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Posted on February 28, 2015February 28, 2015 by Diane Zahler

Remember way back when I pressed “Send” and hurled a manuscript off into the world? That was a while ago. In publishing, the wheels grind exceedingly slow. But now…

…the book is under contract! And I can finally tell you a little more about it. Below is the official announcement in Publisher’s Marketplace:

February 26, 2015
Children’s: Middle grade	Diane Zahler’s BAKER’S MAGIC, in which a young baker’s apprentice must save a kingdom (with a little help from a blacksmith’s son, a lonely princess, a pocket hedgehog, a rowdy band of tulip pirates and some magical sweet-rolls), to Beth Brezenoff at Capstone, with Krissy Mohn editing, by Jennifer Laughran at Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

I love the description, and I’m thrilled to be working with Capstone. HOORAY!

And here, just because I’m so happy, is a pocket hedgehog for you:

KidLit Bonanza

Posted on January 25, 2015January 25, 2015 by Diane Zahler

Everyone likes a best-of list, right? So when I heard about an exhibit of “One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature,” I had to go. Yesterday, despite a little blizzard, we made our way down to the venerable Grolier Club in Manhattan to view this small, wonderful, free exhibit.

I’d never been to the Grolier Club before. It was formed in 1884 by a group of Gilded Age bibliophiles obsessed with books and the graphic arts. It’s on East 60th Street, in a building that is probably lovely when not completely surrounded by scaffolding. Inside, there’s lots of dark wood and a large, high-ceilinged exhibition room lined with cases labeled by theme: Fairy Tales & Fables, Nursery Rhymes, Faith, Learning, Poetry, Girls and Boys, Animals, Fantasy (this got two cases), Adventure, Novelties, and Toys.

We got there just as the curator started a tour with a group of well-heeled Upper Eastsiders (and I mean this literally: I spent several minutes staring longingly at their gorgeous and very expensive boots before the tour began). The curator explained that the books, printed between 1600 and 2000, were chosen by their fame, though she didn’t go into detail about how “fame” was calculated. We got a clue, though, when she described how the place for the hundredth book was a toss-up between Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking; it went to Mary Poppins because the movie version had made that book better-known and more recognizable to the public. There’s been some blowback over the choices; that’s inevitable. And I was disappointed that some of my favorites were missing. But 100 is a pretty limited number, and the ones they did include were generally fascinating — mostly first editions, with original artwork. Many of the stories behind them were equally intriguing, at least to a kidlit nerd. (I wasn’t familiar with Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter, about a boy who, when he won’t stop sucking his thumb, has the offending digit chopped off by the ur-Edward Scissorhands. And I never knew that Where the Wild Things Are was originally intended to be about horses and called Where the Wild Horses Are. )

I took pictures like crazy with my ancient, faltering Kodak, and I apologize for their quality (the light was very low due to the fragility of many of the books). But you have until February 7 to see the exhibit yourselves, and it’s more than worthwhile.

100_8025 — Cinderella, 1919, with Arthur Rackham silhouettes

100_8024 — East of the Sun West of the Moon, 1914, illustrations by Kay Nielson

getImage — William Blake, Songs of Innocence, 1789

100_8036 — from Madeleine, Ludwig Bemelmans, 1939

100_8033 — One of my all-time favorites. 1902

100_8031 — But I was never lucky enough to have the game.

100_8030 — I kept this volume (1930) — and just about all the others — in a box in my parents’ attic until somehow the whole box disappeared.

100_8032 — Maurice Sendak’s gift to Ursula Nordstrom

100_8041 — This was Dodgson’s own copy of Alice — his markings (always in purple) are in the margin. The edition was withdrawn because he and Tenniel did not like the quality of the illustrations.

Quiet! Writer at Work

Posted on September 13, 2014 by Diane Zahler

It’s been quiet on the blog for a while.

I’m between books.

For the first time since 2009, I don’t have a book in the works. It’s a weird, unsettled feeling.

It’s not that I’m not writing! My hands still ache from typing at the end of the day. I’m churning out textbook materials at a furious rate, now that the industry has picked up a bit. I’m writing Common Core readers’ guides for trade publishers. And I’m working on something completely new and different that’s both exciting and unnerving for me.

