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myBurbank Talks
myBurbank Talks
Women of Burbank: Children’s Author, Monica Mancillas
Join myBurbank reporter, Ashley Erikson, in a conversation with the Burbank mom and children’s author, Monica Mancillas, whose picture books center on the themes of culture, identity, and mental health.
Ashley and Monica chat about each of her current books: Mariana and Her Familia, The Worry Balloon and How to Speak in Spanglish. Monica discusses the inspiration behind the books she has written, like growing up in a bilingual household and the stigma of anxiety and depression that she learned to overcome with tools that she now teaches her daughter.
Monica also shares some great insight into the publishing world and the steps and path that led her to become an author.
For more info on Monica Mancillas and her books visit https://www.monicamancillas.com.
Meet Monica at the Burbank Barnes & Noble on August 5th for a book reading and signing.
This episode was sponsored by My Favorite Cleaning Company.
From deep in the Burbank Media District. It's time for another edition of my Burbank Talks. This podcast is presented by the staff of my Burbank. Now let's see what's on today's agenda as we join our program.
Speaker 2:Hi, ashley Erickson here with another episode of Women of Burbank, and I have the amazing Monica Mencius here. She's a children's author who's book center on themes of identity, culture, mental health. She's also a mother and has her own business teaching piano to kids. So welcome, monica. Thank you for coming today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you about your books. You have some books that just came out. We're going to talk about all of them in just a little bit, but first tell me about how you started getting into becoming a children's author. What's your background like in this?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, prior to becoming a children's book author, I actually worked in the recording industry for about 10 years. I moved to LA to be a singer-songwriter and my rock star dream sadly did not come true. So I got married and had a daughter and, as most of us do, when we have our first child, we spend a lot of time at the library. We also have very little time, and I had always had, you know, I had dreams of being a rock star and then coming, and you know, going back to school and getting my PhD, and then at some point I was going to write the great American novel. So I had always written, but obviously those first few years after you have a kid, you just don't have the time. So I started reading a lot of children's books to her from, I think, the moment she came out of the womb, and we spent a lot of time at the Burbank Library and I needed a creative outlet. So, you know, naturally I started coming up with my own picture book ideas and just with the very little time that I had maybe after a 12-hour day, you know I put her down to bed in her crib and spend an hour at night, or whatever energy I had left working on picture book ideas, and then it wasn't until she went to preschool which would have been see, she was born in 2013, so it would have been around 2017, I think that I decided I was going to really dedicate myself to this.
Speaker 3:I had started teaching piano to kids and I was doing that part-time. But I thought, you know, I had this one dream of becoming a singer-songwriter. That didn't pan out. My other big fairy tale dream was to be a writer. So let's now kind of have a second chance at building another career. Let's do that. So I joined SCBWI, which is the Society of Children's Book Writers and illustrators. Is a mouthful, I can never get it out.
Speaker 2:I like the CBWI, as you said.
Speaker 3:SCBWI and some people call it Squibby. Oh, okay, that's easier to remember. Yeah, Squibby. So I had you know. I just kept reading about it on the Internet.
Speaker 3:If you want to be a children's book author, illustrator, you've got to join SCBWI. So I joined in 2017, formed my first critique group, which is a small group of authors or illustrators. If you're an illustrator, who you get together with? You know we would get together once a month. Sometimes people get together more than that and you share your manuscripts, you give each other feedback, you share resources. So we would meet at a Starbucks once a month and we were all kind of in the same boat, just learning. Scbwi also has amazing conferences, so I went to my first writers' conferences. The first one was put on by the local chapter. They have chapters all over the world and a ton in the United States. And then they have this annual summer conference in Los Angeles where everybody from all over the world comes, and it's an amazing opportunity to get in front of agents and editors to hear other authors talk about their journey. So I started doing pitch sessions with agents.
Speaker 2:And at that time did you have like a whole bunch of ideas like set to bring to them?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I had written a bunch of I can look back now and say pretty mediocre books. I was definitely learning and I was super green. The first time I went to one of these conferences I knew nothing about the publishing industry. In fact, I had written what was the first version of Mariana and her family on my debut picture book, and I didn't think to pitch that one.
Speaker 3:I signed up for the pro session even though I was not a pro, because I wanted to be able to pitch to an agent and I pitched her some other animal story and she was like why, what's unique about this? There are a million animal stories out there. And I thought I was done for and I said, okay, you know, I just kind of got the courage up to. I had nine minutes with her and I said can I pitch you one more? And I pitched her what would go on to be this book. She loved the idea.
