Today’s picture book piqued my curiosity, as it was a funnier-than-average farm yard story.  I had to learn more!

Julie Falatko writes books for children. She is the author of the picture books Snappsy the Alligator (Did Not Ask to Be in This Book) and Snappsy the Alligator and His Best Friend Forever (Probably), No Boring Stories!, The Great Indoors, the Two Dogs in a Trench Coat chapter book series, and Rick the Rock of Room 214. Julie lives with her family in Maine, where she maintains the Little Free Library in front of their house.  You can learn more about her by following her on her website or on Substack.

HELP WANTED: ONE ROOSTER is a story set in a barn yard, yes, but this barn yard isn’t working quite right and they need a new rooster.  Thus it’s also about the interview process and how it can fail in the most unexpected ways. It’s a hilarious take on the trope that gets more and more ridiculous as the story goes along.  What more would you expect from writer Julie Falatko?  She is a comedy writer extraordinare.

Welcome Julie!

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

Julie: I was a huge reader as a kid, and I wrote constantly. It took me many, many years, though, to come to doing this professionally.

I committed to taking picture book writing seriously around 2011. I wrote the first draft of Help Wanted: One Rooster in 2012. This book has been in the works for a while!

Me: Wow! Twelve years is a while!  I don’t think I’ve seen a barn yard story with an interviewing process before!  What gave you the idea for this story?

Julie: My initial inspiration was the Monty Python interview sketch, where John Cleese is interviewing Graham Chapman, and the interview grows increasingly absurd. I flipped it around so it’s not the interviewer who is getting sillier, but the interview candidates. And I put it on a farm.

I love stories that start from a somewhat peaceful place and then get more ridiculous with every page turn. That was what I was going for when I wrote this story.

Me: Oh that’s such a fun concept.  The description for this book published in PW described it as The Office meets Chicken Run.  Was that your description or someone else’s?  Can you talk about the marketing of this story a bit?  How did you sell a farm story when there have been so many of them?

Julie: That description was all PW, and I love it so much! They also call it a “workplace comedy” which it totally is, but I hadn’t thought of that description until they wrote it in the review.

When I first wrote this, like I said before, I was at the very beginning of my professional writing journey, so I wasn’t thinking “oh, a farm story will be a hard sell.” I was just writing whatever came to me. I’m not sure I’d write a farm story now, not unless I had a particularly outlandish angle. In the end, this book did get fairly outlandish! I’m so happy about how it turned out.

We can write “there are so many of them” stories (alphabet books, pirate stories, first day of school, first pet) as long as we come up with a fresh angle. It can’t be “Jimmy gets a new pet, that pet causes havoc, Jimmy has to take responsibility.” It has to be something more like “Jimmy gets a new pet, and it causes time to dissolve and the earth to become Jupiter.” Something new that hasn’t been done before.

Me: Ha!  I love that.  I also love how you have different types of birds interviewing for the job and then the random applicant.  That’s hilariously accurate.  Was this always part of the story?  Or did it come about during revision?  How many revisions did this story undergo?

Julie: The candidates changed a bit during revision, but the concept stayed the same, of them being hilariously unfit for the rooster job. This story got a book deal in 2014 and went many, many revisions between then and the published versions. Ok, I just checked – it was about 40 revisions. That’s lower than I expected, given the timeline.

Me: At this point in your career, you’ve written and published several different picture books.  What is one thing that still managed to surprise you in writing this story?

Julie: I never would have thought, when I wrote the first draft of this in 2012, and got a book deal in 2014, that it wouldn’t come out until 2024. It took a long time, but I’m glad it did. It took a long time to get the story right. I’m glad it didn’t come out earlier. Sometimes you write a first draft of a 700-word story, and you don’t figure out the ending for ten years.

Me: The illustrations by Andrea Stegmaier are perfect for this story.  I love all of the details she brought to the story.  Were there any illustration surprises for you?  Any favorites?

Julie: Aren’t they so great!?!? I’m obsessed with these illustrations. I love Cow’s messy bun. I love the color palette. And I love how cute the space blob guy is. There’s so much going on in the illustrations, and Andrea did such an amazing job with layering in all that extra story. I see something new every time I read it.

Me: Any advice for other new picture book writers?

Julie: Read a lot and write a lot, but also think about what your own particular view of the world is, and how to translate that into a story. Don’t try to be anyone else. If you take all the stories, movies, tv shows, music and art that you love, add in the elements that make you who you are, and then swirl it around in your brain, what is the story that comes out? Write that.

That’s great advice Julie.  Thank you for stopping by my blog today.

Dear readers, this book is released today!  It’s a fresh angle on an old story setting with a much needed comedic infusion.  Trust me when I say, you won’t want to miss this one!