I can’t believe it’s already February and this is the first official giveaway I’m offering on my blog for 2024.  But trust me, this book is worth it!  AND as it is the first giveaway of 2024, I’m going to run the giveaway for TWO weeks.  Come find out why.

Mylisa Larsen was born in Idaho, has lived in eight states and two countries, and currently resides in upstate New York with her family. She is the author of several picture books, including How to Put Your Parents to Bed and All of Those Babies, and the novel Playing Through the Turnaround. You can learn more about her at her website or follow her on Instagram.

ALL OF THOSE BABIES is a mind-boggling combination of names for groups of animals (that makes the word-nerd in me very happy), baby animals around the world, and human babies.  It uses rhyme and somehow ties in growing, family, and love all in the same package.  It’s hard to describe how this story covers all of that without including spoilers, but trust me when I say you will want to study this book.  It accomplishes SO much, in very few words.  Plus the illustrations by Stephanie Laberis are amazing.  They fit so perfectly!  This is a book you won’t want to miss.

Welcome Mylisa!

Me: Can you talk a little bit about yourself and about your writing journey up to this point?  What brought you to this book?

Mylisa: I had books in my house growing up but they weren’t picture books mostly. They were books for older people. So I discovered picture books later as I read them to my own children and I fell in love. They were so varied. So clever. So funny, beautiful, amazing. I think many of us come to writing picture books this way.

And then we try to write one and it’s harder than it looks. My first picture book manuscripts were truly abysmal. Or maybe a kinder way to say that is that any time you try something new, it’s not as good as it will be after you have practiced a lot. So keep going.

I kept going. I found friends who were trying to do the same thing and we kept each other going. I looked for good teachers when I needed help. In time, I found the agent and the editors that I needed. And here we are.

Me: I love the idea of combining odd words for baby animals and babies growing.  What gave you the idea for this story?

Mylisa: It was kind of a case of “You had me at puggles.” I was doing some research for a different book and somehow came upon the fact that baby echidnas are called puggles. This amused and delighted me. And then I started looking up different baby animal names and there were so, so many that I had never heard before—crias and eyas and pufflings and cheepers. There were porcupettes, for crying out loud. To a word person, finding a whole vault of previously unknown words is like unlocking a toybox. I very quickly starting thinking about how I could get them into a book together. But just listing them, one per page seemed dull and I want fun so they got pulled into meter and rhyme. And that was definitely more fun but what do all these animals have in common? That all babies grow up.

So, two problems solved but there’s still the problem of the end. Because the picture book genre requires some sort of turn at the end of the book—a surprise, or an emotional settling into comfort, or a new question or something. There can be many different ways to do it but a book feels unfinished if that turn isn’t done well. In this book, I’m writing for younger children and younger children love to hear their own stories. So the turn I chose was a turn back toward the reader—“You once were a baby/You once were so small. . .” And then the tracing of the fact that like all of these other babies, the reader was going to grow and grow.

Me: I love the wide variety of animals that you found to include.  I also love the rhyme scheme that rolls the reader right through the book.  However, when I think of trying to combine those two things, my mind boggles.  How on earth did you get the book this tight?  How many revisions did it take to get to this state?

Mylisa: I’m laughing at this question because I have sometimes said (usually when I’m in the middle of a draft duking it out with some rhyme scheme) that writing in meter and rhyme is a war of attrition. And sometimes I win that war and sometimes I don’t and a perfectly lovely (except that I couldn’t make it work, so there’s that) manuscript goes in the drawer. But when I can figure it out, I really, really like working in meter and rhyme because it’s like putting together some giant puzzle. Or maybe it’s like finding a table with thousands of puzzle pieces on it but only a fifth of the pieces are for the puzzle you’re trying to complete and you have to both figure out which are the right pieces and what the finished puzzle looks like. 