Still, I miss that rollercoaster of ms-to-bound-book. The elation of acceptance. The despair of the editorial letter (four single-spaced pages of criticism? How could there be THAT MUCH wrong with it?). The nerve-wracking fascination of seeing a story change with every revision, becoming more and more itself. The pleasure of a manuscript copyedited by someone who notices that the truffle-hunting pig is the wrong gender. The elation of the first cover viewing. The pure joy of a box full of bound books. The anxiety of the days leading up to publication (the reviews! the reviews!). It’s a wild magnification of emotion, and without it, things are…calmer. Flatter. Quieter.

But the upside is, that calm is a place where I can write. Its flatness allows me to create my own imagined hills and valleys. In its silence, I can hear my characters’ words — and even, if I listen closely enough, their thoughts.

Fabulous Fourth-Grade Filmmaker

Posted on June 12, 2014June 12, 2014 by Diane Zahler

So…an amazing fourth-grader named Gabrielle did this:

She chose the images, the music, wrote the voice-over, and put it all together herself. And she did it after school was out — just for fun! Thank you, Gabrielle!

Dumbing Down; Or, You Get What You Pay For

Posted on May 21, 2014June 20, 2015 by Diane Zahler

I love writing children’s books.

LOVE IT.

But almost no one who writes children’s books makes a living at it. Unless your initials are JKR, you’re probably going to have to supplement your income. That’s just how it is. I’m incredibly lucky that my “day job” is writing — or at least I considered myself incredibly lucky until pretty recently.

I write textbook lessons, mostly in ELA (English Language Arts) for kindergarten through twelfth grade. When I started out, decades ago, there weren’t a whole lot of us. We were good at what we did. We knew the difference between a gerund and a participle. We knew where commas did and did not belong. We knew that Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” was really not appropriate to quote at a commencement. We could define and identify a theme. We could write, on demand, a 250-word essay on penguins, a one-act play set in outer space, a rhyming poem in iambic tetrameter, and a magazine article about earthquakes, along with the composition lessons teaching those forms — all in the same week. We got our assignments directly from editors at publishing houses, and though our names didn’t appear in the textbooks, we were paid relatively well for work that was, for the most part, enjoyable. And it was IMPORTANT.

We wrote the materials that educators used to teach your children to read and write.

In the late 80s and early 90s, the economy suffered a downturn. Educational publishing companies laid off a lot of editors. Many of those editors opened what they called “development houses” and what we called “packaging companies.” Now the packagers got the assignments from the publishers and called us to do the writing. We did the same work, but our pay was cut because of the packager’s overhead — by a quarter to a half.

Some of these packagers weren’t very good at what they did. Many went bust — often without paying their writers what we were owed. Educational publishing continued to downsize, with mergers of companies adding to the number of out-of-work editors. Many of them became writers, and some of them were not very good at what they did. There were fewer textbooks being published and more writers to do the work. The result was that our pay was cut still more.

Then came the crash of 2008. Publishers lowered the amount they paid packagers, and packagers passed the pay cut on to us. Now we were making about a third of what we had made twenty years before — for the same amount of work. When the economy started to recover, our pay didn’t. Publishers and packagers had realized they could get the work for less, and they had no reason to change. It didn’t seem to matter to them that a lot of the writing they were getting was inferior, because many of the writers who had started out in the business had given up or found other career paths. So now, at a time when the entire industry is undergoing enormous changes with the implementation of the Common Core, many of the people who could best write the materials urgently needed for a new curriculum have disappeared. Those who have stuck with it are faced with the task of writing two or three times as much as they used to, just to pay the bills.

In the last two years, I’ve been on a number of projects that have all had the same trajectory. I get a call from a packager asking if I’m available. I ask about the project and the pay, get an answer that’s feasible (barely). I sign on.

The project is delayed — sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. Having signed on, I often turn down other jobs. I scramble for work to fill the gap.

The project starts up. Half the writers have dropped out. They are replaced by second-choice writers. The end date hasn’t changed, so we have to write the same amount but twice as fast.

The project is halted. It must be rethought. A couple of weeks go by. The packager calls — the work has changed radically and now we can only get half the page rate we were originally promised. The end date, of course, is still the same.

