A few years ago, while serving as an educational paraprofessional, local author T.M. Pedroley was assigned to work with a little boy named Jack. Instead of walking or running from place to place, Jack liked to jump—and jump and jump and jump. “I would tease him like, ‘If you don’t stop jumping, I’m going to call you Jumping Jack,’” Pedroley says. From there, an idea was born. Pedroley’s first children’s book, The Adventures of Jumping Jack: Jack Jumps to the Zoo, illustrated by Cyn Watson, was released in August. A second installment in the series is due in mid-January. We caught up with the author to talk about her growing collection of stories and how, exactly, a children’s book is composed.
What made you want to start writing a children’s book series? Poetry is my style normally. I published a poetry book called Unleashing the Soul this past spring that was two years in the making. I feel like you can express yourself in poems in ways that you can’t really in stories or short stories—or even children’s books. But the children’s book just came about. The Adventures of Jumping Jack actually started out as a blog entry. Then I thought it’d be cute to write a book about Jack jumping everywhere and seeing what kinds of adventures he would jump into next. From there, I looked for an illustrator and found one who was local. She was just as excited about it as I was.
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What can readers expect to find in the first edition of the series? It’s very interactive. It becomes an adventure. Kids can jump along with Jack as he goes to each page and animal in the zoo. Even if a child has never been to the Saint Louis Zoo, for example, it’s a book that a parent can read to them before they go, so they can anticipate which animals are there and the noises they make.
How do you go about writing a children’s book? I imagine figuring out what will resonate with a very young reader is more challenging than it seems. Working with kids helped me understand what kinds of books they liked. Keep it simple, and don’t put too many words on the page. Make it interactive. Use simple words, and make them big and easy to read. But yeah, you would think with just a short children’s book, it would be easy—just put a few words on a page, and then move on—but it’s not as simple as it looks. The process has to make sense.
Do you write to fit illustrations, or do your words influence the art? For me, the writing comes first. I knew some of the things I wanted to include, but then you work with an illustrator who might have their own ideas after reading. It becomes a creative, collaborative process. It’s not just something you can whip up over a weekend.
Did anything surprise you about the process? It taught me to be patient with myself. I’m very much a go-getter and a goal-setter when it comes to writing and having things done by this day or that day. I originally thought, “Well, this is going to be illustrated, and I’m just going to publish this right away.” I learned a lot by self-publishing my poetry book. I thought it would be very similar to that, but children’s books are a whole other beast. You really want everything to look and read the best that it can.
Is Jack aware of his newfound celebrity status? He really touched my heart and my life from the time that I worked with him. Once the first few books were purchased on Amazon, I reached out to his mom, and I was like, “It’s official: Jack is a book!” She cried and promised to bring Jack to one of the book signings next year. I asked if he’s still jumping all the time, and she’s like, “Absolutely.” He’s still the same Jack.