Also, you can’t cheat in meter and rhyme so it keeps you on your toes. You can’t transpose a sentence just to make the rhyme fit. You can’t take the easy rhyme if it’s stale. You can’t cram three extra words in to make the sentence make sense or parents across the world will be cursing you as they try to read the book to their kids and stumble over your botched meter. They don’t need that.  You don’t need that. So writing in meter and rhyme is tough but there’s something about the combining of these strict requirements with the very open-endedness of choosing your own subject and taking it your own way and making something out of nothing that really makes my brain happy as I do it. I try not to write everything in meter and rhyme because it’s not the best form for every story but when I find something that I think legitimately lends itself to that treatment, there is happiness.

You ask about drafts. For me, when I’m working in meter and rhyme, it isn’t so much a matter of multiple drafts. It’s more a matter of one draft that comes together slowly and can take me a really long time. So I’ll hammer on it for two weeks or so to see if I think it’s viable in rhyme and once I decide it probably is then it’s a matter of letting it run in the background for months as my brain comes up with stanzas and I add them in and work on it for a while and then rest it and work on it again. It can take six months to a year or more. 

Me: What is one thing that surprised you in writing this story?

Mylisa: How nicely a chorus or refrain can pull a book together. This is the first book in which I’ve used that device and I was like, “Whoa, remember that technique please, Larsen. That just solved a whole lot of problems.” It pulled things together thematically but it also solved the problem that meter can have of starting to feel relentless if it goes on too long uninterrupted in exactly the same way.

Me: I love that this could be a fun book to include in the classroom OR a book to read to a new baby.  It’s fun and it teaches.  Was that always your intent?  Why did you want to share this book with young readers?

Mylisa: Honestly, at first my intent was just to get the word puggles in a book. And then my intent became to make the meter work. And only after the chorus became a thing did I realize that I was writing a book that could be read to really little ones because the rhythmic nature would be something they would enjoy but that I was also writing something that could work for elementary kids because of the fun words and the concept of development and growth. And all of the animals. The animals are so fun.

Me: The illustrations by Stephanie Laberis are absolutely perfect for this story.  I loved the many ways she made so many kinds of babies so cute (and funny!).  Were there any illustration surprises for you?  Any favorites?

Mylisa: Oh my goodness, Stephanie Laberis is brilliant. She has made this book so much fun. My editor, Andrea Welch, suggested her in an early conversation and as soon as I got off the phone and looked at her website, I immediately emailed back a “yes, please.”

So three favorites. I love that little peep on the second page that looks like she’s fallen down on the sand because she’s laughing so hard. I love that when the rough sketches came back, I thought, “Why on earth is the porcupine hanging from its tail? That isn’t even a thing.” But I knew that Steph Laberis was a total animal person so then I thought, “Wait, is there. . .?” and I looked it up and there are prehensile-tailed porcupines that live in South America! How did I get this far into my life without knowing that? New favorite animal.

The last thing that I love is that it was Stephanie Laberis who turned the refrain into those gorgeous double-page spreads that show animals in all the developmental stages between baby and adult. Such beautiful spreads! So many more animals than I was able to get into the text. I love those pages.

Me: Any advice for other new picture book writers?

Mylisa: Read. Read hundreds (and I am not using hyperbole here, I mean hundreds) of picture books. If your librarians start asking you questions like, “Do you run a preschool?” then you are at the right level. Books are often your best teachers. Notice what works for you. What leaves you cold. Note what children respond to and what leaves them cold. Notice how many, many kinds of books all live in the picture book genre. It’s truly an amazing, wide-ranging genre. As an exercise, type out the texts of books you think are stellar so you get a feel for how long a contemporary picture book is, how the sentences go together, etc.

Don’t be discouraged that it’s harder than it looks and that (at least for me) it takes longer to get good at a new genre than you might think. Find good people to travel with. Have fun.

I love that.  Great advice Mylisa.  Thank you for stopping by my blog today.

But wait, dear readers.  There’s more!  Mylisa has agreed to giveaway a copy of her book to one lucky winner.  Because this book is ultimately about love, I thought it would be fun to run it through Valentine’s day.  SO the giveaway lasts for two weeks.  You can enter through the rafflecopter here!