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I’ve been fighting a censorship battle all week. No, a parent did not challenge one of my books in a library. I should be so lucky. That kind of challenge is news- and publicity-worthy.

Instead, I was battling the censors from Texas right in my own head. Worse, I was losing.

Yesterday I submitted my second nonfiction manuscript on dinosaurs, a book for much younger children. The blood of battle did not show on it – but the screams still echo in my mind.

I write science for kids. But it has to be bought by adults before kids ever see it. This book is for the educational market, so I am facing school boards, teachers, and parents. And, mid-writing, I read that three out of five Texans believe dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time.

This is not true. It is a belief based on the so-called ‘date of creation’ somehow calculated from ancient oral traditions in the Bible. I had been going to start the book by saying that “Dinosaurs lived long long ago before there were any people to see them.”

And I froze. What if that meant no school in Texas would buy the book? That same belief holds throughout the Bible Belt. That is a huge proportion of shoppers who would slam the book shut on the first page. “Blasphemy!” I hear them shout.

I could write the book without that fact. I could leave it in and let the publisher decide. I was chickening out, and I knew it. The censors – ignorance – was winning out over scientific truth, and I was letting them.

This is internal censorship. This is what ‘they’ want. In the same way as a terrorist’s aim is not to set off a bomb, but to create terror in a population, book censors make a big stink in one locality to scare everyone in the book industry. They want publishers to quake before them. They want authors to pre-censor what they write. And I was letting them do it.

My mind thrashed. The science is clear, I thought. Fossils do not lie. But this is my first book for a new publisher. I want to do others with them. I want the book to sell well. I could reach more kids using other dinosaur facts. I could leave open an inference.

Instead I ended the book this way:
“Pretend you are a dinosaur again. When do you live? If you lived long, long ago, you could be Compsognathus. He looks everywhere. He does not see people.

“Or you could live now. You see people everywhere. You could be a Robin who sees a child reading this book about dinosaurs!”

I went for broke, contradicting ancient legend and including evolution.

Now I wait to see how the publisher responds to the threat of censorship.

My first book about Dinosaurs

When we decided to take photographs of our desks, I thought, Oh no. I don’t have a desk. At least, none of my own.

See? That’s the computer I share with three other people. Now, I get to use it more than the other three, but I’m booted off with regularity. And you notice all those papers all over the place? Well, yes, a lot of them are mine. But not all of them. Also notice that there’s not a whole lot of room in front of the dinosaur monitor that we use. . .

So where do I work? Where there’s space! Like at the library. (Note that lovely large table, all for me!)

I also do a fair amount of work at local coffeeshops. (Note that empty soup bowl. . . Mmmmm. Soup.)

That’s ’cause I mostly write on paper — I’m old-fashioned that way. I do use the computer. But — well, I have a love/hate relationship with the machine.

Enough said.

I have two processes, one for illustrating, the other for writing. They bear little resemblance to one another, except that both use up an awful lot of paper. I do both writing and artwork on my drawing table (pictured), although with writing any comfy chair or sofa will do. Never in bed, and never after 10 pm, when my brain crashes….make that 9 pm.

Illustrating a book is pretty straightforward, bound by a number of design rules. When I start, the drawing table is clear (really!) Once I know what the trim size for the book will be, I decide where to break the text, and what the pictures should be. I send a rough dummy with sketches to my editor. Soon (if I’m lucky) a set of galleys arrives, with the type and available space for pictures neatly laid out by the designer.

Plenty of room to work!

I then proceed to destroy the designer’s hard work by cutting the galleys to pieces. The type gets glued into the dummy, and the measurements for each picture are penciled in. I toil away at improving the pictures in the dummy, decide all the drawings stink, and toil away some more. At this point the table has begun its inevitable return to messiness. When I achieve really, truly final, non-stinky drawings, they go onto a light box and are traced onto watercolor paper. Then I can start painting, but I always ruin three or four sheets of said watercolor paper before I get into the groove. More mess!

Once in the groove, it’s playtime — choosing pretty colors, swishing the brush around. Plus, it seems that painting only uses a small part of the brain, so I can listen to music or old movies - yes, just listen - while I work without getting distracted. A nice bonus.

Writing, on the other hand, is not straightforward. Sometimes it doesn’t go forward at all, never mind straight. So I’m not sure that what I do can really be called a “process.” Chaos might be a better description. But the exact same things have happened with every book I’ve written, so I guess chaos, confusion, acute suffering, and overindulgence in chocolate are my process. It starts with me sitting in my studio and stare at the blank page of a notebook. I get up, roam around, eat chocolate, and sit and stare again. This is known as “working.”  Eventually, an idea comes, usually when I’m weeding or folding laundry, etc. – never when I’m “working.” I start to write, cross things out, write some more, write, cross out, write, cross out…..

About now is when I begin to wonder why I ever thought I was a writer. It feels as though I’m slogging through a swamp, not sure where I am, or how to get out. And if I’m in this state, you can be sure the poor drawing table is also swamped. It’s worst when I’m writing non-fiction, because then there are piles of reference books giving a vertical dimension to the clutter. When the handwritten ms gets to where I’m barely able to read the smudged, jumbled conglomeration I’ve created, I hurry over to the computer and type in all the un-crossed-out text to see if there’s anything resembling a story buried in there. Amazingly, there sometimes is. Joy and celebration! (And then the editing begins!)