Linda Zajac

I spent the week working hard revising a nonfiction picture book.  It gave me a new appreciation for nonfiction PB writers and illustrators.  It was a puzzle shaving the readability level, explaining the science, pondering illustrator possibilities, showing action, and turning words into art.  In my case at least, dropping the readability level increased the word count.  I was joyous to jack down the Flesch-Kincaid number from 5.7 to a more manageable 3.7.  Cutting sentence length worked well to a point.  I went too far and made it choppy.  To compensate for this, the number of words rose by about 500.  There was one part that dragged.  Initially (last post) I thought an illustration would fix this, but after more thought, I came up with a better solution.  I broke up the science like a pizza and evenly distributed pieces throughout the manuscript. 

My deadline to submit this for the conference is March 10th.  It's in great shape!

It's been a green winter, so when it snowed yesterday, I got the camera out.   That snow covered debris and stacked wood came from fallen trees from the freak October blizzard in 2011.