Every December I get lots of queries from kind readers wondering where they might find a copy of my out-of-print picture book, Hanna’s Christmas, for something more reasonable than the fifty-dollars-and-upward it’s going for at Amazon Marketplace these days. (Crazy!) Here’s a post I wrote about it in December, 2006. I still don’t have any leads beyond the pricey ones at Amazon, eBay, etc. So sorry, folks!
Hanna’s Christmas was published in 2001 as a joint effort by HarperFestival (an imprint of HarperCollins) and Hanna Andersson, the clothing retailer. (I used my married name, Peterson, not my pen name, Wiley.) The Hanna folks carried it in their catalog for a season or two, but the print run was small and it was not expected to live much longer than that.
I was commissioned to write the book as a work-for-hire, which means there’s no royalty—the writer gets a flat fee and that’s that, no matter how well the book sells. Most books involving licensed characters or merchandise tie-ins are work-for-hire projects. I don’t do work-for-hire anymore, but it was a good way to hone my craft when I was young and hungry. It was also a good way to pay scary medical bills when we were self-employed.
I’m fond of the Hanna book, although it was a challenge to write. Like every other work-for-hire I’ve done, there were a great many editors involved (senior editor, junior editor, packager, etc). I was hired by HarperCollins to write “a picture book about a little Swedish girl named Hanna who moves to America and is homesick, and it’s Christmas. Oh, and also we’d like there to be a tomten in it.”
They already had sketches of Hanna and the tomten—adorably and whimsically drawn by artist Melissa Iwai. From there it was all up to me. I came up with the storyline, which had to be approved by all the aforementioned folks plus someone at Hanna Andersson itself. Then I wrote a draft, which got bumped back and forth a zillion times as various editors weighed in with contradictory remarks.
Like this. In the first draft, I described the tomten’s hat as “red as a rowanberry.” The junior editor bounced it back with a strikethrough.
“Change to ‘his hat was bright red,'” read the note in the margin. “American readers won’t know rowanberries.”
Sigh. I argued that “bright red” was flat and boring. Okay, I wasn’t that blunt, but that was the gist. I pointed out that we’d be better off cutting the whole sentence, since the artwork would clearly show that the tomten’s hat was red anyway.
Nope, said the editor, go with “his hat was bright red.” So I did, growling at the screen. When you’re reading a book to your kids, you don’t want to get stuck dragging through pedestrian sentences like “his hat was bright red.” Bleh.
And then the next person up the line—the senior editor on the project, whom I’d worked with before, a first-rate editor with an excellent eye—read the manuscript. She sent it back with her comments. There was a note by “his hat was bright red.”
“Flat. Can you punch up?”
Me: “AAAAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!”
She was absolutely right, of course. I changed it to “red as a hollyberry” and that’s the line that made it into the book. I still think rowanberry was better.
But I digress. Anyway, I loved the story and am really very fond of my slightly grumpy Hanna and her even grumpier tomten friend. I was quite pleased that I got to work in the St. Lucia feast day tradition, since that was already such a happy tradition in our little family. I got a kick out of having Hanna and the tomten make a construction paper crown, because that was what I had done for Jane the December before. I loved the artwork—I have never met or even spoken to Melissa Iwai, but I thought her work was gorgeous. (I keep meaning to check out her other books. Looks like she has a lot of them! Her website is cool, too, especially the process section.)
In the end, I was really happy with the book and was a little bummed it was a merch tie-in, because of course that put it in a different category of book and I knew it would never be reviewed by the critics. To my surprise, it did get a nice little review in School Library Journal, but still, it was a commercial property, not intended for a long and dignified life on library shelves. After all, the characters are all wearing Hanna Andersson clothing. Even the endpapers are Hanna prints. (We actually have a baby outfit in the same pattern.)
But in the end, I’m glad I took on the Hanna project. I liked the challenge of trying to tell an engaging and well-crafted story within the confines placed upon me by the various bosses. There’s a certain satisfaction in trying to make art out of something so commercial.
Last year I was amused to discover that the book had taken on a new life in the resale market. People were actually hunting for it, trying to land a copy. This year (2006) it seems there are no copies on the market at all. I guess everyone who bought it last year decided to hold on to it, which is nice to think about.