When I can, I quit these projects. When I can’t, I have to do my best to deliver as skillful a job as possible, at half the price in half the time. And I do it, because I take pride in my writing. And because textbooks are IMPORTANT.

But the next time you hear horror stories about educational materials that are badly written or full of errors, you don’t have to wonder what happened. The bottom line has replaced any desire for a job well done. The confusion in planning and implementing these projects results in a product that is rushed and poorly developed. Writers are a dime a dozen — almost literally. We aren’t valued, and our work is no longer as valuable. In the scramble to make a buck, educational publishing seems to have forgotten the one thing that really matters:

We write the materials that educators use to teach your children to read and write.

Travels with Diane: Where Are the Beers for Men?

Posted on April 28, 2014June 10, 2014 by Diane Zahler

450px-Basílica_de_Santiago_02 — Basilica de Santiago

I spent a chunk of time this weekend booking my husband and son’s walking trip on the Camino Frances to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Looking at photos of the spectacular landscapes, the ancient churches and monasteries, the weary pilgrims in their Tevas and backpacks, reminded me how much I LOVE to travel. (Not with Tevas and backpacks, but still.)

100_5299 — Wall o’ Beer Labels in our apartment, Gent

I’ve been lucky enough to live in Belgium at three different times. Since Belgium is close to pretty much everything in Europe, during those years I visited as many places as time, energy, and budget would allow. I even created a travel blog during our last stint in Gent.

But there have been downsides to our travels.


: my error in France

We’ve endured bouts of food poisoning. Mussels in France. Something we never figured out in Belgium. Most viciously, in Greece, where I realized we were on the wrong ferry heading twelve hours in the wrong direction at the exact moment that my husband realized he should NOT have eaten that rabbit stew.

mass — happening accidentally on the Mass of the Presanctified in Split, Croatia

We’ve spent endless hours, even days, hopelessly lost — but often being lost led to wonderful discoveries.

: unheated youth hostel in Slovenia

We’ve passed nights in hotels without heating. We’ve shared rooms with insects I couldn’t begin to identify.

We’ve had more than one incident with a rental car that we survived but the cars didn’t. (Take the extra insurance!)

amigos-y-cerveza — hombres, with cervezas

We’ve lived through humiliations beyond counting (asking for the “cervezas por hombres” rather than the “servicios” ranks pretty high — most bars have a men’s room, but for some reason they don’t think it’s funny when you ask, insistently and repeatedly, for the location of the beers for men).

But one of the best things about my travels is finding settings that I can use in my fiction. I’ve taken bits and pieces of places I visited for each book, and each location becomes more vivid in my memory as I work it into a story.

: Chateau de Chenonceau

The castle in The Thirteenth Princess is based on the chateau of Chenonceau in the Loire Valley in France. When I first saw this fairy-tale castle decades ago, I was completely entranced by it. The Loire River runs right underneath. In every room, you can hear the rush of water. I wanted to live there — so I did the next best thing, and made it the home of my main character, Zita.

: northern Norway

A True Princess is set in a fairy-tale version of Scandinavia. I’m half Norwegian, and I have family who live on a farm above the Arctic Circle in Norway. I visited them years ago. It was such a magical place — the mysterious forests, the fjords, the craggy mountains. So that’s where my character Lilia lives.

Glendaloch (ancient monastic site) — Irish countryside

My main character Meriel in Princess of the Wild Swans is Irish at heart. I’ve been to Ireland twice, once to Dublin, and once spending a week in a farmhouse on the Dingle peninsula. I loved Dingle. The green of the Irish landscape and its contrast with the gloomy, lowering clouds, the uneven cobblestones I tripped over in every town, the sense that behind each mossy stone wall might lurk a magical being — this is the feeling I tried to bring to that story.

The setting of Sleeping Beauty’s Daughters is, in my mind, the coast of France. I haven’t been to Brittany, where the chalk cliffs I describe in the book are. Not yet, anyway. But I spent some time in Normandy (before I ate the evil mussels that laid me low), so I mined my memories of those rocky beaches, those salty winds, those dark, choppy waters for details to use in Princess Aurora and Luna’s desperate journey.

