{"id":8924,"date":"2014-11-12T17:07:42","date_gmt":"2014-11-12T22:07:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=8924"},"modified":"2014-12-10T13:59:03","modified_gmt":"2014-12-10T18:59:03","slug":"percy-oozes-into-the-holiday-season-with-a-new-adventure-for-kids-and-parents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/percy-oozes-into-the-holiday-season-with-a-new-adventure-for-kids-and-parents\/","title":{"rendered":"Percy \u201coozes\u201d into the Holiday Season with a new adventure for kids and parents"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

It has long been said that the key to being a successful author is to write about what you know \u2013 and is there really any parent out there that doesn\u2019t know, for better for worse, all the weird and wonderful things that can \u201cooze\u201d out of your kids at the most inopportune times?<\/p>\n

For local authors Karin\u00e9 Marwood, a full-time writer and filmmaker, and Dr. Julie Kim, a naturopath, that answer is a resounding no. <\/p>\n

Just in time for the holiday season, Ms. Marwood, a resident of Aurora, and Ms. Kim, a Richmond Hill resident with a practice based in Aurora, have launched their Christmas-themed book \u201cPercy and the Perpetual Prezzies\u201d, which charts Percy, their ginger-haired hero, grappling with that age-old problem: how do you resist unwrapping all those tempting prezzies underneath your tree in the long lead-up to Christmas?<\/p>\n

While we won\u2019t spoil things on how Percy fared, this is the second Percy book to be released by the duo after \u201cPercy and the Perpetual Ooze\u201d in 2011. <\/p>\n

\u201cOoze\u201d was inspired by Isabella, Ms. Marwood\u2019s daughter, who lived with what was initially misdiagnosed as an eye infection for over a year but was, in reality, a foreign object lodged in her eye.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeveral doctors just agreed with the [original] diagnosis and kept going, telling us to just apply eye drops and they would go away,\u201d says Ms. Marwood. \u201cIt didn\u2019t, and she just kept oozing from her eye and oozing from her nose, and one thing just led to another and I said, \u2018this child just has this perpetual ooze.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

And a literary star was born!<\/p>\n

Well, not quite.<\/p>\n

Karin\u00e9 and Julie grew up in Thornhill together, close friends throughout high school, who both went into university studying the sciences while keeping their love for the creative arts alive. Their respective parents agreed that studying sciences was the practical way forward, but the women retained their creative bent. They took creative writing courses throughout high school, continued to do so through their university electives, eventually following this path to a screenwriting course.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes you just watch a movie and you think, \u201cI can do a better job than that!\u2019\u201d says Ms. Kim. \u201cOr, you might ask, \u2018How do they write that?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The women put their heads together to write screenplays, two of which were optioned by studios. They subsequently formed their own production company and, after being hired by Canadian producer Leif Bristow, recently completed and optioned their third screenplay, which is based on The Bible.
\nWhile neither of them describe themselves as religious, they tackled their commission with gusto, learning quite a bit in the process and revelling in the challenges of creating a screenplay out of millennia-old stories. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is always hard to come up with character arcs when you just have a blank canvas,\u201d says Karin\u00e9. \u201cWith the Bible you have so many strict rules with what you can and can\u2019t do because there is already a story created that people already know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Percy, however, was just one such blank canvas. After finding inspiration from Isabella\u2019s story, they tweaked things just a little bit, turning their heroine into a hero to reach a broader audience. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe eventually decided it should be a little boy because little girls will read about little boys but often little boys won\u2019t read about little girls,\u201d explains Julie.<\/p>\n

Another objective? Not sanitizing things for the sake of kids and parents. In the first installment, the authors don\u2019t hold back in showing Percy tossing his cookies or having an emergency pit stop on a toilet.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not Hello Kitty,\u201d says Julie with a laugh. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to scare the kids, but we just thought kids like poopy jokes and they like jokes that kind of gross them out because that is what they are all about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adds Karin\u00e9: \u201cIt is okay to ooze. It is okay to throw up, it is okay to have tummy troubles and be on the toilet. We have all been there, whether you are young or old, and it comes up at the most inopportune times! We really believe in having a good message and going back to the basics.\u201d
\nThis theme of getting back to basics is one of the driving forces of Percy\u2019s second adventure.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have seen so many people focus on their gifts, even adults,\u201d says Karin\u00e9. \u201cWe have been to Christmas gatherings where adults complain about not getting enough presents. It\u2019s like, \u2018What?!\u2019 Sometimes people fixate on the wrong things.\u201d <\/p>\n

Adds Julie: \u201cEveryone can relate to wanting to open up their gifts right away and to hold onto it. Not being able to wait is something most kids can relate to. We thought we would throw that idea out there to see what the fallout is if you do open up your gifts too soon. It\u2019s something all of us would do. Who wouldn\u2019t want a sneak peek?\u201d<\/p>\n

If you, however, can\u2019t resist a sneak peek, \u201cPercy and the Perpetual Prezzies\u201d is available from online book retailers, as well as at thepercybooks.com. <\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has long been said that the key to being a successful author is to write about what you know \u2013 and is there really any parent out there that doesn\u2019t know, for better for worse, all the weird and wonderful things that can \u201cooze\u201d out of your kids at the most inopportune times?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/2014-11-13-11.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-2jW","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 07:33:07","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8924\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}