write a children's novel

I want to write a children’s novel with my friend from high school. She is an artist and we’ve always talked about doing it together :-).

I have completed a diploma in creative children’s writing (years ago) and have found difficulty finding the time to sit down and get started on a serious story.
I have several stories floating around in my head which all seem to mesh into the one idea….which i can’t put down on paper.

At the end of last year (2005) I was looking for something to occupy my mind and I enrolled in a Creative Writing course which was due to start this month (Feb 2006) and decided I was going to write that book I had been thinking of doing since I was a teenager. Since then I have been doing a lot of research into how I was going to go about writing a novel and trying to come up with an idea for the book. I am definately going to attack this goal (and perhaps complete it) in 2006.