Shutta Crum

It started off with a visit to Abbot School in Ann Arbor—2nd and 4th grades. So much energy, fun, and many good questions! I loved it. I left the older kids with snippets from SPITTING IMAGE and the new book I am working on, THOMAS AND THE QUEEN OF THE DRAGONS. “That’s so unfair,” they [...]

 
Recently I visited the schools of two of my grandchildren. One of them was a middle school here in Michigan. Several of the kids in the school had seen me at other presentations talking about writing and books, so I wanted to do something different. And since I like to leave the kids with a [...]

About losing Mom and Dad and becoming an orphan–and how this relates to characters in children’s literature. Hope is the essence.

REposting of “Come on In, the Water’s Fine” about the differences between writing novels and picture books.

Testing my WLW on my webpage/blog.

Having just spent the first Christmas without my parents, I remembered this blog post I originally wrote a while ago for another site. It’s a favorite Dad story. 
Enjoy.

My Dad’s War
I’ve known that life is a story since I was a child standing big-eyed and listening to my Appalachian relatives tell hair-raising tales about mountain folk. However, [...]

Here’s a shout-out of happiness for my dear friend, Hope Vestergaard, who just revised and expanded the perennial bestseller Capricorn Rhyming Dictionary.  (Originally published in 1938.) This edition, NOTHING RHYMES WITH ORANGE: Perfect words for Poets, Songwriters, and Rhymers, includes a phonetic spelling guide, a key to rhyming sounds that are spelled differently, fun sidebars, and [...]

My agent contacted me and it seems that Knopf is going to make an offer on another book. YAY! It is so great to get good news these days, especially as these past few months have been devastating to me and my family and since so many publishing firms are cutting back on staff and [...]

I need to get back to work.  I REALLY NEED to get back to work . . . there is a January deadline looming.
There are so many lures out there, so many siren songs to do other things—not the least of which is that I must help my family with the transition and all the [...]

I’ve spent a lot of this past month on the road driving to the hospital, or to a group home, to see my father who has Alzheimer’s. This is a sad time for me, in many ways. One of which is that my father was a true storyteller. He was born with the Gift. Now, his drifting into [...]