I’m still traveling and still using what I see in what I write. I don’t know if taking part in a Lobster Quadrille in the Budapest baths will make it into a book, or if a character will ever sit in the Pickle Chair from our Belgian student apartment. But just the possibility gives those experiences a depth they wouldn’t have otherwise. (And, of course, it makes the trips tax-deductible.)

Here are some pictures of places that are making their way into what I’m writing now. Just a taste of setting, to make you wonder…

Villains and Monsters and Princesses, Oh My…

Posted on March 27, 2014February 26, 2015 by Diane Zahler

Every year one of our local elementary schools hosts an author/illustrator day. This was their ninth year — and the first year I was invited. There were at least fifteen other writers and illustrators there, and we were treated to a huge and fabulous lunch before going with our student escorts to classrooms to give presentations. I talked about villains and monsters in my books to two fifth-grade classes. The teachers were helpful and eased me through my embarrassed ignorance of smartboards and Powerpoint. The students were attentive and asked great questions, and every single one had an opinion about which of my villains was the scariest.

Afterward, the authors and illustrators convened in the library, and parents came in with their kids to buy our books. I loved chatting with book-loving kids and parents, meeting new author-friends, and signing books for readers who were thrilled to be there.

The event was beautifully organized and a lot of fun. But something happened that disturbed me. There was a boy, eight or nine years old, who came running over to my table and announced, “I want a princess book!” I was really pleased — I’ve gotten enthusiastic emails and handwritten notes from a few boys who read my books, but not too many. But his parents were not pleased at all. They tried to steer him to other tables, claiming he wouldn’t like my books, that there were other books he’d enjoy more. The boy was quite insistent: “No, I want one of these princess books.”

Other parents joined in. One ventured the opinion that maybe it was the idea of knights in armor that interested the boy. Another pointed out that the books might have scenes with scary dragons that would be exciting and adventurous enough for him. The boy’s expression became more and more uncertain, but he kept repeating, “I want a princess book!”

At this point, I did something that I’m not proud of. I’d been listening to all this, unsure of what to do but pretty certain that I should maintain a low profile. Then I said — to the parents — “There are boy characters in each of the books who go with the princesses on their adventures.”

This wasn’t enough to convince them. The boy left without the books (though with a few princess bookmarks I managed to give to him). I was left with a bundle of reactions that I still haven’t completely sorted out.

There were so many things wrong with the scenario:

♦The boy wanted a princess book and wasn’t afraid to say so. But the adults, by trying to distract him, make excuses for his desire, and eventually refuse it, made him feel uncertain and ashamed. For wanting to read a book. A children’s book. A book about a princess.

♦I allowed myself to become part of the wrong. By pointing out that the books include boy characters, I showed tacit approval of the parents’ belief that the kid shouldn’t read princess books, or books that only have girls in them. I hate that I did that, because I don’t approve at all.

♦The parents judged my books by their covers. Because each cover features a princess, they automatically assumed that there would be nothing inside them that might — or should — appeal to a boy. Why should a book cover with a girl on it be only for female readers? Why shouldn’t a boy read a book about a princess?

I love my book covers. I think they’re absolutely beautiful. Yes, maybe the publisher intended them to appeal predominantly to girls. Maybe they could have instructed the cover artist to include the boy characters in each story on the cover. But should they have to? Is there something wrong with books about princesses that show princesses on the covers?

There is an online movement called Let Books be Books, discussed here in the Guardian, that protests the idea of gendered marketing in children’s books. I wholeheartedly agree that no book should be labeled or marketed “For Girls” or “For Boys.” But this article, by the literary editor of The Independent on Sunday, takes the protest one step too far by stating that the editor will no longer review certain books. She writes:

Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.

That’s a lazy, unthinking position. It lumps all books with glittery pink covers together. It assumes that only girls will like certain books, and only boys will like certain other books, creating exactly the kind of compartmentalizing that it claims to revile. And worst, it excuses the critic from the far more difficult and important task of censuring the social mindset that allows people to assume that books with pink or sparkly covers with girls on them are for girls only (and books about snot are only for boys). It focuses on the symptom, not the disease. It marginalizes my books and other books like mine in exactly the same way that boy’s parents did.

