“My Hundred Friends” Campaign Update #1: Evolution of the Pages

This is a joint blog post by Kara Shane Colley, the author of My Hundred Friends soon to be published at Natural Math, and Dr. Maria Droujkova, the founder of Natural Math. We’ll be posting periodic updates about the book on the blog.

Maria: In My Hundred Friends by Kara Shane Colley, the math of factors and multiples is friendship. It’s a cozy little world, inviting readers to play and explore. From April 27 to June 27, head to My Hundred Friends crowdfunding campaign to preorder hardcover copies for your family or group, reserve your complimentary PDF, and support math joy for all!

Evolution of the cover

Kara: In making drafts of the cover, you can see that some aspects of the cover stayed the same. On every draft, there are number-characters hanging from the title, sitting on the title, running up a path, and cheeky number Seven trying to get our attention!

It was my publisher Maria’s idea that the number-characters should be doing math on the cover. In the illustrator Coley Nielsen’s cover, you can see Two building their cubic model with blocks, Fifty-Five playing tag with their factors, and Seventeen proudly displaying their factor rainbow.

Maria: It is said that sci-fi isn’t about the future and fantasy isn’t about magic: it’s all about our life, here and now. Where does math come from? We make mathematics as we live our lives, create, and discover together. Kara and the number-characters built such a friendly village with their mathematics! Imagine that. Let’s go!

Evolution of page 9

Kara: Collaborating with Coley has been exhilarating. The process of working with her helped me develop some ideas that weren’t totally fleshed out in my head. As you can see in the early draft, I originally thought of the pages of the story as loose leaf paper with a horizontal line at the top of the page and holes punched down the left side. As you can see on the second draft, the horizontal line at the top remained but the hole punches were gone. As we prepared to send over the second draft for Coley to draw her version, I realized that the whole book was like a math journal; it was a scrapbook that I made of my hundred friends. Because it was a scrapbook, I asked Coley to draw graph paper and make it look like it was taped onto the page.

Maria: Our numbers, our math – is it out there, hiding in plain sight all around us, to be discovered? Or does mathematics come alive by our creativity, the same way pretend-play toys or fiction characters do? The readers can see Kara’s and Coley’s art either way.

Evolution of page 12

Kara: Another evolution of the world occurred as Coley began to draw drafts of page 12. In my mind, I was the one writing “12 is one dozen” and I was the one who drew the egg carton. Coley drew a couple of versions of the egg carton for us and that made me realize that I didn’t want a totally realistic egg carton. I wanted a rough “sketch-like” version of the egg carton.

On the other hand, the chalkboard at the bottom was part of the imaginary number-character world. I didn’t draw the chalkboard. The number-characters came to play in the math scrapbook, and the chalkboard appeared when Two wanted to draw on it.

Come check out My Hundred Friends. The book is a kind, welcoming math gathering. We invite you to come, hang out, and meet a few new friends.