From the monthly archives: February 2012
Corrections Happen In the Final Sketches*
Feb 29, 2012
By the Illustrator, Lisa Mertins
Once Jim and I went over my initial storyboard, it was time to finesse the drawings in their – almost – finished form.
I tightened them up with Jim’s corrections and now I’ll admit to one of my shortcomings; Being detail oriented. A few posts back I mentioned the difference […]
Continue Reading →The Play is Cast
Feb 29, 2012
By the author, Jim Doti
Everything in the narrative thus far has been preparatory to the main plot. We know, for example, that Jimmy has a speech defect and that children laugh and ridicule him for it. We also know a bit about his mom, his dog, Blackie, his teacher and a few of his […]
Continue Reading →Speaking Clearly Only Sounds Easy to Do!
Feb 28, 2012
By Dr. Judy Montgomery, CCC-SLP, Professor, Chapman University
One of the advantages that Jimmy and other children have in the elementary school years is speech therapy sessions at school! Children learn how to produce the sounds that are difficult for them and usually in a very short time. Then they have to practice until it […]
Continue Reading →The Illustrator’s Storyboard
Feb 24, 2012
By the Illustrator, Lisa Mertins
Ann Cameron is Associate to the President. She’s the person I do lots of my correspondence with when Jim is tied up with his day job. Along with the manuscript, she emailed an additional file that had great pictures of Jim and his […]
Teasing about Speech Often Hurts
Feb 22, 2012
By Dr. Judy Montgomery, CCC-SLP, Professor, Chapman University
In this book, Jimmy talks about experiences related to a speech difficulty that are all too common in the early school years. He is just learning to be a “talker” like those more accomplished speakers around him, but his fine motor system is still immature and he […]
Continue Reading →The Story within the Story
Feb 22, 2012
By the author, Jim Doti
The reader now knows that Jimmy is afraid of school. In the next two pages (pages 5-6), I need to give a vivid example of why Jimmy is so fearful of school. I’ll do that by introducing a classmate that ridicules him. I also need to set the stage for […]
Continue Reading →Starting the Writing
Feb 15, 2012
By the author, Jim Doti
Now that I’ve storyboarded
Jimmy the Elf
, I have a good sense of how to move the story along. But I don’t know yet all the twists and turns in the plot that I’ll need to come up with in […]
Speaking is Complex
Feb 15, 2012
By Dr. Judy Montgomery, CCC-SLP, Professor, Chapman University
Many children have felt the disappointment of not having clear speech when they entered school. Many times the tentative, or immature, speech patterns they used at home were warmly embraced by their families and even gently encouraged. Why not? It […]
Storyboarding the Book
Feb 10, 2012
By the author, Jim Doti
After running the Surf City Marathon, I was relaxing in a lounge chair by our backyard pool. My wife, Lynne, stretched out in the chair beside me, seemed to be enjoying the book she was reading. While my tired legs soaked up the […]
By the illustrator, Lisa Mertins
Although I hadn’t been contacted by Jim until after he’d done the writing and story boarding, while he was working on his end, I was conducting an illustration workshop for the staff of the UCLA Daily Bruin. We did some conceptualization exercises for […]
