Logan native has published five children's books
By Don Harrold, Executive Editor
Harrison County Times-Reporter
Lorna Stallman, who grew up on a farm near Logan and graduated from Logan-Magnolia High School, has published five children's books and held a signing Wednesday at the Logan library.
"I have five books out, and they're all children's books," Stallman said. "Four of them are picture books. One is a middle-grade chapter book."
The chapter book is "Three Wee Queens."
"A lot of middle-grade novels are long. They're pretty long," she said. "Usually the chapter books are shorter, easier to read, and a lot of them can lend themselves to another book. Like a series type of thing. So chapter doesn't necessarily mean that it just has chapters."
Stallman, whose maiden name is Lovell, lived in the Logan area until she married in 1986.
"I grew up on a farm in Logan, went to Logan-Magnolia, graduated high school there," she said. "I've been in the Des Moines area since then."
She is widowed. She retired from a veterinary clinic, and said the retirement changed what she could get done. "When I was working, I was writing, but I just didn't have the time to spend really focusing on it and getting things done," she said. "So once I retired, it was like, poof, everything just kind of blossomed and everything fell into place."
Asked where the stories come from, Stallman said, "Mostly from my mind."
One book draws on where she grew up. "They don't really have a local angle, except for maybe my sheep book," she said. "'Cause we had sheep growing up, and this is about sheep shearing. So, in a broad sense of the term."
Stallman said she has been working at it for roughly a quarter century.
"It's probably been close to 25 years," she said. "When I started, I knew I wanted to write children's books."
She began with a correspondence course from the Institute of Children's Literature. "That kind of taught me the basics of writing magazine stories for children's magazines, or books," she said. "So I did that. Graduated from there, then I took their advanced course, graduated from there. I've done workshops and conferences and all kinds of things."
She also belongs to a critique group. "I belong to a critique group that meets once a month, and we're really good at bouncing things off of each other," she said.
Asked how a children's book is critiqued, Stallman pointed to form. "There's certain structures that children's books have to have, and I don't think people really realize that, because it's not obvious," she said. "There has to be a beginning, a middle and an end, and there has to be problems in the middle. The protagonist has to fail. They have to fail before they can succeed."
The group's members do not all write the same thing, she said. "We kind of look at each other's stories, and we all write differently," she said. "Some write middle grade, some write picture books. But we kind of know what we're looking for."
Asked whether she had ever received a critique she thought was unfair or harsh, Stallman said the group's history absorbs it. "We're honest with each other," she said. "And I'm sure I've given critiques that are harsh.
But the thing about it is, we have all been together for so many years that we understand that anything that comes that sounds harsh, they don't take it as harsh. We're just trying to make each other better. We all want to be better writers. I have these books published, but I still want to improve and do better."
Asked why she chose children's books specifically, Stallman said the alternative looked more difficult. "Writing for adults seems so hard," she said. "But one thing I learned is writing for children is hard, because of the structure and what's expected, and because it's so competitive.
The traditional publishing market is so competitive that it's really hard to break in."
She said the pull was there early. "I'm kind of a kid at heart. I always have been," she said. "I'd write little stories and I always liked to rhyme. I was always rhyming, and so that kind of drew me to it."
"These are traditionally published books. They're not self-published or hybrid published or anything like that," Stallman said. "They're from two different publishers. I have one publisher in Arizona that published three of these books, and then a publisher in Australia that published the other two, and I have some more books coming out through them."
Illustrators are assigned by the publishers. Stallman said she had some input on two of the titles. "I had somewhat of a say in who the illustrator was, 'cause it was just a different publisher and they operated differently," she said. "They gave me choices, like a big long list."
The arrangement with the Australian publisher is different. "I can't even contact the illustrator," she said. "They find the illustrator best suited for the story."
The illustration styles and fonts differ from book to book. "They're very high-end," Stallman said. "It costs a lot of money for the publisher to do these end papers like that, and, you know, with color and everything."
Asked about the price of a picture book relative to its word count, she said the work is not visible on the page. "There's a lot that goes into this," she said. "This was years' worth of work."
Of "Klink," Stallman said: "This is about a little owl who's afraid of everything, but he has to save his brother and sister, who fall from a tree, from an oncoming cat. And then he becomes the hero."
"10 Hungry Dragons" came from the Arizona publisher. "This is actually a subtraction book that counts down from 10 down to one," she said.
It also works as a book about sharing, she said.
"The one poor dragon ends up with nothing. Everybody else, all the other dragons have something, and he doesn't have anything," she said. "But then, surprise, there's 10."
"Broomtastrophe" is set at Halloween.
"It's about two witches preparing for the Halloween ball," Stallman said. "One of them is to be crowned queen of the ball. But they have trouble making it to the ball."
Twin sisters illustrated it. "They do art, and they collaborated on this together," she said. "They just did an incredible job."
She said she found something in the finished artwork that she had not seen in progress. "The little lizard and the little rat, they have their own little stories going on all the way through," she said. "I didn't notice that until it was all done. But they end up going to the ball too, in the end."
"Sheer Magic" is also a fantasy, she said. "It's about a sheep that won't stop growing purple wool. And the little girl, Piper, she just doesn't know how to make it stop. But she loves her lamb so much, she ends up knitting for all the other sheep, because it's winter."
Stallman had not held a signing in the Logan area before. "Not here. I have in Des Moines," she said, at Barnes & Noble stores there.
Asked whether people locally know she is a published author, she said she does not think so.
"I think they don't really know that. Not that I try to get the word out, I guess, here specifically in the area," she said. "Although Facebook helps, and Instagram, all those social media. A lot of them do know me from there."
Copies were sold directly at the library. "These they'll buy directly from me, 'cause I brought the books," she said. "Because I'm doing them at the library, so I needed to have the books there available to sell."
She did not charge extra to sign them.
Asked why she writes, Stallman said many writers describe the work as something they have no choice about. "If you talk to a lot of writers, they will tell you they have to write. It's just something that they have to do. Like, they're driven, I guess," she said. "I can't say that I'm driven, but I just really enjoy it. It's just, you know, like some people like golf."
"It's a labor of love, and I really, really do enjoy writing children's stories," she said. "It's just kind of my passion, I guess. It's a hobby and a passion."
Stallman's books are available through Barnes & Noble, Amazon "or really anywhere books are sold online," she said, and through her website, LornaStallman.com, where they can also be ordered.
