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"In Williamsburg this summer I bought two of your books. They are great!" George, six-year-old from Georgia |
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Archive for the ‘Author’s Purpose’ Category
Class Project: ROUGH DRAFTS!!
Written on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 [permanent link]Be a part of my next book!! As your students work on their writing skills, I’d love to have them practice by editing ME. I’m posting more and more on my website about the author’s choices I make, and I’ve just added some rough draft pages from my upcoming book about World War I.
http://www.chestercomix.com/rough-drafts/
The rough drafts are the second step in my Creative Trail. (The first is research – When I pick a topic, I love the hunt for information I will use to tell the story the way I want to tell it.) I hope that inviting students into this second step with me will excite them about the creative process. Teachers can print these rough draft pages and give them to students to review and correct. Now, for once, the students get to be the editor! I’d love to get feedback from teachers and students via email or via a snail mail return of the pages, marked in red or green or purple or whatever color the students want to use to mark their suggestions.
I will take all suggestions into consideration before making my final author’s choices on these pages. Classes who make real contributions to this story will get signed copies of the final book!
Tags: author's choice, Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Chester the Crab, creative process, World War I
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I Dream of Sparky
Written on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 [permanent link]
I’ve been blessed to meet most of my cartooning heroes in the past 20 years, but I never got to meet Charles “Sparky” Schulz.
Until two nights ago. I had a dream that I found him — he was undercover, hiding from his worldwide fame as the creator of “Peanuts.” He was a schoolbus driver for elementary kids! Somehow I had reason to get on his bus (though my two sons are well out of elementary school now, I may have been there mentally because that’s still my target audience for my comix) and I easily recognized him under his old guy felt cap. He looked like a kindly grandpa and was very quiet — even as he asked me to not reveal his secret. Of course I promised I would not.
It was a great dream. It made me very happy to make that simple connection, standing on the steps of that bus. The day outside the bus was sunny and warm — were we in California, where Schulz the Quiet Minnesotan had found a place to draw his magic? Or had he moved to my town, Williamsburg, like so many other retirees? My dreams are always based in reality — I’m never flying, never shooting through space talking to aliens. I’m chatting with Charlie Brown’s dad!!
A 42-year-old cartoonist dreaming about Charles Schulz is nothing remarkable — my generation of cartoonists grew up chasing his example. I and many of my peers started drawing by copying the Charlie Brown and Snoopy strips we read in the newspaper. I recreated a bunch of them line-for-line and mailed them to Schulz, and some nice secretary mailed me back the form letter you see above. And it was one of the best moments of my life.
Thank goodness Sparky paid for that secretary to crank out those form letters. That simple piece of paper inspired me to keep going, to keep practicing, to believe that my dream of finding a job as a cartoonist could be real. I’ve had plenty of inspirations from many sources to be an Artist, but Schulz was the shining example that you could get a JOB as a CARTOONIST and maybe conquer the world.
And here he was in my dream, giving up the world to live a simple life caretaking children. Which is what he had already done for decades with his cartooning.
From one of those kids, Thanks, Sparky!
Tags: Bentley Boyd, cartooning, Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown, Chester Comix, Chester the Crab, elementary school, Peanuts, Snoopy
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OK, Twitter too!
Written on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 [permanent link]Woah, there are a lot of librarians on Twitter!!! And plenty of other cool people, too. So now ChesterComix will be a Tweet you can follow as I hack my way through history.
I remember hearing about Twitter for the first time on an NPR talkshow in 2007. The host kept reading sample Tweets and then asking the founder, “But WHY do I care that Jamie just ate a taco?!?!” I asked the same question. I love Facebook so much that I thought it and this public website blog would keep my update bases covered. Who would care if I ate a taco?!?!
But Twitter is really connecting a lot of interesting people. And it seems a great Do-It-Yourself way to send a short press release. And my business is all about Do-It-Yourself tech. So I’ve added my voice to one of the most insistent pieces of the Web 2.0 cloud of information.
I hope it’s not too boring for you to hear about when I’m researching just how to draw an 1890s farmhouse in Idaho . . .
Check it out: http://twitter.com/ChesterComix
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Chester the Crab, educational comics, graphic novels, history comics, Twitter
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