write a children's book

I have actually done this.

I’m currently waiting for the illustrations.

(slightly embarrassing that I forgot I’d written it)

at the moment I can’t find the heart to write for adults let alone for children so I am giving up on this one

The story takes place over seven days. On each day there will be seven events, or things, or scenes, or vignettes

Today I had two “ah ha!” moments when bits of the story jumped into my head and I realised the details of the relationship between a character called Meodulf and a character called Arlington.

“Backstory” is important to me; even if it doesn’t form a part of the tale I am telling I like to know where people came from.

I also put two new possible villans into my character morgue and, as I am writing this, I have just managed to work out how one of them came to be.

My Muse is currently in the building – must… go…write

I am pondering writing this book as a part of NaNoWriMo, although that is difficult because I am DJing at a festival at the end of October and the recovery period from WGW tends to knock out the first week of November.

That being said the story arc is starting to come together …

The rejection letter from the agent for my novel has rather taken the wind out of my sails when it comes to writing. This has to stop as rejection letters are par for the course.

I’m going to get my ideas book out and see if I can come up with the master list of ideas. I used this exercise when I wrote “Saying Goodbye to Amy”, if the shortest length for a novel is 50,000 words then all you have to do to hit that magic target is find 50 events and write 1000 words about each of them.

In practice it doesn’t quite work like that; indeed 1000 words is not really very much and many of the ideas took about 6000 to develop properly.

I’m also working on a “character morgue” a rather gothic description for what amounts to a one page word sketch of a character, what they look like, what motivates them – an autopsy of the psyche. This is quite similar to the one page “briefing sheets” we used to do for LRP.

Updated to add: The character morgue idea has worked really well and I have 2 really strong characters and 3 that need some development (one of which is better defined than the others)

As this is being crossposted to my LJ from 43Things I should preface this by saying that one of the things that I want to do is to write a children’s book.

At the end of last week I wrote an outline of the story whilst riding on the tube train from Hammersmith to Picadilly Circus, and when I got home that night I sat down and hammered out page 1.

Page 1 is easy though. 20 minutes and 600 words later it reads like the start of a story; but I am very good at starting things and pretty rubbish at finishing them.