Hello readers, and welcome back to our WONDERful blog! It’s time to share the results of our last Pitch it to Me Challenge. I know more than a few months have passed, so thanks for be patient with me. I’ll come back to the reasons for that and plans for future posts in a moment, but first let’s find out who won.
Fabulous author Judy Shemtob pitched her story, COME BACK ZIEFER, to guest star Candace Spizzirri and me to see what magical words we could spin. Each pitch had quite a few votes, but only one could take first place. Here is the winning pitch:
“Zach loves nothing more than the stuffed chicken Grammy made for him. But Ziefer often “wanders” and Zach must retrace his steps each time to find him. When there’s a power fail-ure in Grammy’s building, Zach thinks Ziefer may have wandered off for the last time. Only the reader can guess where Ziefer might be!”
Thank you to Judy and Candace for participating in the challenge. Although this pitch was mine, these ladies made me work extra hard to come up with the winning words. And now Judy has some WONDERful voter feedback to help with her query letters!
But wait, there’s more . . .
I am sorry to say that keeping up with the challenge has been – well – a challenge – these last few months. My work as a publisher takes up most of my time, and special projects like The Pitch it to Me Challenge don’t get the attention they deserve. After a lot of thought, I have decided to change the direction of my posts. I hope fans of the challenge will continue to tune in and support the blog and writing community as you have done in the past.
Going forward, I would still like to offer an interactive component to each post, most likely through an “Ask a Publisher” format or something of a similar nature. If you have a topic you want to know more about, share in the comments below and I will consider it for later posts.
Until next time . . .
Welcome back, everyone! The next Pitch It to Me Challenge is here! It’s incredible how fast time flies when you are having fun (or … when you have two kids at home doing remote instruction, which isn’t fun, but it does leave me wondering what happened to the hours in a day).
Natalie Cohn attended the University of Louisville, majored in Art History and Humanities. Natalie is a 2nd year member of the SCBWI, joined Story Storm 2019, two years in 12×12, a recurring graduate of Children’s Book Academy, and is taking a Writing Barn class. She’s a part of the KidLit community, SubClub, and several other social writing groups on Facebook and Twitter. Natalie attended the MidSouth SCBWI conference in 2019, and she is part of five critique groups. Natalie loves being creative, crafty, and getting messy, and her goals are to inspire kids to read. She reads a lot of children’s books and enjoys bringing imagination to life through her stories. Fiction books have always been her favorite, and now she enjoys reading with her three minions.
Laura Roettiger is the author of ALIANA REACHES FOR THE MOON and has enjoyed working with children ever since she was no longer considered a child herself. She was a reading specialist and elementary teacher in Chicago, IL before moving to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado where she worked in Environmental Education and as a mentor for new teachers for two years at a STEM school. She is a judge for Rate Your Story, works with third grade classrooms through #KidsNeedMentors, tutors adults in the Boulder Reads Literacy program at the Boulder Public Library, and works with BookstoKids, a Colorado based literacy nonprofit. Her superpower is encouraging curiosity in children and her students, letting them know she believes in them. She has three children of her own whose curiosity and creativity led all of them into STEM related professions.
Purchase ALIANA REACHES FOR THE MOON through your local indie bookstore OR:
Some of my earliest memories involve storytelling. I remember laying under quilts with the silver needles flashing in and out, burning marshmallows around roaring fires, and sitting still as a mouse while the grown-ups spilled story after story into my thirsty ears. “Remember when” were, and still are, some of my favorite words.
Nancy Churnin is the award-winning author of eight picture book biographies with a ninth due in 2021. Beautiful Shades of Brown, The Art of Laura Wheeler Waring, is A Mighty Girl pick that will be featured at the 2020 Ruby Bridges Reading Festival at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn. in May. The William Hoy Story, a Texas 2X2 pick, has been on multiple state reading lists. Manjhi Moves a Mountain is the winner of the 2018 South Asia Book Award and a Junior Library Guild selection. Martin & Anne, the Kindred Spirits of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank is on the 2020 Notable Book for a Global Society list from the International Literacy Association. Irving Berlin, the Immigrant Boy Who Made America Sing is a 2019 Sydney Taylor and National Council for the Social Studies Notable. Nancy graduated cum laude from Harvard, has a masters from Columbia and lives in Plano, Texas with her husband, a dog named Dog and two cantankerous cats.
The Wonder of Words 