Over the years, I gave away almost all of my author comps. The book really is going to disappear for good soon, save for a few scattered copies on people’s Christmas shelves. So to the very nice folks who have written me in recent weeks, asking if I know where you can find copies, I’m afraid I have to tell you I’m unable to help you out. But I deeply appreciate your interest!
Gray, chilly, bleak, rainy day here. We are spoiled by all the San Diego sun. Days like today make me feel like I’m made of tissue paper, in danger of dissolving during the brief sprint from house to car.
We had to go out for a while this morning, and now we’re home, and I am feeling considerably cheered by the tortilla chicken soup simmering in my slow cooker. (Not the chai kind.) A couple of gingerbread cookies helped too. Now I’m snuggling under a quilt and wishing I had some good tea, the fruity, tangy, zinger kind. Instead I’ve got a fat baby and a good book, as soon as I put this laptop away (in about three minutes). I’m halfway through The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and it’s just right for a blustery, waterlogged day like this.
I can see why Jane liked it so much; the heroine is a precocious eleven-year-old growing up on an old British estate around 1950, a motherless imp whose chief entertainments are distilling evil poisons in a long-dead relative’s abandoned chemistry lab and tormenting her two older sisters. Her father is a distracted philatelist who occasionally mourns his wife’s loss by sitting and weeping in her bunkered and dust-covered Rolls Royce. This sounds like the makings of a children’s novel, but it’s an adult murder mystery, really. Young Flavia, our budding chemist, stumbles upon a dying man in the cucumber patch one very early dawn, and she seems determined to muck up the police investigation as much as possible by solving the mystery herself first.
Delightful.
Speaking of delightful, I bet I’ve watched this video clip (via BoingBoing) ten times in the past few days. It’s from an upcoming documentary called Babies, about the lives of four infants from birth to age one in Namibia, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Mongolia. We can’t wait.
• Our read-aloud of Winter Holiday, which we began in (gulp) September.
• Our new read-aloud of The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas. This one’ll be a cinch (she says recklessly)—it’s a shortish book, something between a very long picture book and a children’s novella. Although it features one of my favorite fictional families in all the world, I’ve never read this particular L’Engle tale before.
• Two Mental Multivitamin recommendations I began a long while back and set aside only because I had a guilt-inducing stack of review copies awaiting me (most of which I still haven’t read):
—Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding by Scott Weidensaul. I checked this out from the library over the summer (I think it was) and devoured the first couple of chapters, pausing frequently to read out long passages to Jane—who was so interested in the material that I wound up buying a copy to keep. She snapped it up and regaled me in turn with anecdotes about eccentric, passionate birdwatchers.
—Great Books by David Denby. Oh good grief, I see I posted a quote from it way back in January—that’s how long ago I started reading this book, and again I only read the first couple of chapters despite finding it completely engaging and memorable. Wait a second. I just realized that post is dated January 11th. I gave birth two days later. Well, that explains it. Ha.
Anyway, here is the M-MV post that piqued my interest in Denby’s book. As I recall, she said it was “one for the permanent library,” and I took her word for it and didn’t even bother previewing a library copy; I ordered it straightaway and it has been sitting on Scott’s nightstand ever since I laid it aside on January 12th or thereabouts. It must have been too thick and heavy to read while nursing a newborn. Babymoons are a time for comfortably slim (but not necessarily slight) works of fiction. Looking over my January reading notes, I note several titles I read on my iPod, and most of the others are one-hand-able paperbacks. Ah, yes, that was a great month for reading. Gatsby, Daisy Miller, Lolita, World Made by Hand. My rate of reading had slowed considerably by the fall—probably in proportion to the distance my inquisitive infant son has managed to travel away from my protective embrace. It’s hard to keep a baby out of mischief when your nose is in a book.
My sewing machine. It was in the shop for weeks, and now it’s back. I am happy. We had it whirring all afternoon: I am months behind in our online quilting bee.
GAMES:
Apples to Apples. The Shakespeare Club kids always pull this out after we’re done Barding for the day. It’s a hoot. Scott’s not big on board games but the girls and I talked him into a round of Apples on Thanksgiving Day, and he had a great time. (It’s a word game, really, not a board game.)