Speaker 3:I was so new that at the time I actually thought that being Latina was going to work against me and I didn't know that there was this whole own voices movement, that publishing was trying to diversify and actively looking for stories like mine, and so I wound up getting a lot of interest from agents and editors based on that idea. So okay. So after that conference, I applied for a mentorship through the local chapter of a CBWI with Andrea J Lone, who is a wonderful children's book author. That was a six month mentorship, and so she just laid it all out on the table, told me what I needed to do to start getting some momentum. The first thing she told me was get on Twitter, because I couldn't find you anywhere and Twitter has an amazing writing community, or at least it did.
Speaker 3:It still does, but it's going through a wonky stage as we all know, and Twitter had at that time tons of pitch events, so they had specific ones for specific genres and on those days you can pitch your manuscript a few times during the day in just like 200, whatever the limit is the word for Twitter and agents and editors who are looking for something in that particular genre or category will potentially like it and that's an invitation for you to query them, to send them a query letter in your manuscript.
Speaker 2:It's almost like acting like you just keep going to all these auditions and hope that something sticks right yeah.
Speaker 3:And the query process can be grueling. I mean, people are in. They call them the query trenches. People are in the query trenches for sometimes years, you really? One of the first things my mentor told me was that writers eat rejection for breakfast, and it's true. No matter what stage of your career you're in, even after you're a published author, you just have to have a thick skin.
Speaker 3:What they're looking for too. Yeah, yeah, and you have to deal with, you know, reviews from consumers and there's just that's really hard. It's a lot, but anyway. So I had just started querying two weeks before and I decided to participate in a pitch event called DV Pit, which is was for diverse voices, so marginalized creators who are writing stories about marginalized characters. So I pitched Marianne and her family. My now agent liked it she was one of two likes. I submitted it to her and within a week we were on a call and I had an offer of representation, which was amazing. So I got a bowl.
Speaker 2:Very lucky, yeah. And ironically, you and I met at the Burbank Library. We were just talking about that. Yeah, we met one of those summer library things where the kid I think it was when the Wildlife Learning Center was there bringing animals and you and I met because our kids were hanging out and we stayed in touch ever since. And now you've got all these books coming out, which is amazing. Are they in the Burbank Library yet? Is this one?
Speaker 3:Marianne and her family is I made sure it was. I donated three copies. I was like my local library has to have this.
Speaker 2:I don't know if they have the worry balloon yet, because it just came out last week, but I will definitely check, so that's a great place for people that are listening to come and find these books, and so this one was your first book, so give us a little rundown of what it's about.
Speaker 3:So Marianne and her family is basically based on my own childhood experience.
Speaker 3:So I was born in Ensenada, mexico, which is just on the like two hours south of the border, and I moved to San Diego with my family when I was about two years old. So my whole family on that, on my father's side of the family, lived in, and continues to live in, ensenada and I would go back and I would visit them from time to time. But there was always this kind of feeling of unease being sort of in these two different cultures. And so this story is based on that experience of going back to your family in a different country or in a different cultural setting and feeling a little bit alienated because maybe you don't speak the language as well as they do or you don't necessarily have the same cultural traditions. And then over time, of course, marianne quickly acclimates to her family and she finds a wall of pictures where she sees pictures of herself in amongst all the pictures of the rest of the family and has this moment of realization that she's always been there and always been loved and part of the family. That's really beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and did you do a book signing with the Set Barns and Nobles here in Burmick? I did. How did that go? How was that experience like? It was incredible actually.
Speaker 3:You never know what to expect at these events. I mean, I've seen these really sad Twitter posts by incredibly successful authors who are sitting in an empty room. You just never know if you're going to get an audience. But my Burbank community really came out. We had, I think, over 50 people showed up. We sold out of books. It was an amazing experience.
Speaker 2:And you're doing some library readings. I saw you posted.
Speaker 3:I'm actually doing a Barns and Nobles event again on August 5th at 11 am to launch the Worry Balloon, which just came out last week, and then how to Speak in Spanglish comes out on August 22nd. So I'll be reading those and Betty C Tang, who is the illustrator for the Worry Balloon, will be doing a drawing demo. And she is an amazing illustrator. She's got some graphic novels out that are just parachute kids. As her latest she worked on the Jackie Ha Ha series. But just amazing, amazing illustrator.
