Soaked
by A. J.
Cosmo
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BLURB:
What a
way to start summer… I should have never stood up to that bully Jacob. It was
just a water balloon thrown to save my friend’s behind during recess. Now we’re
on a bus heading home and everyone gets the same text: “$500 gift card and full
immunity to the kid that brings me Aiden- Jacob.” I’m Aiden by the way, and the
entire fourth grade is staring at me. Hopefully, with my friend’s help, we can
get off at the next stop, three miles from my house, and make it home before
the entire neighborhood finds us.
Soaked is the first middle-grade novel by author/illustrator A.J. Cosmo. Filled with humor and suspense, this surprising page turner is a tale of friendship, courage, and standing up for what’s right. For 3rd-5th grade readers.
Soaked is the first middle-grade novel by author/illustrator A.J. Cosmo. Filled with humor and suspense, this surprising page turner is a tale of friendship, courage, and standing up for what’s right. For 3rd-5th grade readers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A great book for ages 9 and up talking about bulling. This author covers her grounds well with this story. Well written and a page turner for the young readers!*Received for honest review*
EXCERPT
We ran into the woods and weaved through the trees. Ben
grabbed my hand and pulled me into one of the crusty drainpipes that marked
where future homes would be put. We waited there for the patrol to run past.
"You left him," Ben said.
"You left him? How about we left him?" I said.
"It was your idea to make a break for it. Your plan,
you're blame," Ben growled.
We stopped, looked out of the pipe, and waited for the sound
of the rallying kids to come near.
"I'm sorry," I said as I looked down at the dirt.
Feet stomped by overhead and we dropped our voices.
Ben shook his head. "They're not after me," Ben
whispered. "I could walk out right now and no one would care."
"Don't say that," I said. I couldn’t help but feel
a bit betrayed. "What makes you think they wouldn't bother you?"
"I nearly got soaked back there." He pulled out
his cell phone. He looked at his phone as if it was the most precious thing in
the world. And you know what? To him, it was. I knew that if something happened
to it that it would take at least three grades before he would be able to get a
new one.
"Is it okay?" I asked, not caring about the phone
at all.
He tapped the phone. Then he shook it, pawed it, and pleaded
with it.
It didn't work.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
A.J. Cosmo is the author and
illustrator of over forty children’s books including the best-selling “The
Monster That Ate My Socks”. He lives and works in Los Angeles, loves reading
and video games, and is hard at work finishing the Monsters A to Z series.
“Soaked” is A.J.’s first middle-grade novel.
Website:
Blog
Twitter
Facebook
Soaked
Purchase page
What are your biggest
fears?
(Note: I use the word artist here interchangeably with
writer and any other person in a creative field.)
Irrelevance.
Imagine a little boy that spends an afternoon drawing a
picture for their mother. He selects the perfect colors (red is her favorite),
the perfect image (unicorns and a palm tree), and the perfect text (I love
you!), and wraps it all up with a nice dusting of glitter and kisses. Then that
child looks for his mother and, no matter where they look, or how long they
look for, their mother isn’t there. Then suddenly the mother appears and
doesn’t have time for the drawing because she has been arguing with the boy's
father. The drawing is meaningless to her at that time. She simply tosses it in
the trash and mutters a few curse words. The child is crushed. Beyond just
wasting an afternoon, he feels as though he himself is a waste.
That is the fear all artists share.
Creating anything, be it a book or a painting or a film, is
an enormous venture in time, energy, and will. Creation is both fulfilling in
the regard that we need to say
something and daunting in the sheer scale
of expression. Do we have something to say? Should we say it? What is the
correct way to express it? And then, ultimately, will anyone listen?
Capitalism is the cruelest wet nurse of this fear, as it
demands that what we say be exchanged for currency. That makes the gamble even
worse, as you could imagine that aforementioned child attempting to charge his
mother for his drawing. Capitalism already informs the professional artist, as
their second thought is "how am I going to sell this?" True, most
artists will never say that they censure themselves in the interest of making a
living, but you see very few of them working outside of current cultural
taboos.
However capitalism is not evil and if it were not our
current system then our art would be subservient to something else. In the past
it was Kings, gods, and tradition, and I'm sure something else will demand
tribute in the future.
So what is an artist to do?
We have things that we wish to express and need to meet our
daily needs. So we compromise. We choose topics that resonate both with our
hearts and with the public. Common sense says that the closer to our heart we
get, the more receptive our audience will be, but any artist who has been
working for more than a year knows that that's not the case. We do not know how
our work will be received and any attempt at engineering it will be met with
failure. However we have to try and
engineer it because otherwise we will miss the mark entirely.
So you choose to write the monster story over the heartfelt
interpersonal drama that you really want to write because your audience has
told you repeatedly that they really like monster stories. So you add the
interpersonal elements into the monster stories and come up with something
admixed but unexpected and I think
that's where most working artists end up.
Underlying all of this is the common need artists share to
be heard. We want to be noticed which interestingly goes hand in hand with the
wallflower personalities that many of us are bridled with. I am horribly
embarrassed to speak in large groups of people but I would love as many people
as possible to read my work. The work is a proxy interaction for my own
interaction. If they were to judge it harshly, they would be judging me
harshly, and that is why artists take criticism so personally.
The work of an artist says "I am here, I exist, this is
what I think" and all criticism; love, hate, what have you, is criticism
of the creator. Artists are a sensitive, somewhat narcissistic lot, and we will
seize upon any negative remark as the whole truth, ignoring whatever positive
there is, because deep down inside we fear that we have nothing to say in the
first place.
If you have nothing to say, you are irrelevant. If you are
irrelevant, and your whole view of the world rests on being heard, then you
effectively don't have a reason to exist. In other words, if the world ignores
your work, you are dead. Imagine screaming as loud as you can and never being
heard. Imagine setting off fireworks and being ignored. That is the fear of
irrelevance. That is the fear that stops many a first draft and causes paint to
dry on brushes.
The third worst thing you can do to a writer is not read
their work.
The second worse thing is to read their work and hate it.
The worst thing you can do to a writer is read their work
and ignore it.
What's interesting about how the art world is setup is that
it's a commercial enterprise built by non-artists to exploit artists. The query
process for publishing as well as shopping material is equivalent to eating
spiders for most writers. Not only do they have to take their expression and
make is saleable, they are also asked to continue with rejection, or worse, silence. Traditional publishing in
particular is structured with excessively long periods of silent waiting. How
cruel is the agent who asks to be queried exclusively and then takes seven
months to reject a manuscript.
At least the painter gets a flat no from a gallery when they
bring their slides.
Still we create and we continue to struggle because
underneath all of the doubt lies a spiritual force that demands expression. A
true artist could stop creating with as much ease as they could float into the
sky. Something demands that we do this and it is stressful to wrestle with a
world that doesn’t want us to express that force. We are, to put it simply,
caught in the middle between two arguing parents.
And all we want to do is give our mother a drawing.
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