Rukhsana Khan’s Big Red Lollipop is my favorite kind of multicultural picture book: the kind that doesn’t sound like a multicultural picture book. I shy away from books that attempt to flaunt their multicultural aspects rather than their great tales. In fact, I find that the more an author attempts to sound ethnic, the less authentic the work reads.

Big Red Lollipop doesn’t try any of the usual tricks:

• Forgetting to focus on the universal story. In Lollipop, the main character Rubina is invited to a schoolmate’s birthday party. Rubina’s mother refuses to let her attend the party unless she brings along her little sister. Readers from any culture can sympathize with the embarrassing situation that follows as well as Rubina’s frustration with her family.
• Dropping in foreign words seemingly for the sake of having foreign words. Nothing wrong with adding well-chosen words, but often the placement of such words comes off as random and unnecessary. Throwing in vocab to add multicultural flair creates hiccups in the flow of the text (especially when nonnative speakers read the books aloud). Who wants a mini-vocab lesson sprinkled over a great story?
• Making cardboard villains. Stereotyped bad guys are common in movies, but they make appearances in children’s lit, too. Lollipop doesn’t try to make villains out of Rubina’s schoolmates (who have a different cultural background than she does). Although the contrast between the social norms of Rubina’s native culture and the one she now lives in causes tension, it’s the situation—not anyone’s ill intent—that’s the problem.

Big Red Lollipop is a worthy book filled with lovely, often clever, illustrations. It’s available at any major retailer. To read it online (and help a worthy organization!) visit www.wegivebooks.org.

Paula LaRoque’s resumé bleeds experience. Besides her role as as an author, she is a columnist for the Society of Professional Journalists’ Quill magazine, a frequent commentator for public radio, a former college educator, and a communications consultant. For twenty years, she acted as writing coach for the The Dallas Morning News.

Last Saturday, LaRoque presented “The Secrets of Good Writing” to the NC/NE Texas SCBWI chapter. Her basic tips—create a loose outline, make bios for your characters, keep your files organized—echo what many other authors advocate.

The rest of her advice affects the finer points of writing. La Roque shuns vague terms, wordiness, and careless usage. A few of the many highlights of her practical tips include:

• Don’t write consecutive chapters. Write the scene you feel like creating today.
• Don’t polish a chapter while writing a first draft. It’s harder to cut a bad chapter later if you’ve already committed the time to edit and proof it.
• Avoid telling every detail. Skip what readers can fill in for themselves.
• Dense blocks of text turn readers away. Vary your sentence length. Bear in mind studies show sentences with 25 or more words confuse and deter readers.
• Try not to sound impressive for the sake of sounding impressive. Ask yourself, “Would I talk this way?”
• Prune vague qualifiers such as very, totally, wholly, and utterly.
• In most cases, keep one idea per sentence.

The tip that I don’t doubt made the audience cringe from guilt was the simple admonition: Use the right word. In an effort to sound educated or skilled, writers will use words they don’t really understand. Think about it: do you really know what “decimate” means? (Hint: The definition does not mean to entirely destroy.) How about disinterested, notoriety, or fortuitous? If someone says, “Boy, the executives really had that salesman run the __________,” should the missing word be “gauntlet” or “gantlet?”

Point is, writers must know a word’s meaning before they use it. Seems obvious, and yet I sense many of you are already reaching for your dictionaries to look up words like “notoriety.” I did.

LaRoque offered many other guidelines to her audience. For more of her tips, check out The Book on Writing: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Well, On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work—and Don’t, and Championship Writing: 50 Ways to Improve Your Writing. Or, visit her blog and website.

Apple released a free app to help authors create interactive books for the iPad. The iBooks Author app is geared toward the education market (read: textbooks), where Apple has already made headway with the proliferation of iPads. Using templates and other user-friendly features, writers now have the tools to do for books what many had hoped companies like Push Pop Press would have offered before. Some caveats of the iBooks Author app:

• Can only create interactive books for the iPad.
• Templates are geared toward textbooks and teachers. Imaginative and industrious fiction writers will find great uses for this app, but in general, nonfiction authors may benefit most. Future updates could change this.
• Special formatting—like math equations, for instance—may require fooling around with other Mac applications like Grapher. Read reviews of the iBooks Author app to understand its limitations.

Enjoy this new offering from Apple. If you decide this app is not for you, no worries: it was free anyway, right?