the juvenile author- gerald locklin
someone gave my five-year-old a bunch of books.
i got to paging through them
and i was amazed to discover that there were only
about fifty words of text to each book.
my god, i said to myself,
i thought i had the slickest racket in town,
but obviously these thieves have gone me one better.
i was sure that i could write about twenty
or thirty books a day, and retire on the movie rights,
so i tried to think of a promising first line.
the only one that came to me was:
"there were ten cats hanging from the christmas tree."
and that was the end of my career as a juvenile author,
not only because i knew my cat-christmas story
would never see print,
but because i loved the line so.
i was convinced that i had written the finest first line
in the history of kiddie lit.
there was nowhere to go but downhill.
i still get the giggles
thinking of those ornamental felines.
i got to paging through them
and i was amazed to discover that there were only
about fifty words of text to each book.
my god, i said to myself,
i thought i had the slickest racket in town,
but obviously these thieves have gone me one better.
i was sure that i could write about twenty
or thirty books a day, and retire on the movie rights,
so i tried to think of a promising first line.
the only one that came to me was:
"there were ten cats hanging from the christmas tree."
and that was the end of my career as a juvenile author,
not only because i knew my cat-christmas story
would never see print,
but because i loved the line so.
i was convinced that i had written the finest first line
in the history of kiddie lit.
there was nowhere to go but downhill.
i still get the giggles
thinking of those ornamental felines.