Speaker 2:It was a beautiful book. I'm so glad I got to look into it before this podcast. The colors are so vibrant. It's such a beautiful story. The Worry Balloon is about a little girl on her first day of school and it's about tackling all those anxieties right, the what-ifs that are going through your head, and then pulling out those tools on how to manage that. So tell me a little bit about the Worry Balloon and where that idea came from for you.
Speaker 3:So there's an author's note in the back of the book where I talk a little bit about my own personal experiences with anxiety. It's definitely something that runs through my family. When I was a kid growing up, my mom struggled with anxiety and depression on a number of different occasions. And you know, as a kid and back in the time that I was growing up I didn't have the vocabulary. It was also really highly stigmatized back then so it was something that we weren't supposed to talk about with others and so I kind of had to navigate that on my own.
Speaker 3:My mom was a single mother for many years and I kind of took on the role of caregiver emotional caregiver in some respects and so when my daughter was born, you know I it was so important to me from the get go to not only have the language for her to discuss her feelings and and understand that that when anxiety and worry comes up it's a natural emotion, it's something that happens to all of us. It doesn't have to be. Yes, it can feel overwhelming, but it can be manageable. So you know, I started giving her. I introduced her to yoga at a very young age, talked to her about meditation and we would do little meditations that were age appropriate. But I was really taken aback when, at the age of six, she herself started experiencing some fairly intense feelings of anxiety that centered around some physical health problems that she was having. I hadn't experienced anxiety that way as a child. I definitely did as an adult, but I really wasn't prepared for my young child to be experiencing those things.
Speaker 2:It's harder to rationalize with a child and try to explain those fears in a way that they're going to understand.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and I had actually been very careful about the way I had discussed things with her before. I didn't even want her to know what anxiety was I didn't use that word intentionally, but once she started experiencing them I did. I wanted to normalize those feelings and we created a calming corner in our home and I just started introducing as many tools as I could to her, and eventually things got better than the pandemic came around and she, you know, she was very as an only child. She was super isolated, like a lot of other kids. She started developing social anxiety or I I'm sorry, separation anxiety, where I couldn't even go to the bathroom without her going mom, mom, where are you? Which she had never experienced before.
Speaker 3:And I talked to other parents who were going through the same thing and that was where sort of the seed of an idea for this book came about, because I knew there were so many kids around the world that were dealing with that same kind of anxiety and so the world was going through this huge traumatic experience together and I wanted them to have again not only the language to discuss it, but I wanted to normalize the feeling. We all feel scared, we all feel worries. What can we do about it?
Speaker 3:How can we manage it, and my editor and I were very intentional about not resolving it at the end with this perfect, everything's okay now you?
Speaker 2:know the storm might come again it's quiet. Yeah, Because every time I mean, this is just her the one moment she's going to school and that she's just getting through. But I love at the end how you have pages of these tools, the tool belt or tool bag that you say in the book of all these coping like the yoga and other things, what were some other tools that you had in there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I go through a few different like basic yoga positions. There's a breathing exercise that the kids a hot chocolate breathing which is something I came up with and then found that others were doing the same thing, because it's so age appropriate and easy for a kid to wrap their mind around the idea of breathing in hot chocolate, blowing out the steam. I think I also talk about creating a calming corner. I don't remember what else I know there are.
Speaker 2:so many things. I remember the hot chocolate thing. I thought that was really cute. Oh, there's the ohm Ohm on the range. I called it yeah.
Speaker 2:The little corner is a very cute idea too. I grew up in a. My mother took care of her mother, who had bipolar and depression, and so she was the caretaker for her mom. So growing up it was very stigmatized in our home that we don't talk about it, you ignore it. So I just kept growing up waiting like when is going to be my breakdown? My aunt didn't have a breakdown until much later in life, and so I kept waiting for the floor to pull out from underneath me and it was going to be my turn. So I just kind of always walked on eggshells waiting for it to happen, instead of just talking about it Right and being like I can have those feelings and they're okay and they're valid and there's ways to go about them. But that didn't come about until much later, when mental health is being put on the radar more and more Right.
Speaker 3:And that was exactly my experience was that when I finally did experience anxiety as a young adult and it was normal anxiety it was terrifying. So you develop an anxiety about anxiety. Yeah, what?
Speaker 2:you saw, just waiting for it to come back too. It's like the anxiety of waiting for the anxiety attack, right, you know, and I feel like your body, your body tricks you like you feel completely fine and then, all of a sudden, the symptoms come and you're like I'm fine, but it's like, it's like triggered from, like last week's anxiety, right, right.
