I like my job, which has nothing to do with writing, reading or publishing (why I like it!), but I do work with an extremely creative bunch. There's the sales specialist who sings 'forties show tunes in a rich be-bop that makes me swoon. There's the creative-writing senior with a piercing stare who works and works and never says a word.* Then there's the young guy who does the most amazing doodles in our work-notes book.**He'd make a great picture book illustrator!
"So," I said last night after he turned my dinosaur-eating-a-daisy into a surfboarding cat hanging ten beneath the starlit sea, "have you ever thought about the children's market?"
Apparently he has. We talked for a while about agents and dummies and submitting and how the writing is harder than the drawing for him.*** And then he told me about his secret trips to the children's department in our local Barnes and Noble.
"But so much of the art is digital. So I see maybe one or two things that I like," he said.
Well. Going into the Barnes and Noble Children's Department, I told him, is a lot like wandering into our store's cleaning products aisle expecting to find something that smells of the deeply mysterious perfume of Scheherazade Herself.****
Frankly,all you're going to get is a snoot-full of Febreze.
Don't get me wrong, I said. I like Febreze. I just don't like Febreze in the morning, Febreze at night; Febreze Febreze all day long. To start with, it's kind of an icky word---half fabric, half breeze with that faint, sickening hint of febrile. And it's a smell that smells good but not great.
It doesn't smell of anything or for anything or because of anything---it's just a chemical absence of extremes. It smells like an illusion.
And let's face it, the commercial marketplace is heavily (heavily) redolent of writerly Febreze. Febreze sells great because Febreze is easy and it reads well at the beach and there's not much to wrestle over late at night when the lights are out and you're having trouble sleeping what with trying to figure out if there's a god and what the meaning of life is and who will you love and will he love you in return? Febreze just don't enter into it, man. Febreze is inconsequential---which is pretty much how we like our children's books. Undemanding---but not outright stinky.
"Have you been to the downtown library yet?" I asked. "They have a mammoth children's collection."*****
"Nah. Isn't that just full of old stuff?"
Yup. Our public library, has a long, odorific tail of writerly smells---authors like George MacDonald and E.L. Konigsburg and Jean Craighead George---ready to be cracked open and give the reader a big ol' whiff. But it has tons of new stuff too, and not just the Febreze-ladened, nossir. You'll get plenty of brilliant writing with top notes of citrus and lavender; you'll get the off-beat, the quirky and the just-about insane You never know what those librarian mischief-makers are going to buy next. Lots of books, though. Lots and lots of books that smell like heaven and hell and Lake Michigan in between..................******
_________
*We'll all end up in her novel. I just hope I'm unrecognizable, but if not I'll be the aging-hippie-with-a-foul-mouth-and-encyclopedic-knowledge-of-deck-stains-God-help-her.
**I like to doodle, too. I can draw a mean dinosaur-eating-a-flower. I am awfully good at tulips.
***This is, of course, a good sign. Good writers find writing great stuff incredibly hard. He also told me that he is drawn to organic shapes, like da Vinci's deluge or Van Gough's trees.
I love 'em too!
****Or the aftershave of Gustav Flaubert!
*****Their collection is so large in fact that it encompasses several copies of my books, which are donkey's years old.
******I love the smell of the lake. Some people say is smells like dead fish and sunburnt feet but I say it smells like joy.
