Her newly released adult novel, Dangerous Admissions, took three years to write, and she has started another, but Fancy Nancy has grown to dynastic proportions. But when she holes up in her Manhattan apartment to write, she doesn’t allow the office to distract her. The life of a writer is too solitary an existence for her to quit editing altogether, and she treasures the connection to other writers, illustrators, and the books she edits.
Recently, O’Connor scaled back her editing responsibilities to part-time. Nina, Nina Ballerina borrows O’Connor’s experience of performing in a dance recital with a cast on her arm, and Splat! recalls the exploits of her gentle-souled son equipped with a mammoth Uzi-like water gun. “I was a skip-challenged little girl,” says O’Connor. In Ready, Set, Skip!, the main character can whistle, leap, and even somersault, but cannot skip. “Practically everything I write comes from something that happened to me or my kids when they were little,” she says. Since that first book, O’Connor has populated picture books, novels, and easy readers with appealing characters. “I’d still be going if they’d allow it, but that first year I was very homesick.” O’Connor’s novel so effectively describes Abby’s experiences that even young editors with whom she works today tell her how much they loved reading about Abby when they were nine. In 1979, her first book, Yours Till Niagra Falls, Abby, was published and still speaks to children today. She loved it and has been editing children’s books for various publishers for thirty years.Įditing children’s books sparked O’Connor’s creative side and tapped into the voice of the child within her. Reflecting on her career in publishing, O’Connor recalls that in 1969, Smith College degree in hand, “you weren’t supposed to know what you wanted to do with your life.” On a whim, she took a job as the assistant to the children’s book editor for a small, family-run publishing house. It’s fun to be at the bookstore with the outrageous little girls dressed to the nines.” Sometimes during a bookstore event, O’Connor brings her own dress-up props and lets the girls decorate her. O’Connor describes the Fancy Nancy series of picture books, easy readers, and soon-to-be-released merchandise as the biggest surprise of her life. I wasn’t a girlie-girl, but I felt it was important to look fancy for company.” O’Connor was Fancy Nancy long before she wrote Fancy Nancy. “As soon as I heard the doorbell ring,” she says, “I would race in my room, jump in my pink tutu, wrap a satin red cape around me, and come galoomphing out to greet my guests in a pair of my mom’s high heels.
When Jane O’Connor was four or five year old, her grandmother and great-aunts visited every Sunday afternoon.
0 kommentar(er)
