Why we started
There is no shortage of handwriting workbooks. Most of them are printed from the same clip art, put every letter of the alphabet on one crowded page, and leave a four year old to work out where the pencil goes down. A parent buys one, the child gets two pages in, and the book goes in a drawer.
We wanted the opposite of that. One thing on a page. A dot where the pencil starts. Arrows numbered in the Zaner-Bloser stroke order, the one most schools in the United States teach. Rows that begin with a solid letter and end with an empty space, so the help falls away without anybody having to decide when. Pages big enough for an arm that still moves from the shoulder.
None of that is new. It is how handwriting has been taught for decades. It is just rarely done carefully, because doing it carefully is slow.
The coloring books came from the same complaint. Too many of them are so crowded with detail that an evening’s coloring turns into squinting at tiny shapes, and the back of each page shows through when a marker soaks in. Ours are bold and easy: thick lines, big spaces, one design to a page with the back left blank, so a page can be finished in a sitting and nothing bleeds onto the next one.
The books
- Ready, Set, Write! Handwriting workbooks for ages 3 to 6, from the first lines a letter is made of to copying a whole sentence.
- Lantern Coloring. Bold and easy coloring books for adults and teens, each built around one theme.
- Little Lantern Coloring. The same idea for ages 3 to 6: extra thick outlines and one big picture on every page, for hands that are still learning to stay inside a line.
How a book gets made
Each book is built from a plan before a single page is drawn: how many pages, in what order, for what age, with what on each one. Then the pages are generated from that plan, so a change to the method changes every page at once rather than fifty pages by hand.
- The plan. What the book is for, and the shortest honest route to it. Book 1 of Ready, Set, Write! exists because a child cannot write a letter before they can draw the lines a letter is made of.
- The pages. Every guide letter is drawn from the outline of a real typeface designed for beginning readers, never grey text faked to look like a model. The stroke arrows follow the Zaner-Bloser order, sit along the ink rather than beside it, and are numbered.
- The pictures. The illustrations and the coloring designs are made with an image generation tool and then checked one by one: for a line that does not close, a shape too small to color, or a face where no face belongs. We say so when we list a book, and we say so here.
- The proofs. Every page is rendered and checked for things that do not show on screen: ink too close to the trim, a line that would vanish in the gutter, a page number in the wrong corner.
- The print. We check the files against the printer’s rules ourselves before uploading, because a book that comes back rejected is a month lost.
The authors
The books go out under two pen names, one for each kind of book. Each has a heading of its own here, so a link to the name lands on the person.
Milo Wick
Milo Wick writes the handwriting workbooks, and they began at her kitchen table:
When my son was six, he couldn’t write. Nothing was wrong. He was bright and curious and full of stories. But a pencil never felt right in his hand. He held it in a fist, pressed until the tip snapped, and gave up before the first letter was done. Homework ended in tears at the kitchen table, his and sometimes mine.
So one evening I put the worksheets away and drew him a single line. Just a line, from a little rocket to the moon. He followed it. The next night I drew a wavy one, from a fish to its rock, and left the picture for him to colour once he got there. That turned out to be the trick. The line was the way to the colouring.
Night after night the lines got a little harder: zigzags, loops, curves that turned back on themselves. Then the curves became letters. Some weeks later he wrote his own name, by himself, and held the page up for me to see.
I kept every sheet. And I kept thinking that if a few lines and a dinosaur waiting at the end could do that for him, they could do it for other children too. That’s how these books started.
Milo also writes the guides for parents. Where a guide gives a fact about how children learn to write, such as the age a shape usually arrives, it names the published source it comes from, and where a point is our own judgment, the guide says so.
Nora Ember
Nora Ember makes the coloring books. Nora’s books are for the end of the day: the kettle on, a blanket over the knees, a box of markers open on the table and nothing that has to be finished by morning. Every page is drawn to be colored rather than admired, with lines thick enough to stay inside and spaces big enough to fill in a sitting, so the hour goes to the coloring and not to squinting at it. The same idea, drawn bigger and bolder, goes out as Little Lantern Coloring, because the best evenings are the ones where a grown-up and a three year old color at the same table.
Both are pen names, not people we are pretending exist: Milo Wick is the mother in the story above, writing under another name. Write to either of them at [email protected], or to Milo at [email protected], and a real person answers.
What we will not do
- No characters selling anything. Rudy and Sadie are in the workbooks to keep a child company, not to be collected.
- No rewards you have to buy. The certificate at the back of a workbook is a page, and you already own it.
- No app. These are books. A screen is not where a pencil grip is learned, or where an evening’s coloring is done.
- No data we do not need. There is no account to make, and no sign-up to look inside a book: every book’s sample pages are free to see. The newsletter is there if you want it. See the privacy policy for the short list of what we keep.