Okay. Well, I never really thought about the writing stuff that much. It was always drawing and illustrating. That was what I really enjoyed doing, but I never really thought about it as a career. It was just something that I did in all of my free time. And so I was a real academic kid. I wanted to make straight A’s. I made straight A’s. And art was just sort of a break from that.
So I don’t really think I started to see it as a career until I went to college, and I met my husband there. He wasn’t my husband then, but, you know, when we met, he was an art major. And that has been — of course it’s Tom Angleberger, also a writer. And but he was an art major, and I was an English major. And I was a miserable English major. And he was a very happy art major.
And so he sort of convinced me to join him over in the art department maybe because he just wanted to spend more time with me, but I ended up having a great time. And I sort of started to realize that I wanted a career as an artist, but I didn’t know how to make that happen. So I actually was kind of tiptoeing around children’s books, but I really was just interested in illustrating for whoever would hire me.
And so for a long time I worked as a freelance illustrator. And I started to send illustrations out to publishers, kind of hoping that I could illustrate other people’s work, and nobody would hire me for a job because, you know, I’m a good illustrator, but I’m not the greatest illustrator you’ve ever seen by a long shot. So, that was kind of disheartening, but then I read in a book somewhere that said you are more likely to be published if you both write and illustrate picture books.
So I thought okay, and that was in the back of my mind. And eventually I did get that big idea, my first big idea for a good picture book, which ended up being my first book, Sock Monkey Goes to Hollywood. And that was what got me into writing. It was almost more of a, you know, a necessity. If I’m going to be in this world, then I’m going to have to do both.
And it turns out that I loved the writing. And for years I think I liked making the pictures better, but now it feels like maybe I like the writing part better. All of it is fun, and I don’t think I could be successful without the pictures. I need the pictures as a writer because
I sort of see the story that way, but it was sort of a long curvy path in some ways to get to that point.
