Welcome to the RPLA Showcase
Each year at the Royal Palm Literary Award Banquet, authors experience the joy of earning accolades for all the hard work that is often done in the privacy of the home with little to no recognition. Our goal is to showcase the best of the best at the 2015 Royal Palm Literary Awards and provide First Place winners with a well-deserved spotlight. Not only are we recognizing extraordinary talent, but we’re giving readers an opportunity to sample excerpts from the winning stories.
2015 Published Children’s Picture Book
I Beg Your Pardon, But This is My Garden! by Stephen Kindland
Stephen Kindland won First Place in the Published Children’s Picture Book category. In I Beg Your Pardon, But This is My Garden!, Paul Irving Pickett, a very wise cricket, settles an argument by a group of bugs who each claim to own the garden they all depend on for food and shelter.
Click the link to read a sample:
Excerpt from I Beg Your Pardon, But This is My Garden!
Q & A with Stephen Kindland
Q: Where do you get your story ideas?
A: That’s a difficult question for me to answer, but I’ll try. Story ideas can strike me anytime, anywhere, although inspiration most often comes after I’ve gone through a particularly emotional time — good or bad. To me, story ideas are the result of combining curiosity with imagination and personal experience.
Q: Anything in particular about your award-winning RPLA entry that you’d like to share?
A: I’m thrilled to say that copies of my book have been sold in several U.S. cities as well as Canada, Germany and England. I can only hope that the book continues to serve as a source of entertainment and education to parents and children everywhere. Winning a Royal Palm Literary Award was awesome because it served as validation that a children’s book written in rhyme can still receive strong reviews.
Q: Who do you credit with inspiring your writing?
A: Dr. Seuss! It was Theodor Seuss Geisel’s “Green Eggs and Ham” and “Horton Hears a Who” that first captured my little-boy imagination and made me want to express my thoughts in writing. There have been many other writers who have inspired me, such as the late Mike Royko, a columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote for the Chicago Tribune; the late Robert Ludlum, author of 27 thriller novels; and Robert James Waller, whose gentle style in “Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend” inspired me to become a more versatile writer. Ellen Goodman, another Pulitzer winner and syndicated columnist who writes with great wisdom, inspires me to think before writing — and think again before rewriting.
Q: Any tips for new writers?
A: You get out of writing what you put into it — not just in time, but in heart. Learn to recognize those who know — then seek their advice. Good writers don’t always make good editors, and good editors aren’t necessarily good writers.