Music Ace Deluxe. This music theory computer game was sent to me for review, and I have to say my middle kids (especially Rose, the eleven-year-old) have really enjoyed it. It hones sight-reading skills and packages some solid music theory instruction in fun, cartoony games. Rose and Bean are tremendously fond of the grinning musical notes that frequent many of the activities. But the $80 price tag is rather daunting, and even the $58 Amazon price is hefty.
MOVIES:
Our family watched Harvey last week and it was every bit as delightful as I remembered.
Scott read it and passed it to Jane. I’m up next, I suppose. I don’t know anything about it except that it’s a mystery, which is always promising. UPDATED LATER: Loved, loved, loved this book—the precocious young narrator, unabashedly impish, far too smart for her own good, obsessed with poisons, left alone with a chemistry lab, meddling, spying, getting herself into terrible danger as she unravels a local mystery. Highly recommended.
What a ride this tome was! A couple of my comic book writer friends recommended it to me—both are big Stephenson fans, and both thought I’d enjoy this novel in particular because of its focus on the education of young girls. (Its subtitle is A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.) It’s a postcyberpunk novel, set about a hundred years in the future, in a time when nanotechnology is commonplace and national boundaries have given way to cultural allegiances and global economic protocols. Most people belong to a tribe or “phyle,” adhering to a certain set of cultural mores and traditions. Among the most powerful and populated phyles is the Neo-Victorian culture, which thrives in wealthy, protected communities all over the world; the Vickys have chosen to adopt certain attributes of the original English Victorians, including dress, manners, and a moral code. Other influential phyles include the Han Chinese, the Nippon, and the Hindustan.
So, yeah, Neo-Victorians, nanotech, and education: this novel had me at hello. Top-notch world-building; there’s a little dose of cyberpunk in the opening, with a ruffian named Bud getting himself fitted up with a skull gun that fires explosive bullets upon his mental command; and then we’re whisked off to New Atlantis/Shanghai, the home base of a thriving Neo-Victorian community, where the upper crust are Equity Lords (aristocrats by dint of their corporate ties) and the birthday entertainments involve creating fairylands that rise out of the sea for a day, thanks to the limitless possibilities of molecular manipulation. There is something delightful about this melding of Dickensian characters and futuristic tech.
One of the upper-crustiest of the Equity Lords is an elderly gent who, for all he esteems his phyle and works to protect and promote it, rues the loss of opportunity for young Neo-Victorians to experience character-building adversity. His adult children missed out on something important, he believes—after all, he himself grew up on an Idaho farm, was homeschooled until age fourteen, pulled himself up by his bootstraps and all that. He determines to offer his granddaughter an alternative to the soft Vicky upbringing, in which status and comforts are often taken for granted by those born and raised in the phyle. To this end, he hires a gifted techno-engineer, one John Hackworth, to create a sophisticated, interactive book-slash-computer, the Primer, which will provide his granddaughter with personalized instruction in academic subjects, ethics and morals, handcrafts, self-defense, computer programming—pretty much everything under the sun.
Hackworth rises to the challenge…Hackworth, who, as it happens, has a young daughter of his own. He attempts to procure a bootleg copy for four-year-old Fiona, and therein lies the tale. The illicit copy of the Primer goes astray and winds up in the hands of a young thete child—thetes belong to no phyle at all—named Nell. As in “little Nell”—a Dickensian waif full of pluck, growing up in dreadful circumstances in a cold, cruel world. If ever a child needed a Magic Book, it’s Nell. Well, and Pip, and David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist…but no, really, Nell’s in worse straits than all those lads (her mother, Tequila, has worse taste in men than David Copperfield’s mum), and we’re thrilled to see the Primer offer her some tools for digging her way out of the squalor.
Hmm, it seems The Diamond Age is taking over this post. This is appropriate, considering it took over the entire month of November. Actually, that’s not accurate: I began this book in October and was glued to the first 300 pages. In the last quarter I thought it bogged a bit and I wound up setting it aside for a while. I finished it over Thanksgiving weekend, and though I have quibbles, I am thoroughly glad I read it. As bildungsromans go, this was a doozy.
I’ll try to revisit it in a proper review later on. Right now there’s a sweaty infant head cutting off the circulation in my left arm and the laptop battery is burning my leg. Time to tuck this computer in for the night.
Hanna’s Christmas
