The new “Wow” book is Wow! Ocean! And I always wanted to do a Wow! Ocean! because I’m a surfer and once you get in the ocean, you spend that much time in the ocean, just the marvel of it, the awe of it, the power of it, the vastness of it, it’s almost a religious experience. And so doing Wow! Ocean! was just a natural choice for me.
When I got into doing Wow! America! and to a lesser extent, Wow! School! though, which — one of the things about the “Wow” books is they can be very informational and be like a teaching tool. With Wow! Ocean! I thought it’d be really interesting to do, you know, whales and the different kinds of whales.
Again, it’s not a definitive encyclopedia of sea life but it’s for very young readers to have an introduction to what the different kinds of whales look like, what the different kinds of jellyfish look like, different kinds of what you would see in a coral reef, tropical fish. And we do dolphins, whales, coral reef, sharks, which they love. I have a daughter who’s obsessed with sharks.
She’s seven years old. What’s her favorite movie? “Jaws.” Terrified her the first time she saw it, but then you tell her it’s a rubber shark and she can’t get enough of it. There’s tadpoles and as a family, we’ve spent hours and hours, you know, on the seashore just looking at tadpoles and wandering amongst them. You know, it’s fascinating.
So I label every different kind of sea creature. You know, “Wow! Deep!” — we do the angler fish, you know, with the light and all of these things. So everything’s labeled and everything has to be precise. And I spent a lot of time in a library checking it out and I am gonna have a marine biologist do the final proofing of it to make sure that everything’s right because once you print 30,000 copies, you can’t have a mistake.
When I was a little kid, I thought that if something was in print, it was gospel. It was like literally carved in stone. When I got into journalism as a grownup and began to realize how human people are and how things slip in, you know, I realized that that wasn’t true. I think with children’s books you really have to make a special effort to be accurate on everything that you describe and everything you do.
I have a fifth grader and if I say some
And we have a tortoise, you know, and I say “turtle” every now and then because I’m lazy. And she says, “Dad, it’s a tortoise.” Anyway, so you can’t have a flaw. You can’t have a mistake.
And I do a lot of research because, you know, I mean, if you’re gonna label anything, you’ve gotta label it correctly or else don’t label anything. You know, you’re either in or you’re out that way. But I find that really interesting in Wow! Ocean! to do the labels. I thought it would be interesting cause I know how the kids love that.
