Barb Odanaka is one cool Mommie! Our kids can’t get enough of her children’s books. Plus Moms everywhere will be inspired to take ups sports with their little go getters. Barb also heads a nonprofit, Skateboard Moms, and a community service project, Rolling for Reading… Rolling4Reading collects new and gently-used children’s books then distributes them–on skateboard–to children in need.
NAME: Barb Odanaka
OCCUPATION: Children’s Book Author, Skateboard Cow
BOOKS: Skateboard Mom, Crazy Day at the Critter Cafe, Smash Mash Crash There Goes The Trash
WEBSITE: http://www.skateboardmom.com
CITY, STATE: Laguna Beach, CA
1. Tell us about your family?
My husband, Paul, and I met 25 years ago as I was preparing to leave for an eight-week trip through the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. We were falling in love, so I bailed on the trip! But after we were married, he made it up to me ten times over: in 1994, we spent a year backpacking around the world–17 countries on $30 per day. The adventure of a lifetime! That was my “must do” before becoming a mom, and I’m so glad I did it. We still travel quite a bit, though it’s often more for business. But we will always have those wonderful memories: communing with mountain gorillas in Africa, trekking through the Himalayas, scuba diving with sharks off Borneo… Today, we find plenty of adventure just raising our teen-age son and being amused by our crazy cat!
2. How did you get into skating? When did you first start? etc…
My older brother was a serious surfer (and steel-wheeled skateboarder!) growing up in LA. So I was enamored with the surf culture from an early age. On my tenth Christmas, Santa brought me the Hobie Super Surfer, the coolest skateboard at that time. It was love at first ride! My girlfriends all got skateboards that Christmas, too, and we would roam the neighborhood on our skateboards, “surfing” the streets, sidewalks and driveways as if we were riding the hollow waves of Pipeline and Sunset Beach and other famous Hawaiian surf spots we’d read about in Surfer Magazine. At 13, I tried out for the Hobie amateur skateboard team and somehow managed to earn a spot. It was a big, big thrill!
I gave up skateboarding to concentrate on competitive distance running, but I came back to skateboarding again after having my son. That was my therapist’s orders, in fact! She said every day for ten minutes I needed to do something I used to *love* to do before I became a mom, and I didn’t even have to think twice. “Skateboarding!” I said. And a week later, my husband gave me a new longboard skateboard for my 35th birthday. I’ve been rolling ever since!
3. How and when did you decide you wanted to write a children’s book?
I was actually a sports reporter at the Los Angeles Times for nine years–a job I “fell into” with great luck. But after nearly a decade, I was starting to feel a bit burned out on the subject, and the deadlines. One day, my sports editor called me into his office and asked why I was working rhymes into my columns. Rhymes?? I hadn’t even realized I was doing it. That’s when I knew maybe I was ready for a different kind of writing.
I always wanted to write children’s books but like many people I thought I either had to illustrate the books myself or find a capable artist to partner with. Well, I finally attended a workshop on publishing children’s books and the very first thing I learned is that assumption is completely false. Publishers, who put up a considerable amount of capital to produce a book, nearly always choose the artist for an author’s book. So, with that piece of knowledge, I started writing and was on my way. I was pretty lucky–my first two books were picked up (by Putnam and Simon & Schuster) pretty quickly. I also have a great agent, Tracey Adams of Adams Literary.
4. Tell us more about the SkateBoard Cow?
Well, like most of my ideas for books, Skateboard Cow just popped into my head while I was working on my latest book, A CRAZY DAY AT THE CRITTER CAFE. The story involves a busload of animals that get stranded at a roadside diner for a day. Lots of chaos ensues, including that by Skateboard Cow, who eventually takes over the business and becomes a bovine version of Wolfgang Puck. My first book was Skateboard Mom, and all my current works-in-progress involve skateboarding one way or another, so obviously I’ve got something of an obsession going on! But Skateboard Cow has been very fun. A friend gave me a couple cow costumes she happened to have, and so now I do live performances as Skateboard Cow at schools, libraries, bookstores, even birthday parties or summer parties for kids. Most children’s authors make their living doing school assemblies, and my “Skateboard Cow” alter ego allows me to blend fun and learning in one “udderly” awesome character. Sometimes I wear the costume at skateparks, just for fun. That always raises a few eyebrows!
5. What advice do you have to give to other Mom’s who would like to write children’s books?
Overall, I think the best piece of advice was summed up by someone who said 9I’m totally paraphrasing here): “Read one thousand books before you write one.” You learn so much about writing just by reading good books. This is particularly true with children’s picture books. It can be hard to condense a great story into 32 pages! You have to get a feel for rhythm and pacing and setting up a satisfying ending. It’s trickier than it looks–at least for me! But most parents read lots of books to their children, so that in itself goes a long way in your “training” to becoming an author. Granted, it’s always been a tough business to break into it, but if you have a sincere passion for it, just follow your heart and go for it!
On a practical note, I suggest two resources for information on the nuts and bolts of publishing: Harold Underdown’s excellent “Complete Idiot’s Guide To Publishing Children’s Books” and the very helpful “Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market” guide published annually by Writers Digest Books. Of course there are also countless blogs and so forth, but those two books alone are worth years of writers’ conferences. In addition, thanks (ahem) to the recession, many top-quality children’s book editors are now doing freelance editing–even longterm career guidance; Emma Dryden and Deborah Brodie, for example, are legends in the field. But the most important thing, by far, is just to start writing and don’t stop. You have to write the book before anyone can publish it!
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