Speaker 3:It's like this snowball going down the line and again which is why I think books like this are so important because I see my daughter still deals with anxiety but she's so resilient, she's able to bounce back from it quickly because I think it has been so normalized and so talked about and so okay in our house.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like what you did in the book, where she's thinking about all these like horrible things like what if you know? What if I get sick, or what if I get injured or what I have to go to the hospital, and then the mom says, well, what if you're going to be okay, and what if you're going to have a fun time, and what if you know we? I think we dwell so much on the things that could happen wrong that we are missing what could happen right, and I think that's a good eye opening just for even for adults. I think yeah, Not just for kids.
Speaker 3:And those were. Now that you're reminding me those were the other tools that I mentioned in the book is that for me, I end every day with a prayer of gratitude and I really try to focus on even if I felt miserable all day, all day what were the good things that happened, and then I like to follow that with positive visualization of these are the things that are going to happen for me and I, and sometimes just doing that can change your brain chemistry, because now, instead of focusing on what you're so afraid of or so sad about, you're focusing on this kind of fantasy of hope that has a real possibility in your life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that Well, we're going to take a quick break here. A message from our sponsor, and then we'll be right back.
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Speaker 2:All right, we're back. We're going to talk about your third book that is coming out next month. Yeah, August 22nd Month how to Speak in Spanglish. So tell me a little bit about this book that's coming out.
Speaker 3:So this book follows a little boy named Sammy who grew up speaking both Spanish and English in his home and he and his sibling and his mom and dad all kind of speak in Spanglish, which is very common amongst bicultural, bilingual households. That we call it code switching, where if you can't think of a word immediately in one of the languages, you'll grab for the other language and kind of fill it in and go back and forth and sometimes that turns into the creation of new words like lunche, for lunch. We say al muerto in Spanish for lunch, but lunche is a uniquely Spanglish word. Okay, so this little boy is, you know, thrilled with speaking Spanglish and he has a lot of fun with it.
Speaker 3:But he has a very traditional grandmother, or traditional abuelita, who kind of looks at him as scantz and he and she wants him to stick to Spanish at home, english at school and not mix them together. And then when, when he gets a paperback from his teacher that that has kind of a little red mark on it saying he used the word hung out instead of hang, and she says this isn't proper English, and so he decides okay, I'm going to try to do things their way for a minute, but it's so entrenched as a part of his personality that it kind of takes the wind out of his sails. And so he winds up at the park one day talking to a neighbor who's curious about Spanglish and says, hey, can you teach me a little bit more? And he starts teaching her and then other community community members here and they come over and he starts slowly kind of teaching the entire community how to speak Spanglish and his abuela slowly comes around at the end and it's just so cute, kind of a sweet embracing, yeah, identities and culture.
Speaker 2:I love that. Did you grow up speaking Spanglish?
Speaker 3:Does your daughter? My daughter sadly doesn't. She has an Italian grandmother on my dad's side, and so I mean on her dad's side, and she started learning Italian when she was little and so I thought, okay, I'll let her teach her Italian first and then I'll teach her Spanish, and I kind of missed my window. We're trying now Number two late, but yeah, I grew up speaking Spanish and English and my Spanglish was accidental. I didn't do intentional code switching, but I would mix up words. For example, in Spanish, for the word for socks at least in where I'm from in Mexico is calcetines, and so I would accidentally call them sake tines. There's a there's a moment in Marianne and her family where she accidentally calls her abuelita agua li agua means water, and so I had a lot of those like embarrassing moments, and I think how to speak in Spanglish was my way of kind of owning that. Yeah, instead of being ashamed of it, as I was. Through my whole childhood and even in my adult life I've said some embarrassing things accidentally that didn't translate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think people that can speak multiple languages are pretty amazing. I don't know how you can switch back and forth in your head. I can even like barely get English words out and that's my only language, so I can't even imagine like trying to go back and forth in your head and at the end of the book you have a glossary of Spanish words and English meaning and Spanglish words, which I think is really cool, so people can kind of figure out what everything means, and the illustrations are absolutely beautiful in that book. It was really well done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've been blessed with amazing illustrators for all three of these picture books. Like they all have their own unique style and they really just are so well paired with the books.
Speaker 2:How does that get put together? You don't pick your own illustrator, the publisher does.
