59 episodes
BookSmitten Kelly J. Baptist, Heather Shumaker, Patrick Flores-Scott, Jack Cheng
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4.7 • 15 Ratings
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Seeing a hopeful, human world through children's literature. Hosted by authors Kelly J. Baptist, Jack Cheng, Patrick Flores-Scott, and Heather Shumaker – your book smitten crew. We cover the whole range of kidlit, from picture books to middle grade and young adult fiction, as well as writing, reading, and publishing. This season: We’re writing picture books!
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Titles and Critiques
As we inch our way toward finishing our BookSmitten challenge, the crew talks titles and shares pages from their picture book manuscripts.
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Dummies
We’re not dummies … but for this episode we made some! The crew talks about the invaluable experience of making picture book dummies—aka mockups—even for non-illustrators.
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Page Turns and Word Count
The drama. The suspense. The page turns! The crew covers the similarities and differences between creating page turners in novels and picture books, and the tricks and challenges of letting go of our writerly attachments.
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Year-end Reflections
The crew looks back on key lessons from the season so far, what brought them joy in 2023, and whether or not they'll keep writing picture books after this challenge.
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Outside Inspirations
In our penultimate episode for 2023, Patrick, Jack, and Heather talk about all the things they do when they’re not writing or dreaming up stories – and how these things eventually flow back into their stories.
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Making Music with Your Prose
The crew tackles another chapter of Writing Picture Books: Making Music with Your Prose. We talk about the challenges of picking perfect words; delve into alliteration, onomatopoeia, simile, and metaphor; and the ways we hone our intuition as writers over many sentences and drafts.
Customer Reviews
My virtual critique group!
The authenticity in this podcast and its hosts keeps me coming back. They offer a true version of the author life and let us along as they work through all the problems the rest of us writers face too. I feel like they’re my virtual critique group!
Smitten with BookSmitten!
I’m smitten with the BookSmitten podcast! Binged several episodes back to back on a long Michigan road trip and found the content to be helpful, hopeful, real and fresh. Heather, Jack, Kelly, and Patrick each bring a unique perspective and the energy created by the group reminds listeners that it takes a village to create good books! Carrie Pearson, author
Upbeat perspective on young people and reading
Episodes are wide ranging, presenting a variety of approaches to writing for children and teens, societal pressures and opportunities, and what & how children grow with books. Lots of good references to specific books with a little bit about why they're good or important. Episodes are all free-standing; you can listen in any order. They vary from 25 to 45 minutes long. Delightful to listen to these authors.