The boy who wanted a princess book was being true to who he was. The rest of us — parents, reviewers, me — are the ones who were false. We did the wrong thing, and for that boy, the repercussions may be far greater than we know.

Survivor: San Nicolas Island

Posted on March 23, 2014March 23, 2014 by Diane Zahler

Island of the Blue Dolphins.

This book had a huge effect on me as a kid. The idea of being lost, abandoned — it’s a theme that runs through a lot of children’s literature, especially fairy tales, and it reflects a very basic fear. Which of us didn’t get lost as a child? Who hasn’t let go of a parent’s hand in the mall or the park, looked around, seen only strangers’ faces? That feeling of dread and helplessness is familiar to most people.

But Island of the Blue Dolphins takes this primal terror one step farther. Not only is the main character, Karana, lost, she is abandoned by EVERYONE, completely alone on her island except for her brother and the wild dog she tames. As far as she knows, she will be alone forever. And yet…she survives. She figures out how to live. Even when the worst happens, she endures.

Why am I writing about this? Because I visited the Mission Santa Barbara this week, and found out that the real person on whom Karana is based is buried there. There was a display about her — the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island.

The Lone Woman’s true story, as far as it’s known, differs somewhat from Scott O’Dell’s fictional version. Her people, the Nicoleño, were killed in great numbers in clashes with fur trappers who came to the island in the early 1800s to hunt for otter. The Mission sent out a rescue boat to bring the remaining twenty or so back to the mainland (some versions suggest that the Mission wanted the Nicoleño to work their grounds, as they needed to replace workers who had died). Accounts state that the Lone Woman stayed behind or leaped off the ship because she had been separated from her child, but there’s no proof of this. She may simply have been forgotten. A storm blew up before she could be found and taken onboard, and the ship returned to California. People gradually forgot about her.

Eighteen years passed.

When the Lone Woman was finally found in 1853, she had been living alone on the island in a cave. A trapper who had heard of her story located her and brought her back to the Mission. She was unable to understand or be understood by anyone on the mainland, though she enjoyed the company of people who flocked to see her. She was entranced by horses and clothing, and she ate as much fresh food as she could. But only weeks after her rescue, she contracted dysentery and died. After her death, she was baptized Juana Maria.

Scott O’Dell’s version is slightly more kid-friendly, making the Lone Woman several years younger than she probably was and giving her a brother and a dog as companions. But the basic story is the same. It enthralled me, the same way other tales of abandonment and survival did — My Side of the Mountain, Hatchet. Or even stories about kids isolated by their differences — Harriet the Spy, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, A Wrinkle in Time. The idea that a young person can endure and even thrive in isolation helps, I think, to assuage the feeling of aloneness that all children feel at some point in their lives. And few characters in children’s literature are as utterly alone as Karana.

Juana Maria’s life is a testament to what humans can endure. Her story’s real, tragic ending was a blow to me when I read about it at the Mission — I didn’t remember having heard it before. I’m glad I didn’t know it when I was ten. But I’m also glad that Scott O’Dell chose to immortalize the Lone Woman in a novel that kids still adore, even fifty-four years after it was first published.

Pressing SEND

Posted on January 26, 2014January 26, 2014 by Diane Zahler

I’ve sent off a new manuscript to my agent.

This is the

♦best feeling ever

♦worst feeling ever

Pick one. Or both.

I thought about the story for a year. Worked on it for seven months. Revised it. Revised it again. Made my husband read the whole thing at least twice. Got to the point where if it had stayed in my computer for ONE MORE MINUTE I would have gone mad.

Pressed SEND. Died a little.

I had an editor once who asked me, when I turned in a contracted manuscript, “Do you love it?”

Um, yes. I wouldn’t have sent it in otherwise.

I think what she was really asking was, “Will it get starred reviews? Will it sell enough to justify its print run? Is it great?”

To those questions, if they had actually been asked, I probably would have replied:

I don’t know.

I don’t think it’s my job to know these things. It’s my job to write the best story I can write and then press SEND. I can hope that it sells, that it gets good reviews, that it’s great. (I can really, really hope so.)

But I can’t know anything for sure except that I’ve written the best story I can write.

