Josh Funk has a long bio, a short bio, a very short bio, a bio where you can fill in the blanks, and a bio written by his cat, all on his website joshfunkbooks.com. Since there’s no way I can improve on all that, I’ll just let you know that Josh is a software engineer based in New England, the author of many funny, popular books and that I’m super excited that he’s made THE KIDS ARE ALL WRITE one of his blog tour stops to talk about his fourth and latest adventure in his Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast series: Short & Sweet. Welcome, Josh!
Congratulations on Short & Sweet, your fourth Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast book! Back in the day when you were still an aspiring picture book writer and you were inspired by your kids arguing about having French toast or pancakes for breakfast, did you ever think you would have a fourth book in a series about this?
Thanks, Nancy! And no! When I wrote the first book in this series, all fourteen drafts over a period of a year and a half, I was just hoping that I would someday get some book published. I was so far away from thinking about sequels, let along serieses or quadrilogies (is that a word?). And I still feel so fortunate to have published any books at all, let alone multiple. I don’t think the “pinch me” feeling will ever get old (I certainly hope it doesn’t).
What inspired this particular story? Part of the Short & Sweet plot hinges on Professor Biscotti accidentally turning Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast into toddlers and I couldn’t help wondering if the dad in you sometimes wishes you could do that to your kids, too — if just for a little bit.
Well, there are a couple things that went into the idea behind this. First and foremost, I’ve recently been getting the question, “How are Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast not stale yet?” from a number of readers. So I wanted to address that, as well as make it possible for them (in theory) to be able to live in the fridge forever. Secondly, I like the fact that each of the books in the series is sort of a different ‘genre,’ if you will. Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast is a race. The Case of the Stinky Stench is a mystery. Mission Defrostable is an action-adventure-thriller. I wanted to keep up the trend of switching genres. I like to think that Short & Sweet is a magical bodyswap / sci-fi comedy (think Big or Freaky Friday meets Honey I Shrunk the Kids or The Absent-Minded Professor). And thirdly, I wanted to try and throw it back a bit to the fast-paced madcap culinary chaos of the original and a little less dialogue than books 2 and 3. Putting it all together, this is what I cooked up.
You worked hard at your craft for a long time. You endured a lot of rejections in the beginning, mainly from literary agents. Then you decided to submit directly to publishers and boom! You had three books come out from 2015-16, have an agent you love and you haven’t slowed down since. What kept you from getting discouraged in the beginning? What made you persevere?
The writing community has been so warm and welcoming. I’d like to think that even if I never sold a book, I’d be so enamored with the friends I’ve made and the experiences I’ve had, it would still have all been worth it. But also, rejections are part of the deal. You know that going into it. It doesn’t hurt any less getting them. But I also knew that my writing was improving. I could tell that my stories were getting better, the more new ones I wrote - both because I was enjoying them more, but also because of the responses from my critique partners. Which brings it back to the community. Having the support of other writers going through the same experiences alongside you - and hopefully some ahead of you - is critical. Having more experienced writers around to be able to ask for support is something I was very fortunate to have (both regarding the craft of writing and about the business of writing).
What do you hope other writers learn from your experience?
It’s important to keep writing new things. My first manuscript was terrible. My next manuscript was a little less terrible. And my third was slightly better than the second. But I attended workshops and classes and webinars and kept writing new things. That first manuscript was flawed in so many ways and was never going to get published. But I needed to write it. And revise it. And submit it. And get rejections. I now know I shouldn’t have been submitting it, but it was all part of my journey, so I don’t regret it. I learned so much from that process. And I was able to take all that I learned and start new manuscripts with much better foundations. Also, don’t use ridiculous pseudonyms. Going as Papa J Funk definitely hindered me in getting an agent. Oops.
What drives and inspires you to write as much as you do?
