I
was born in 1967 in Long Branch, New Jersey. When I was three years old, I learned
how to read, write and draw. I liked it so much that, before I'd even gone to
school, I knew that I wanted to be "an artist and a book-maker." When
I was in elementary school, I was classified as a slow student. In third grade
a teacher spotted me reading an unedited translation of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback
of Notre Dame, as well as a collection of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. It
was supposed that maybe I wasn’t as dumb as I looked, and halfway through fourth
grade I was moved to an advanced reading class. However, nobody explained to me
what was happening, or asked me to do any work. Consequently, I failed that subject
that year, while my fellow fourth-graders learned the parts of speech (which would
later prove necessary for learning foreign languages) and I did not. So in fifth
grade I was classified as slow again – or at least really weird. The following
year, I amused myself by reading – and re-reading – Frank Herbert’s science-fiction
epic Dune. (This was years before anyone managed to make it into a movie. I wanted
to make the movie!) Then,
in eighth grade, I scored a 190 on the standard IQ test all eighth-graders had
to take. Apparently, 100 is supposed to be “average,” so that made me some sort
of genius. Okay. This did not exempt me from school, nor did it entitle me to
a paycheck. Also, now I had to put up with conceited (and perhaps territorially
defensive?) math whizzes “testing” me with math problems, which I could not solve
in my head because math never was my strong point (I had actually scored below
average in the math section, with the exception of the geometry problems, which
I’d found quite simple). And
now regarding Preston McClear. When I was working at the movie theater, he came
in to see a movie and we recognized each other from high school. He said he had
written a children’s book and asked if I would be so kind as to illustrate it.
I agreed, and we soon had Frannie and Pickles. He sent it around to publishers,
who said the story was good and the pictures excellent, but nobody knew who we
were so they weren’t going to publish it. We created a slightly more ambitious
book called Old Man Brown and His Magic Bike, with identical results. The
same deal happened with The Boy Under the Bed. So we decided to put together
a sort of presentation package for publishers, which included hand-made self-printed
copies of the books. Since I had created the same sort of thing with my first
novel The Third Ice Age, I knew how to make books by hand. Before I knew
it, Preston had decided to take what I call the “Little Red Hen Maneuver” and
set up a publishing company called Malibu Books For Kids (now Malibu Books For
Children). So,
I’m half of a publishing company! It’s pretty exciting. Meanwhile, I continue
to write and draw. It all keeps me pretty busy. Nick
Dollak |
