Laurie Isop has known some prickly people in her time.
If she hadn’t, perhaps she wouldn’t be $5,000 richer today and on her way to becoming a well-known children’s author.
Isop, who lives near Spring Lake east of Renton, is the winner of the Third Cheerios New Author Contest, which drew about 3,000 entries nationally.
Her story is titled, “How Do You Hug a Porcupine?” To find out the answer, you’ll have to buy a box of Cheerios a year from now. Or read a hardcover version of her book to be published in summer 2011 by Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing.
At least here’s a hint.
How Do You Hug A Porcupine?
Can you hug a horse? Of course!
A cow?
With arms around her neck, that’s how.
A dog or cat is not so hard.
Just hug them in your own backyard.
Hugging bunnies is just divine.
But how do you hug a porcupine?
Isop and her husband Paul have run a photography studio, Studio 6 Photography, for 17 years, specializing in wedding photography.
Their sons Erik, 13, and Austin, 15, are avid readers. Isop tests out everything she writes on them – and a lot of other people, too, basically wherever there are kids.
She has been writing for children for nine years, piling up a lot of rejection notices along the way. Now, she’s excited.
“I am riding the wave,” she said.
Realistic, too, she said she could go the rest of her life and never get published again.
Now she’s awaiting the publishing of her first book.
An illustrator has been selected to do the book’s drawings, including a cover. The contest criteria included a book that was conducive to illustrations and can be read out loud. The limit was 500 words; “Porcupine” is 200 words.
Isop taped those prerequisites to her computer.
The current winner’s book (“1 Zany Zoo”) is just now on grocery-store shelves, peaking out through cellophane. It’s estimated the books will go in about 2.2 million boxes of Cheerios.
Isop’s book is geared to 3- to 6-year-olds. But the inspiration came from a more adult world. She was faced with a “relatively difficult personal situation” with a “prickly” person, she said, while working on a book.
“I refer to those people as porcupines,” she said. “It’s hard to get close to prickly people.”