I like to entertain. Myself. My kids. My friends. And hopefully strangers. I have fun writing things that a brilliantly talented illustrator will eventually render on the page. I want to entertain children, but also the adult readers in their lives. The way I see picture books is that adults will be reading them to children (in most cases). Teachers, librarians, parents, and so forth. As a parent, I wanted to be entertained as I read picture books - and if I wasn’t, I was likely not to want to give a book a repeat read. And so I want to create books that adults will enthusiastically enjoy with their children or students or patrons. I write books that I want to read. And hopefully children and their grown-ups will, too.
How long does it typically take you to take a manuscript from idea to acquisitions? Does the number of revisions vary from book to book?
It’s completely all over the place. Ballpark, I’ll write 5-10 drafts before sending it to my agent and if she agrees it’s worth moving forward with, we’ll revise a couple times before submitting to publishers. The truth is, most books don’t even get to my agent. And even those that do, only a little more than half ever go on submission. And of those, about half eventually sell, but not before some (or many) rejections roll in. All of these numbers are improving slightly over time as I realize which books are worth pursuing and which aren’t earlier on in the process. Here are the raw (vague, because it’s publishing) numbers. I have 12 published books, with a few more on the way. But if you take out sequels, books that were someone else’s intellectual property, and the two books that came out of slush piles before I was agented, my agent and I have sold a total of only 6 books in over 150 submissions to editors. That’s a 4% success rate with almost 150 rejections (or black holes).
Is it a challenge to find a work/life/writing balance? Where and how does your writing fit in with your time with your family and your work as a software engineer?
I write whenever I can fit it in. Coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, but mostly in the evenings and on weekends. Usually when I’m really into a story, I’ll work on it in ALL my free time for a few days or weeks or longer until it’s done. But I’m not one of the types that writes every day. Which is probably why I don’t write anything longer than picture books. I don’t have the mental stamina to handle that.
Do Brendan Kearney’s illustrations for this series crack you up? I love all the visual jokes, particularly the signs being held up in the final pages of this book, and am wondering if you two collaborate on that or if he is inspired by your text to come up with his funny stuff independently.
Brendan’s art is hilarious. The band names are all him - he’s been adding them since book #2 (The Case of the Stinky Stench) when Spuddy Holly and the Croquettes played on the final page (there’s always a party on the final spread before the gatefold). In Mission Defrostable it was The Peach Boys. And Juice Springsteen leads the way in Short & Sweet (but if you look closely, there are a whole bunch of other food bands on the festival poster - that you’ll have read the book to discover). I love that Brendan adds so much humor to the series. I’m so fortunate that Sterling found him.
What inspired Pirasaurs!, Dear Dragon, How to Code a Sandcastle and the It’s Not a Fairy Tale series?
The word “pirasaurs” came to me in the middle of the night back in 2013 and I wrote it down on a pad I keep next to my bed for just such occasions and went back to sleep. The next morning I saw it and started a first draft. Three and a half years later, Pirasaurs! became a book. I don’t know what I was eating or reading or watching before bed that previous night. But whatever it was, it worked.
Dear Dragon stemmed from my wife leading a pen pal postcard exchange with other middle school classes around the world - and my son being very into dragons when he was in preschool. Both were discussed on a car ride to a family theater production of Charlotte’s Web and somewhere along the way, the ideas melded together. When I wrote it, I thought it would be funny if both characters didn’t realize they were writing to different species. And I think it is funny - but the reason Penguin acquired it was because they loved that two characters with completely different backgrounds became friends. Which I didn’t realize until my editor explained that to me (even though I wrote the book). Writing is weird sometimes.
For the How to Code with Pearl and Pascal series, it was my agent who suggested I should try writing a book about coding, since it’s an important topic for youngsters and I write code for my day job. But taking a complicated topic and breaking it down into something digestible by the picture book crowd (or even my non-coder adult critique partners) was not an easy task. It took three and a half completely different attempts at writing a picture book about coding before I landed on How to Code a Sandcastle. But it was all worth it.
