Last week a patron came up to me at the info desk and asked for "watercolor Caldecott books." Usually when a patron requests something so specific, the chances of the library not having it and them walking out disappointed increases tenfold. The same principle can be applied to when patrons make the vaguest requests, "I want to reread a book I read for school about boy, I don't know the author or the title, and that's all I know."
I told her that I could narrow down our collection to Caldecott picture books, but the catalog record wouldn't list if they were watercolored or not. Our public catalog shows book covers but searching on it is as frustrating as using AskJeeves on Netscape Navigator on 28.8k baud dial-up. So I turned to Amazon which was perfect because of the "Look Inside" option to browse a few pages. One of the earlier book results was A Ball for Daisy and I told her that I was researching Caldecott books a few months ago and that I wasn't really sure about that year's decision. It was then she mentioned that she is also in her first stages of researching Caldecott books and that she wants to write a picture book. When she also said that she was not impressed with A Ball for Daisy, I told her that I also want to write a picture book, but I want to win a Caldecott with my first book. She just grinned at me and said, "Well, we should trade notes, we'll both win an award with our first book!"
I have the skeletal structure of a story in my head, I just have transfer everything to paper. Another one of my dreams is/was to write a book series that starts in boardbook format and progressively works it way up through to an novel. I just think that the idea of having a whole generation grow along with a character is pretty awesome.
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