Speaker 3:Yeah, typically they're in the contract. If you have a good agent, they'll work language into it that says that you are part of that process. So I can definitely put forth names. But typically, you know, there's just a whole team in traditional publishing that does that. There's a design department and they're so good at that. So the designer you know whoever's in charge of the art will typically come to me with a few different names and say here are the ones that we're thinking of. What do you think? And you know, usually I like them, but I might be able to say I like this one the most. And then we'll offer, we'll reach out to that illustrator's agent and work out the details.
Speaker 2:Do you get to have like a say on what. What images are going to be presented? Because I mean your story really, I mean covers the images and sometimes the images are telling what the story is saying. So you probably have to write that into your pitch, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know this is an interesting topic because when you first get into writing for children, a lot of people advise you don't put art notes. The agents and editors don't want to see art notes, and that can't be further from the truth. Yeah, you, it depends on how integral it is to the story. So you don't. I don't want to tell the illustrator everything point by point that they should do.
Speaker 3:I want to give them some liberty. It's their book too. But if it's something for example, a little girl walks into a room and there's a dog hidden behind the couch and that's an important part of the story, but it's not part of the story that I'm telling Then I will put an art note in there. So it's illustration dog hiding behind couch. And that way the illustrator knows that that's what they have to do, and some editors might my Penguin Workshop editor, which, how to speak in Spanish, she's coming out with them. She wanted very specific notes from me. She wanted character descriptions, she wanted to know specifically what was happening on each page to give to the illustrator. So it depends on the team.
Speaker 2:Okay, and you have three different publishers have coming out with Five different Five. That's incredible. Yeah, it's been an amazing journey, yeah, managing all that. And you've got more books coming out. I do, and some of the ones that are about to come out.
Speaker 3:So I have. I'm working on an unannounced project with Scholastic. Hopefully I won't get in trouble for saying that I won't give any other details, but it'll be coming out at the end of next year. It's a middle grade novel and my middle grade debut, called Sing it Like Celia, comes out next year, next April 2nd through Penguin Workshop, and I am enormously proud and excited for that book. It's really a book of my heart. I have another middle grade book entitled Le Yendas Legends coming out through Chronicle in 2025. And that's a compendium of 60 biographies of Latine icons. So nonfiction.
Speaker 2:Was that been like a whole different experience writing that than writing a children's book?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's completely different. It's, I mean, it's still for the children's market, it's middle grade, but nonfiction is a completely different beast. I mean, it took a very long time to research, and then, of course, you go through all the revision stages with your editor. But on top of that it goes through sensitivity reads. It's currently going through sensitivity reads. It had to go through kind of a lengthy fact-checking period as well, so it's yeah.
Speaker 2:What's the time period like from when you pitch a story and get it approved or taken by an agent to when it actually comes out onto the board? It comes out onto the bookshelves, okay, so that's a fantastic question.
Speaker 3:It can vary a lot. It depends in. Children's literature is notoriously slow, so it takes longer than adult fiction. Picture books typically take two years from the day that they're sold to the publisher, and that doesn't include the amount of time that it takes to first write it, then get it past your agent, cause your agent will usually want revisions, and then you'll send it out on submission, and submission can take months. Wow, my first book sold really quickly. It sold at auction, which was amazing. But every book has been a different experience my, the Chronicle book that I was just telling you about. It will be five years.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's been long, long process.
Speaker 2:I guess if you're constantly putting out stuff, then it'll just constantly like you know, it'll catch up to where you're always releasing something at some point. Yes, yes, that's the goal, right, yeah, yeah. And then in one of your books I think it was how to Speak in Spanglish in the dedication you said that your love of words came from your mom and dad, which I love. Tell me about that, and what in your childhood made you fall in love with writing you?
Speaker 3:know, I think I've always been a wordsmith. I mean, my mom used to tell me I said my first word when I was four months old and I didn't believe her. Then my daughter said her first word at four months and I was like, okay, maybe, wow. But I just always loved writing. I mean, that was my favorite thing to do in school were the writing projects. I have every piece of writing I've ever written, from first grade on, and even, I think you know music. I was a songwriter. I loved creating stories and using words to emote, and both of my parents were writers. My dad was. He was always writing poetry when I was a kid and he wrote a couple of novels. When I was a kid, my mom took a children's book workshop, so it was, you know, and they were both very, very supportive as well of my writing. I was always so eager to read whatever I had written to them and they would lavish me with praise and support.