For the It’s Not a Fairy Tale series, I was mostly inspired by B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures. I thought it was great that the adult reader looked foolish reading the book aloud to a child. And I thought, what if the characters in a book actually argued back with the person reading it. Add to that how characters in fairy tales often do very … let’s say ‘not smart’ … things. I mean, if a giant beanstalk grew in your backyard overnight, would you climb it … or call the police (or maybe a gardener)? If you lived in the woods your whole life, wouldn’t you know that animals would eat bread crumbs if you left them on the ground? And if you went to visit your grandmother and a wolf was in her bed, don’t you think you’d be able to tell that it wasn’t her?
Put those ideas together and you’ve got smart-alecky characters who talk back to the storyteller leading to (hopefully) lots of children laughing at the adult reader.
How did your Lost in the Library: Patience and Fortitude series come about? Writing stories about the lions in front of one of the most amazing libraries in the world had to be a thrill. Had you ever wondered about the lions in front of the 42nd Street Library growing up? How did their story come to you?
This also came about because of my agent - she is great at networking. She heard from an editor at Macmillan that the New York Public Library was partnering with Henry Holt (the Macmillan imprint) to make a handful of books about the library. One was a middle grade novel (which turned into The Story Collector series by Kristin O’Donnell Tubb), one was a coloring book, and one was a picture book about Patience and Fortitude. My agent pitched me the plot suggested by the editor (Patience goes missing and Fortitude goes searching for him in the library, getting a tour of the library and eventually finding Patience in the children’s room) and asked if I was interested in writing a sample. Of course, I said yes.
A few months later, I found out they picked mine and then I had to write the book (fast, in fact, as Macmillan told the library it would be out in the fall of 2018 and I didn’t officially get the go ahead until the winter of 2017. But I took a quick trip to get a behind the scenes tour of the library (Boston to New York to Boston via Amtrak all in one day in early January) and pretty much wrapped up the final draft of the text by the end of that month.
And why a sequel, you ask? That one was my idea - but it’s the library’s fault. You see, I wrote a draft of the backmatter describing all the different rooms and statues, etc that Fortitude met along his journey in the first book, Lost in the Library. I wrote this for the final bullet point: “Fortitude finally finds Patience in the Children’s Center, which is located on the ground floor just beside the 42nd Street entrance.” It was sent along to NYPL staff for fact-checking and to make any tweaks they deemed necessary. The NYPL appended this line: “As of 2020, the children’s library will be located at the newly renovated Mid-Manhattan Library across Fifth Avenue, which will be called the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library.” WHAT?!? As of 2020 the children’s library was going to be MOVED?!? I wrote this book based on a summary given to me and in two years, the book wouldn’t make sense any more?!? (thanks, Kirkus, for pointing this out in your review, btw… *eyeroll*).
However, I (several months later) realized that THIS could be the conflict for the sequel. Patience and Fortitude venture into the children’s room one night and all of the books are GONE! Voila - we’ve got Where Is Our Library?, in which Patience and Fortitude race ALL over the island of Manhattan searching for the books, racing by kidlit literary locales (like the Plaza and the High Line), visiting kidlit statues (like Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park) and other libraries (there are 92 branches of the NYPL) before eventually finding their library across the street. (Where Is Our Library?, illustrated by Stevie Lewis, comes out on 10/27/20). So…are your kids impressed? Do they take credit for your success? Do either of them write or give you ideas about what to write next?
When you’re searching for a new idea, are you ever tempted to encourage them to argue about something?
Ha! I always encourage children to argue - all children, not just mine - it makes for great story ideas. But no, they don’t really take credit for things. They’re a little impressed, but not much. I have a hard time getting them to listen to me when I want to read them new drafts (until I remind them that if they want to go to college, I have to keep selling books). And if they have ideas, I encourage them to write them. I’d never steal my kids’ ideas (but I’ll definitely take their critical feedback if they’re willing to offer it).
