I know you’re having a splendid time, but I am not. My nerves are nervy.
Yours in fright,
Maisie
To: Maisie Brown
From: Bellini O’Donnell
Subject: Elves are watching to see who is good and who is bad
Maisie,
I think you’ve been spying on me.
I am a tad busy here. Yes.
But I’mthinkingof Roxy Belle often, whenever I get a free moment, and I ask myself, “What would Roxy Belle say? What would Roxy Belle do? What is my next book about?”
You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m tellin’ you why…
I’ll get ya a Roxy Belle book soon.
From one of Santa’s favorite elves,
Bellini
To: Bellini O’Donnell
From: Maisie Brown
Subject: I’m cryin’
Please, Bellini.
Write.
Drinking tequila because you made me,
Maisie
Roxy Belle was rejected by twenty-four agents. The twenty-fourth agent was named Ashley Goodwin. I sent the book off, complete with illustrations, and hoped. I figured I would send it to twenty-five agents, and if all rejected it, I would shove it under my bed and try to forget about it. So, I was almost to the quitting point.
It was in this state that Ashley rejected Roxy Bell with a mean note, including that she found Roxy Belle “unreasonably intelligent,” and the other characters “caricatures,” and thefarm setting “unappealing,” and the “lack of technology to be unrealistic for today’s modern children.”
I burst into self-pitying tears, right there in my light sage green kitchen in Honeysuckle Pink. But there was a problem: I didn’t agree with anything Ashley said. I took a deep breath and emailed it to the twenty-fifth agent, Maisie, my hand shaking as I hit send. Again, I’d attached photos of the illustrations I’d done.
Three days later, Maisie called me up and said, “Well, I’ll be danged if I didn’t laugh my way through this sweet, sincere, original book. I want to be Roxy Belle. I want to live on her farm. I want to have animals exactly like hers. I want the eccentric parents and the quirky siblings and Roxy Belle’s ‘I Love Science’and skeletonT-shirts. It’s a series, right? I’ll get ya a deal, Bellini, hang on.”
And she did. She sold the book as part of a three-book deal. The publishing house liked my illustrations featuring my off-beat, exuberant,differentRoxy Belle, and I was off and running as the writer and illustrator of a set of books that I loved writing. So far, I’ve written twenty books.
My goal is for the kids to be entertained. I want them to laugh. I want them to relate to Roxy Belle, who is leading an imperfect life. She has problems and dilemmas to solve. She cries. She feels lonely sometimes and alone and bullied and not smart enough and scared—everything that other kids feel, too. She makes mistakes and learns from them.
But I also portray Roxy Belle as imaginative, an inventive dreamer, a bold thinker, a girl who loves her family and friends, breaks rules now and then, and is utterly herself. I write about how Roxy Belle loves exploring outside, spiders and other insects, obscure topics, and the farm animals. She is baffled by math and gets frustrated, but she absorbs life lessons from her siblings, parents, and her motorcycle-riding grandparents.
In every book, I want the kids to learn something academically, too. So, Roxy Belle writes down ten vocabulary words a week to memorize, and my young readers learn them along with her. In each book, I also choose a subject—science, math, reading, history, health, writing—and write something educational about it. I don’t hit the kids over the head with it, but I think it’s important that they learn, too.
Because of the Roxy Belle books, I travel fairly often for book signings and presentations, but also to schools who hire me to come and talk to the kids about being a writer. I read from a Roxy Belle book, then tell the kids how I wrote the book and how I created Roxy Belle.
