Catherine Ciocchi: Hi, I'm Catherine Ciocchi. I'm the author of Science, Matter and the Baseball Park, which is a picture book explaining the three states of matter you can find at a baseball park. And it's beautifully illustrated by Chantelle and Burgen Thorne. The first thing I do is I write down all the words because this is a curriculum supplement in one way, and really a big way. So I write down all the words that have to do with the topic. I'm a big rhymer. Which is something I said in my blog that I heard, "Editors don't like rhyme," and, "What are you doing?" But I just gravitate to rhyme. So I put all the words, vocabulary, just tons of words, and then just try to piece it together, and then re-piece it together, and redo it again and go to my critique group, and repeat.

I think I enjoy when it's falling together and you think you're done and you think it's great, and then it becomes so much better, as most writing pieces do. And the ending, having the ball go out of the park and the expression, "It's outta here," I was like, "Oh, my gosh. I thought of that all by myself." But it was, obviously, we've all heard it. But it was like the perfect ending and I think that's ... excited me. Because that did not, it didn't exist in the beginning, the first parts of the, you know, manuscript. So just things that come to you when you're excited and nothing can bother you in the day because you just found something amazing that rhymes with something, and, you know, just when it all works out.

Just like everything that I'm writing and I'd like to write more of is that it's all science and it doesn't have to be in a textbook or on a worksheet, and it's all around them. And that's what I practice with my high school students, is that I have to make the science real for them and something that is tangible and something in their life. So I'm hoping that they go to the ballpark and they remember that the hot nacho cheese is a liquid, you know, things like that.