You caution people about rhyming for good reasons — agents and editors are wary of it, it’s hard to do well, it makes books a harder sell for foreign translations. And yet…you rhyme. All the time. Charmingly. Why?
I was stubborn at first and didn’t give up, despite hearing all the stigma attached to rhyming picture books. And because of that I made a ton of mistakes .. but eventually learned how to rhyme better (it took a long time - and I’m still learning more about writing in rhyme all the time). For me, I feel like there has to be a reason why I should be the one to write a book as opposed to someone else. I have to bring some element of charm that makes the book special. In the case of the How to Code with Pearl and Pascal series, the charm is that the books are about coding. In the It’s Not a Fairy Tale Series, the charm is the meta aspect to the fractured fairy tales. And lots of other times, the charm is rhyme. I think I’m pretty decent at it, and hopefully people enjoy reading them.
What do you recommend for aspiring rhymesters?
Don’t write in rhyme. But seriously, I could talk about this for hours. I guess I’d say a couple things:
1.Rhythm is way more important than rhyme (and also harder to learn). Any kindergartener can rhyme. But nailing the rhythm is the tricky part.
2. Picture books are meant to be read aloud, often performed. And rhyming picture books are, after all, picture books. Picture books are a unique medium where the reader will likely have never read nor heard the words before (unlike a song, which one can emulate). So it’s important that the words are as easy to read (and PERFORM!) as possible. No adult wants to look foolish in front of children (unless that’s the intent of the book, of course).
3. It’s not about YOU and how YOU read the book - it’s about EVERYONE ELSE. And I mean EVERYONE who speaks the language. All accents. If it rhymes in New England it needs to rhyme in Texas. If the rhythm works in Seattle, it also needs to work in New York. Picture books are only about 500 words. I go through every syllable to try to make sure they’re the right ones. I recommend you do, too. Also, don’t write in rhyme.
You have always been a super helpful and supportive member of the kid lit community. You offer great free tips on writing on your website and generously boost other writers. Please share why that’s important to you.
As I mentioned, the kidlit community has been so welcoming since the very beginning. Living in New England, there are a plethora of writers and illustrators who’ve helped me along my journey toward publication. And I’ve learned a lot (although I know I still have lots to learn). I’d love to help folks avoid the mistakes I made along the way and hopefully give people a bit of a head start if possible. Also, you can only post ‘buy my book’ so often on social media before people will either tune it out or unfollow you. Or both. You have to provide some sort of interesting content. And at first, I didn’t really think I had any interesting content to share. So I wrote some blog posts about what I’d learned so far about writing and shared those. Eventually I cleaned them up and turned them into a Resources for Writers page on my website. And maybe, if it’s helpful to you, you’ll consider buying my books. *wink* I’m guessing you have another half dozen books in the hopper.
Can you tell us a little about what’s up next?
After Short & Sweet, I have two more sequels coming out, both on October 27th, 2020: Where Is Our Library?, as I discussed earlier, and It’s Not Little Red Riding Hood, in which Red questions the storyteller’s plan to have her walk in the woods ALL ALONE, the Wolf calls in sick (Captain Hook fills in), and basically nothing goes according to plan - illustrated once again, brilliantly, by Edwardian Taylor. And I do have a few more books in the pipeline … but unfortunately I can’t talk about them yet (and not all of them rhyme!). But follow me on social media and I’ll be sure to shout about them as soon as I’m able!
Is there anything you'd like to add?
I’d love to share a couple of my favorite recent books if you don’t mind. I really enjoyed Your Name Is a Song written by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow and illustrated by Luisa Uribe. It’s a great story that should be read in every classroom on the first day of school. And a terrific novel I read recently is The Wonder of Wildflowers by Anna Staniszewski. It’s a fantasy about a little girl named Mira who moves to a country of privileged citizens who are allowed to use a “natural super-drug” called Amber which is basically a liquid that makes you completely healthy and very smart. It explores privilege and immigration in a kid-friendly way. And thanks so much for inviting me to stop by and chat!
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