app. The phone is on your person. Reading is so much fun. What’s not to like? Apparently a lot: My friends are stuck on liking the heft of real books (horses and carts were nice too)  or reading “real” kindles with the lighting all perfect.  There is actually grousing on the web about an iphone being hard to hold for long periods of time? huh? It rests beautifully on the belly while lying down.   Are the rest of you that organized that you can pull out  the paperback novel to just the right page for that moment after the dentist gave  the injection and before the mouth gets numb enough for the drilling to begin? Well I’m not. But if we have got to this stage of minutia it’s not really even worth discussing.  I heart reading on my iphone. You don’t.

Well leave it to the reading-on-the-iPhone habit itself to come up with a possible answer to why this may be so. According to this morsel on The  Guardian, a UK paper

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/apr/06/iphone-makes-reading-books-easier

Dyslexics like me do well reading on iPhones. Okay it is a little anecdotal. Okay the article is specifically about dyslexia and I lean more in the A.D.D. direction, but hey, where dyslexics go can A.D.D ers be far behind? (You are allowed to make jokes about these things when you have them.) Maybe there is something here.

See if it helps your dyslexic friends and family members.  Bring on the scientific studies! This discovery could save the world!

NOW FOR THE COMMERCIAL SEGMENT OF OUR PROGRAM:  why not start with my books?!: Thumbelina (Tiny Runaway Bride) and Cinderella (As If You Didn’t Already Know the Story) are available on kindle for the low low price of $9.99. (The latter book isn’t actually available yet, but they will happily take your payment and send it to your device of choice in a few months.) Behold how cutely the illustrations jostle with the text on an iphone! Ideal for a little learning disabled friend or relative– or, as per the Guardian article, an adult making up for an impoverished dyslexic childhood of not reading.

Hans Christian Andersen

The Man

Hans Christian Andersen was an amazing paper cutter. Not just sort of good for a writer. His cut paper pictures wink across all this time. I was already deep into this medium when I stumbled upon collaborating as a writer with this master of the art. (Collaborating implies that he had some choice about it which he did not.) Then I illustrated the book with the technique of cut paper just as I had with my earlier children’s book Cinderella (As If You Didn’t Already Know the Story). An odd coincidence to say the least seeing as the storyteller Andersen himself was a notorious cutter of paper. Then again, maybe it is not a coincidence at all, but divine synchronicity.  

Andersen never made images with scissors that were intended to illustrate his stories. More they were little presents he made for children he cared about.  (Which come to think of it is something I have begun doing, but more about that later.)

As my blog-linking skills develop I will show more paper cutting of Andersen’s (and around the world). It is a medium in which people have expressed themselves in every corner of the globe.  I like that it is cheap and binary, and tends to be a crazy mix of figurative and abstract. The paper is there or it is not there: These are the choices. Repetition and chance play an integral part in a process that is like a child’s game.  To tell you the truth you cannot make a bad picture with cut paper.

 I did not include any of Mr. Andersen’s cut paper in my recently published Thumbelina, Tiny Runaway Bride. Probably I would not have been able to get permission.  Interesting that Andersen also combines writing  with pen and ink next to the cut out paper images. I love the way that looks.