June 2011-Issue of Guardian Angel Kids Ezine is Online

Hi All

The June issue of Guardian Angel Kids Ezine is now available.  The theme this month is "Wheels"  If you get a chance, please stop by http://www.guardian-angel-kids.com/default.htm.  I'm sure your children, grandchildren, or other special child in your life will enjoy it.  If they like to draw,they can give my online paint program a try.

Into the Home Stretch

Well it looks like the moment I’ve been waiting for is finally arriving. I approved the galleys for If I Could Be Anything and it’s been sent off to the printers. As soon as the copy comes back and is approved by my publisher, I am officially published.

To coincide with this monumental occasion, I’ve also just about finished my website. I have all the games and activities loaded and I’ve been testing the links, the look of the site, and everything else. This is actually the second site I came up with. I designed the first site and threw it up on my web server. It completely crashed and burned. But I was able to salvage some text and graphics for my new site.

If you would like to take a sneek peek, my new website, please go to http://www.kevschildrensbooks.com/

Please be warned that this site is still under construction and I am working furiously to get this site ready to coincide with my book’s release. I’ll let everyone know when this site is officially launched.

After this site is launched, I plan on doing some more writing and having some champagne to celebrate my book’s release, but not necessarily in that order. :-)

Whoo Hoo Again!

Coming through once again, Guardian Angel Publishing has accepted my picture book manuscript, My Brother, the Frog. There’s no release date yet, but my publisher already has an illustrator in mind. I’ll post more info on this, if the illustrator accepts the project.

In other news, I’ve still been working on online games and have reached a decent sized inventory of games and activities. I plan to launch my site in the fall when my first book, If I Could Be Anything, is released. Right now, I’ve been loading and testing games, but it’s not a working website yet. The following game isn’t going to be on my kid-friendly site, but I couldn’t resist making it once I found out that I could switch the target pretty easily. I figure that adults might get a kick out of this so I’m posting this here. It’s based on whack-a-mole and you have to click the mouse to register hits.

http://www.kevschildrensbooks.com/whack/whackanauthor.html

Also, I wound up winning the contest that Gayle Krause, hosted on her blog

http://thestorytellersscroll.blogspot.com/

The grand prize was an autographed copy of her picture book, Rock Star Santa. Gayle autographed it for my daughter, who was thrilled to see that the book was personalized for her. Rock Star Santa is a modern day “Night Before Christmas. The verse and the illustrations are great, and this would make a fine addition to any child’s library. It’s published by Scholastic for anyone who would like to put a copy under the Christmas tree this year.

More Tech Stuff

I must have spent the past two months up to my eyeballs in technology, while I tried to piece together some online games. I managed to get a working matching game, puzzle and online coloring book. I also reserved the domains kevschildrensbooks.com and kevinschildrensbooks.com, that I’ll be using to host these games. I’m not quite sure which domain I’ll eventually use, but I figured that I should probably reserve both.

Most of the games I came up with are based on The Sister Exchange, illustrated by Kit Grady. But now I’m waiting on some graphics from Marina Movshina who illustrated If I Could Be Anything. After, I see what I can do with the new graphics, I think I’ll be close to finishing the new website. Because, then it will just be a matter of creating the main page, along with any links. That should be a piece of cake compared to what I’ve been trying to teach myself lately. I’m planning on officially launching this site in the Fall to coincide with my first book’s release. I’ll be posting more information when I have a firm date.

On to other things, I actually wrote something new. It seems like forever since I’ve actually written anything and it felt terrific to exercise the creative portion of my noggin again. But Gayle Krause, a member of my poetry critique group, came up with a contest that was too much fun to resist. It was about creating a poem blending characters from two different fairytales. My entry is called “The Date”, and you can see that and others on her blog at,

http://thestorytellersscroll.blogspot.com/

And you can always post one of your own if you like. The grand prize is an autographed copy of her picture book, Rock Star Santa.

Some Tech Stuff

One thing I didn’t realize when I set out to be a writer, is how little time I’d have to actually write. After I received my first contract, I began learning about the business end of writing and it was a real eye opener. I needed to spend a lot of time setting up the promotional aspects of my writing career. After all, nobody will be able to buy my books if they don’t know that they’re out there

My first endeavor was creating my website. I needed to get some name recognition and begin building my brand as a writer. I remember tinkering with the settings on my web editing software for what seemed like forever. Finally, I came up with a design I liked that would be fairly easy to maintain and update.

My second project was my blog which I launched last year in anticipation of my book releases. I designed the blog, put all my various links and widgets in it, joined a virtual book tour group, and started promoting. The only problem was that my book releases were taking longer than I thought, so there was nothing to promote. I took a leave of absence from the virtual book tour group and will probably have to do a complete overhaul of my links before I become active again. Also, I’m going need some fresh interview material, book information and some press kits as well. I should have started on some of this stuff already, but I’ve been sidetracked by my latest project…online games.

I decided that I needed to have something for kids besides my books. My website www.kevinmcnamee.com is not very kid friendly. Mostly, it introduces me as an author and has background information geared to adults who would like to find out more about me. Frankly, I know that kids could care less, so I wanted to have a site dedicated to entertaining them and have games, coloring pages, and other activities based on my books. The website is www.kevschildrensbooks.com but don’t bother going there. I haven’t loaded any pages yet. I’ll post an announcement when this website is ready to launch.

I started by teaching myself different computer languages. Building my website gave me a working knowledge of what code is supposed to do, so I took it to the next level. I taught myself Java and wound up developing a decent interactive coloring page. The problem with Java is that there it is an older technology and some people turn it off entirely because of security problems. I asked a few people to test my coloring page on their computers and a few of them couldn’t see my page at all. I decided to scrap Java in favor of Flash technology.

Flash games will run on any flash player. Just about everyone already had one loaded on their computer, plus flash doesn’t have the security problems that Java has, so it seemed like a good choice for game programming.

It was a steep learning curve, but with the help of two “dummies” books and some online tutorials, I was able to come up with a jigsaw puzzle based on the Sister Exchange that didn’t crash and burn every time I tried to run it.

I still need to design a web page for this puzzle. When I’m done I’ll post a link for it, feedback will be appreciated. I’m still trying to put together an online coloring book and a drawing pad for kids. I think I’m OK with the drawing pad although I’d like to add some more bells and whistles to it. The coloring book is giving me some problems but I’m still plugging away at it.

I’ve sort of been out of the loop lately, but I just wanted to let everyone know what I’ve been up to. I figure that as soon as I wrap up this tech stuff, I’ll be able to get back to get back to the business at hand, which if I remember correctly … was writing.