And I’ve pressed SEND.

I Resolve Not To

Posted on December 22, 2013December 29, 2013 by Diane Zahler

It’s December 22, and I am sick. In bed, with aching muscles and tissues and cough drops and enough On Demand TV to turn my brain to mush. I’m pathetically up to date on Househunters, so I’ve started to think about what one thinks about as the new year approaches — resolutions.

I hate resolutions. I actually stopped making them years ago. The ones I made were always the same, and I never achieved them. I got tired of facing certain failure every January. I preferred not to resolve.

But this year I have a few writerly resolutions. They are really non-resolutions, resolutions NOT to change certain things I do. All this means is that I’ve learned to recognize my limitations and have found ways to make the best of them. I am accentuating the positive here. Isn’t that a better way to ring in the new year than pledging to lose five pounds while swilling champagne and stuffing your face with caviar-topped deviled eggs?

1. I Resolve Not to Stop Reading My Reviews. Even the Stupid Bad Ones.

I used to admire writers who said they never read reviews. Not the ones who didn’t read them because they were hurtful — you need a thick skin to survive in the writing world, and if you can’t take a bad review, you certainly can’t take the years of rejection that you’ll have to endure. But for a while I was impressed by the writers who claimed they just didn’t care and, even more, by the ones who implied they didn’t read reviews because they didn’t want to dirty their Process with outside influences.

The more I thought about it, though, the more that seemed wrong to me. Most of us don’t write in a vacuum. We actually write for an audience — maybe not a particular audience, or one that we have in mind as we compose, but the readers who will, eventually and if we are lucky, read our work. And to me, those readers matter.

Yes, there are readers who will completely miss the point. There are readers who will be cruel or snarky just because they can be. (I will never forget the Kirkus review — not of my book, thank God — that called one title a “lugubrious piece of bilge.” Ouch ouch ouch.) But if you ignore those reviewers, you also ignore the ones that say your work opened up new worlds for them, or got them to love books when they never did before. And you might miss the group of reviews that claimed your main character was undeveloped or your plot grew murky in the middle or your historical details were inaccurate. If enough people are saying it, it just might be true. It’s too late to change things in that book, but you can pay more attention in the next.

2. I Resolve Not to Stop Envying Others Who Are Better or More Successful Than I.

I am aware that envy is one of the Seven Deadlies. But I’ve found it can serve a positive purpose. I do envy writers who are better at their craft than I am. I lust after their gorgeous turns of phrase, their beautifully structured plots, their fully-drawn characters. I notice how they do what they do as I read. I pay attention to the effect. I try my best to absorb their skill. I want to become a better writer, and how else to do that than by learning from the best?

As for the more successful — well, to those writers who are better and more successful, I find I can say mazel tov, you deserve it. It feels good to say this. And I mean it. For those who are more successful but maybe…not so much better, I can grind my teeth and say it’s a quirk of fate, the luck of timing, whatever. It also feels good to say that. And it reminds me that what I really want is to be better, not just more successful. (Don’t get me wrong, more successful would be great. But it’s not the ultimate goal.)

3. I Resolve Not to Stop Using Adverbs.

I don’t even know when the idea that adverbs were the devil got started. It drives me crazy.

If you see an adverb, kill it. — Mark Twain

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs. — Stephen King

How many writing websites and blogs say dump the adverb? There must be dozens. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. No one wants to kill the adjective or the verb or even the pronoun, which is misused far more often than the adverb. But though Twain and King advocate violence against this humble part of speech, I found three adverbs on the first page of Stephen King’s 2013 Doctor Sleep, and one each on the first page of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Most great novels swarm with adverbs. They’re going to find their way into your writing no matter what. Just let it happen. I say harness the adverb, don’t murder it. Let it know who’s boss, and then allow it to work its wonders for you.

So, there are my resolutions. Three bad habits I will not change in 2014. I’m sure you can come up with a few of your own, if you think about it. Feel free to tell me what they are and why you intend not to change them…unless, you know, they’re not legal. In that case, please keep them to yourself.

(I also intend to keep swilling champagne and eating caviar-topped deviled eggs. But those don’t really count as bad habits, do they?)