Miss Mingo 3

I've just started working on the third Miss Mingo book, currently titled, Miss Mingo Weathers the Storm. Usually I find it hard to get started on a new project, but it's much easier now that I have Mabel. Besides keeping me company, she offers lots of feedback. We work well together.


I've almost got a good working draft of the story from which I can make thumbnail sketches. As with all the Mingo books, I start with a group of facts I think kids will find interesting. In this story, the facts are about weather and some animals' different relationships to weather. For example, as the temperature rises, male crickets chirp faster. I bet you didn't know that you can actually come up with a good approximation of the termperature in Fahrenheit degrees by counting the number of cricket chirps in 14 seconds and then adding 40 to your tally. Pretty cool.

Once I have a group of facts, then I come up with the story. In this one, Miss Mingo and her class are going on a hike and they run into all kinds of weather. Sometime this week I'm going to go walk up Blue Hills in Dedham, MA to take pictures for reference. The research part of making a book is always lots of fun.