Speaker 2:That's incredible. It's so important, especially when I was growing up. I was in poetry club when I was in middle school and I always loved writing and I always wanted to be an author. And of course life, you know, takes you on some crazy journeys, but I graduated with my English degree and you know so as somebody who wants to take that step into that world. I know you talked about joining these groups and things like that, but where do you even begin? Like pulling from your personal experience, like where would somebody even begin to start writing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think my first piece of advice is to write as often as possible. I mean, I write every day and it really is like a muscle. It's like going to the gym the more you do it, the easier it gets, whereas if you, when I was songwriting, I would wait for inspiration to take me and it would be like once every six months I'd write a song. It's hard to really sustain something that way. So I would say, write as often as possible and, yes, write what you know. That's so important.
Speaker 3:Don't try to write someone else's experience. It is important to look at the market and see what is being acquired and what is being published, but don't aim for that, don't go okay, well, you know Holly and Hoover is really doing really big right now. So I'm gonna write that because, again, it takes two years for books to come out. You don't know what the market's gonna be like in two years. You wanna write something that is both uniquely yours and also universal, so it has to have something that makes it stand out but at the same time, that readers are gonna read it and go. I see myself in this.
Speaker 2:Do you read a lot of children's books. I feel like that would be like step two after writing is to read everything, right?
Speaker 3:Yes, you absolutely have to read in your genre. So right now the book that I'm working on I have a two book deal with Penguin Workshop. So I'm working on my second book right now and it's a dystopian middle grade novel and so I've got to stack this high on my coffee table right now of dystopian middle grade novels. And the book before that for Scholastic was more kind of in enemies to lovers, dual point of view. So before that I was reading books in that genre and category. So it's feel for inspiration. It gives you an idea of again what's publishable today. So you can read the Golden Compass, for example, just because it's a great piece of literature, and it gives you an idea of what people are ultimately gonna be reading still 30 years from now. But editors today and agents today aren't gonna be looking for that voice. They want something that is written for today's children and I feel like I mean.
Speaker 2:So much is being published every year. It just keeps adding and adding and adding. So trying to find something unique and different has got to be absolutely difficult.
Speaker 3:It is, which is why again sorry, you don't want to chase the market, as much as it's important to be aware of those, because agents and editors will ask you also for comp titles, which are comparison titles, titles that you can. I might say. Marianne and her family I think I used Islandborn as a comp Islandborn meets Abuela Mengo and me, so it gives them an idea of where this sits in the market. But at the same time, that can't be your starting point. Your starting point has to be what am I inspired by? So when I'm trying to come up with new concepts, I'll think back on my childhood and go what were the really important moments in my childhood? Or I might look at my own kid or her friends and go what's going on in their lives right now? That's important. But again, you also want to be careful not to co-opt. Even if it's your own kid, you're not co-opting other stories, so it really has to come from personal inspiration.
Speaker 2:Speaking of your daughter, how does she love your books? I'm sure she gets to read them all the time. Is she your big critic of yours? So do you pitch your idea to her first before I do Do?
Speaker 3:you, I do, yeah, especially with these middle grade titles. I just read her. I had to go through several iterations of book proposals before we finally landed on one that my editor really liked, and so every single one I sat down with her and my husband and would read it to them, and it's helpful because my daughter is my demographic.
Speaker 2:Because she's 10 years old.
Speaker 3:So she'll interrupt me with what. I don't know what that means, and then I know. Okay, mental note this doesn't resonate with a 10-year-old kid. She doesn't know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:So as she gets older, you're gonna change your demographic, like writing higher grade books possibly.
Speaker 3:I think it's highly possible. Yeah, for sure. I definitely had a lot more picture book ideas coming at me when she was that age and I knew I was watching preschoolers and kindergartners going through things. And now I am really fueled by middle grade. So, yeah, it's possible. In a couple of years I'll be writing young adult, that's so exciting.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll put your website in the bio of the podcast and everyone can come check these books out at the library. Right, All the libraries here in Burbank are there.
Speaker 3:Yes, and you can get them on Amazon. I'm sure you can get them on Amazon, target, bookshoporg, all the major retailers, and I have to mention that how to Speak in Spanglish is a Target book club pick of the month. It's September, congratulations, so you can go to Target and get it inside the physical store.
Speaker 2:That is so exciting. And you said remind me the date for your book signing.
Speaker 3:August 5th at 11 am here in Burbank. I have another one at Once Upon a Time Bookstore in Montrose on August 12th at 11 am Wonderful.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for joining. It was such a great time talking to you, and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Women of Burbank. Thanks, ashley, thank you.
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