Chapter 14
Bellini and Maisie
To: Bellini O’Donnell
From: Maisie Brown
Subject: Roxy Belle is giving me gas
Hello Bellini,
Haven’t heard from you. Looking forward to knowing that you’re on your way with Roxy Belle.
Portia, your fire-breathing editor, called me and breathed down my neck and kicked at my knees.
Christmas With Roxy Belle is selling as if Santa was bribed to put it on his bestseller list, and Roxy Belle Is Thankful on Thanksgiving is still flying off the shelves like turkeys running from a hatchet.
You know we like to keep that momentum flying, so she wanted assurances that your next Roxy Belle will be done at the end of December. I know you said January, but December is best.
I will buy you candy canes if the answer is yes.
Yours favorite agent,
Maisie
To: Maisie Brown
From: Bellini O’Donnell
Subject: Roxy Belle and her reindeer
Maisie,
Greetings!
I’m writing away in my head, with jingle bells ringing,
Bellini
To: Bellini O’Donnell
From: Maisie Brown
Subject: Lies. And it’s the Christmas season, too!
You’re still not on track at all, are you?
No book. No story. You’re home running a bar and a Christmas show, and your mom needs help, and you’re with her six sisters and all your cousins and your friends from elementary school, and you’re singing Christmas carols, and you’ve written nothing, right? Not one word.
I know you’re having a splendid time, but I am not. My nerves are nervy.
Yours in fright,
Maisie
To: Maisie Brown
From: Bellini O’Donnell
Subject: Elves are watching to see who is good and who is bad
Maisie,
I think you’ve been spying on me.
I am a tad busy here. Yes.
But I’m thinking of Roxy Belle often, whenever I get a free moment, and I ask myself, “What would Roxy Belle say? What would Roxy Belle do? What is my next book about?”
You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m tellin’ you why…
I’ll get ya a Roxy Belle book soon.
From one of Santa’s favorite elves,
Bellini
To: Bellini O’Donnell
From: Maisie Brown
Subject: I’m cryin’
Please, Bellini.
Write.
Drinking tequila because you made me,
Maisie
Roxy Belle was rejected by twenty-four agents.
The twenty-fourth agent was named Ashley Goodwin.
I sent the book off, complete with illustrations, and hoped.
I figured I would send it to twenty-five agents, and if all rejected it, I would shove it under my bed and try to forget about it. So, I was almost to the quitting point.
It was in this state that Ashley rejected Roxy Bell with a mean note, including that she found Roxy Belle “unreasonably intelligent,” and the other characters “caricatures,” and the farm setting “unappealing,” and the “lack of technology to be unrealistic for today’s modern children.”
I burst into self-pitying tears, right there in my light sage green kitchen in Honeysuckle Pink.
But there was a problem: I didn’t agree with anything Ashley said.
I took a deep breath and emailed it to the twenty-fifth agent, Maisie, my hand shaking as I hit send.
Again, I’d attached photos of the illustrations I’d done.
Three days later, Maisie called me up and said, “Well, I’ll be danged if I didn’t laugh my way through this sweet, sincere, original book.
I want to be Roxy Belle. I want to live on her farm.
I want to have animals exactly like hers.
I want the eccentric parents and the quirky siblings and Roxy Belle’s ‘I Love Science’ and skeleton T-shirts.
It’s a series, right? I’ll get ya a deal, Bellini, hang on. ”
And she did. She sold the book as part of a three-book deal. The publishing house liked my illustrations featuring my off-beat, exuberant, different Roxy Belle, and I was off and running as the writer and illustrator of a set of books that I loved writing. So far, I’ve written twenty books.
My goal is for the kids to be entertained.
I want them to laugh. I want them to relate to Roxy Belle, who is leading an imperfect life.
She has problems and dilemmas to solve. She cries.
She feels lonely sometimes and alone and bullied and not smart enough and scared—everything that other kids feel, too.
She makes mistakes and learns from them.
But I also portray Roxy Belle as imaginative, an inventive dreamer, a bold thinker, a girl who loves her family and friends, breaks rules now and then, and is utterly herself.
I write about how Roxy Belle loves exploring outside, spiders and other insects, obscure topics, and the farm animals.
She is baffled by math and gets frustrated, but she absorbs life lessons from her siblings, parents, and her motorcycle-riding grandparents.
In every book, I want the kids to learn something academically, too.
So, Roxy Belle writes down ten vocabulary words a week to memorize, and my young readers learn them along with her.
In each book, I also choose a subject—science, math, reading, history, health, writing—and write something educational about it.
I don’t hit the kids over the head with it, but I think it’s important that they learn, too.
Because of the Roxy Belle books, I travel fairly often for book signings and presentations, but also to schools who hire me to come and talk to the kids about being a writer. I read from a Roxy Belle book, then tell the kids how I wrote the book and how I created Roxy Belle.
I have a slide deck presentation so they can see how I make my illustrations step by step.
I show them many of my drawings, including ones of Roxy Belle riding a pig while wearing a T-shirt with a skeleton on it, standing on her hands in the middle of a field next to a cow, and posing with her five siblings while wearing a pink cowgirl hat and a belt buckle with a space alien on it.
I show them slides of the journals I use to get my ideas together for each book, and I show them how my printed rough drafts look and how I correct it with pens, adding and editing and deleting different lines and paragraphs. They can see that sometimes I cross out entire pages and start over.
I show photos of my writing desk at home, my pink and white cottage, my cats, and my land.
I tell them about my childhood, how I played outside all the time, how I ran through meadows and splashed in a lake and rode my bike.
I tell them that I daydreamed a lot as a kid and read tons and tons of books.
“That’s how I became a writer,” I tell them.
“Daydreaming and playing outside and reading. If you want to become a writer, or an illustrator, you can do it, too.”
Then I go to each classroom, and I teach a writing lesson. The kids write a story about a kid, and they become “illustrators.” I love teaching kids about writing, and I love that they love Roxy Belle.
I don’t tell the kids how I helped pour beer in a bar when I was their age. I don’t tell them how I memorized alcoholic drink recipes. I don’t tell the kids about the bar fights I saw and how I watched my mother drag people out of the bar in headlocks now and then.
I don’t tell them that the Roxy Belle books were written after one of the saddest, most hopeless periods of my life, after I left my cold, soul-sucking marriage, after my dreams were ground into the dust, after grief leveled me to my knees, and after I became someone I’d never wanted to be, and it was killing me.
I don’t tell them that after leaving my husband in his dusty little town, I felt free, like I could fly again, like I could dream again.
No, I keep it light and happy for the kids because children are precious and special, and they don’t need to know about the collapse of the guest writer’s life.
When I am done with my presentations, the kids clap and cheer, and their enthusiasm and sweet innocence remind me once again of why I love writing books for kids.
If only I could think of the theme, the topic, the main idea for another Roxy Belle book.
I love that character, but it felt as if she were under a table, her arms crossed, a grumpy expression on her face as she refused to speak to me.
I pictured her saying, “Go to the North Pole and talk to Mrs. Claus about it,” and that sounded completely authentic to me.