Today, I continued work on my coaching project, but to be honest, the submission from my client was a mess and I don’t want to dwell on that.
The other night, my wife and I were discussing the children’s books that our kids borrowed most recently. The two younger kids have two favorite authors that we keep coming back to time and again (there are more, but these are the two that we haven’t exhausted yet).
Both authors use characters from other books as cameos even when they are not the main character and never mention the other stories. Since they are picture books, this seems like an efficient way to save on having to come up with new drawings, and it also offers an easter egg for fans of the author’s work as a whole. Our kids are always excited to point out that a random background character showed up in a different story. When they’re picking out books at the library, if they see a familiar character, they are more likely to grab it.
The authors both also have distinctive styles. Both are fantasy worlds with talking animals, etc., but one of the two is completely off the wall, introducing things like monsters that eat people, but also have a zipper stomach, so the person can be rescued (or, in one case, the monster can be turned inside out and zipped into itself). Because the author is consistently wacky, we accept this. But on the other hand, another book that we borrowed that had a walking-talking spoon in an otherwise real world, left us confused and scratching our heads about the interaction.
Both of these are important lessons for my future fantasy writing!