Author Betty Vanderwielen had the students name four raccoons based on pictures of them. Lance, the main character in the story, was told not to name the baby raccoons people names, but name them based on personality characteristics or behaviors.
Author Betty Vanderwielen signing a copy of "Raccoon Summer" for fourth grader Chase Cahoon. She drew names for two books. Seventh grader Bekah Kelley received the second. Cahoon was very excited to receive his signed copy. Vanderwielen also donated a book to the Seeley Lake Elementary and Swan Valley Libraries.
Author Betty Vanderwielen reading the part from "Raccoon Summer" when Lance first received the red Corvette phone from his mother. The corded phone was one of the main reasons Vanderwielen quit submitting her manuscript to publishers in 2019 because readers would no longer believable that a young teen boy would not have a cell phone.
SEELEY LAKE – Author Betty Vanderwielen met with Seeley Lake Elementary school students May 25 to share about her new book "Raccoon Summer." Students not only learned about how she came up with the idea for the book but also the process of getting it published.
In the mid-1970s, the Vanderwielens volunteered with an animal rehabilitation program through the Kalamazoo Nature Center in Kalamazoo, Michigan. For nearly 10 years, they took in small animals including raccoons, birds, possums and squirrels. The baby raccoons were their favorite.
Vanderwielen wanted to write a book where a young boy rescued and raised baby raccoon. She started her first version of the book in 1992. However, it was not until 2003 that she started seriously writing.
To help the SLE students get into the story, she had them do some of the things that the main character Lance did when he found the orphaned baby raccoons. First the students suggested names for the raccoons based on their personality or behaviors they saw in the photos.
Second, Vanderwielen had the students suggest ways that Lance could introduce new foods to the raccoons, questions Lance asked of his classmates in the book. The students shared advice how they would help encourage the raccoons to try and eat different foods including worms, beetles, fruit, fish and crayfish.
Vanderwielen said after earning two masters' degrees, in English literature and Medieval Studies, and teaching English composition, research and report writing and children's literature, she thought she knew all about writing.
"But I found there was always more to learn," Vanderwielen said.
To improve her writing she did a lot of research, attended workshops and started a critique group with other local writers. Once she finished her book, it was time to find a publisher.
When Vanderwielen started submitting her manuscript, she would mail an entire copy with a self-addressed stamped envelope to the publisher and wait for a reply. More than 20 years later, she couldn't even send directly to a publisher, she had to go through an agent.
For each submission she had to write a cover letter and submit a part of the book based on the publishers' requirements.
"Then you wait and you wait and you wait," Vanderwielen said.
The rejections and no responses started to pile up. Vanderwielen said agents and publishers often passed on the book because they were not passionate about it.
"It is not that it is not good, it is just they aren't passionate enough about it to spend a lot of their time and energy because [the agent] doesn't get paid until it gets published," Vanderwielen said.
Vanderwielen pointed out that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling received 12 rejections before a publisher agreed to publish it. Dr. Seuss received 27 rejections before he published his first book "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" and Steven King received 30 rejections.
"But here is the secret," Vanderwielen said. "The first manuscript that J.K Rowlings or Dr. Seuss or whomever sent to the first agent or publisher, is not the same one that they sent to the last publisher that accepted it because all along the way they revised it. You are continually revising, revising and revising."
While Vanderwielen told herself that as long as she loved getting back into the story and revising it she would continue to submit it to be published. However in 2019, she stopped because she did not know how to overcome a hurdle with one of the main symbols in the book.
Lance's telephone, a novelty phone in the shape of a red Corvette, was a landline with a program button. Throughout the book, the phone was an important method of communication between Lance and his mother. It was also a way for Lance to avoid his mother's calls by unplugging it. However by 2019, everyone had a cell phone.
"I could no longer expect kids to believe at 12 or 13 that Lance was going to have this toy phone," Vanderwielen said.
A friend recommended she submit her manuscript to Chicken Scratch Books. Publisher Kiri Jorgensen loved the story, however, "I would need to make changes."
Vanderwielen was tasked with cutting it down from 85,000 words to less than 60,000 words. She also set the story in the 1980s making it a historical fiction. This forced her to research the popular movies, video games, TV shows, books, LEGO sets and the slang used in the 1980s to make sure it all fit.
Vanderwielen also changed the conflict between Lance and his mother. She wanted a parallel between the baby raccoons and a human baby, so in the end, Lance's mother wanted to adopt a baby with Down's syndrome. Vanderwielen shared information about Down's syndrome with the SLE students.
Chicken Scratch Books published "Raccoon Summer" in April 2022.
"Now I am a bona fide author," Vanderwielen said. "For me, the best part of being an author is knowing that children can now enter the world I created and meet the characters I love."
Vanderwielen added that she is 76 and she has published her first book.
"The moral of that story is it is never too late and you are never too old," Vanderwielen said. "If it something you really want to do and you keep working at it, eventually you can make it happen."
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