Time to Buckle Down

By Lacey Gunter

Okay people, you've had your little imaginary play time, and I know you just want to curl up in a candy induced coma. But, it is now officially November!  It is time to buckle down. November is for writing. 

While a good proportion of you will be focused on NaNoWriMo, us picture book folks never do well in trying to increase our word count.  So for those of you who write picture books, I recommend PiBoIdMo - Picture Book Idea Month.

As I'm sure you can guess, the general idea is to come up with 30 new picture book concepts within the month of November. They don't have to be entire manuscripts and they don't even have to be super detailed. Just a simple concept or premise will suffice. If you come up with more than that, great, that is just icing on the cake.

If you want the incentive and structure that comes with a formal program you can register  here. Otherwise you can just do it on your own.

This will be my second year participating. I really enjoyed the challenge last year and produced several manuscripts based on the ideas I came up with in PiBoIdMo 2013.   I am hoping for the same success this year.

So if you are anything like me, it is time to buckle down and get started simmering on ideas. Because thirty days goes quick and banging your head on the wall trying to come up with a bunch of ideas on day 29 never worked well for me.

So good luck getting those creative juices flowing. And begging a few candies from you kids Halloween stash probably won't hurt. ...Mmmmm, candy coma!  ... No, wait ... I mean ... get to work!

Finding Your Write Calling in Life

by: Lacey Gunter

I used to hate writing. I would always put it off until the last possible moment. It wasn't that I was particularly bad at it. I just would have preferred to have dental work done over writing an essay.

For so long I have been known as one of those math geeks. You know, the kind of person who claims numbers are a universal language (which they are, by the way). Moreover, I am a statistics instructor. So you can imagine how baffled I was when I got hit with the writer's bug last year.

Why in the world would I want to write books?!? I'm supposed to be analyzing data somewhere in a windowless basement, off by myself.  And, anyway, who would want to read a book written by a stats instructor? We don't even enjoy reading our own kind of books, most of the time.

Yet there it was, somewhere deep down inside, pestering me. "You should try writing. Just one little, teeny, tiny book. What's the big deal? You can do it!" And none of my logic and reasoning could make it go away.

So, I finally decided to give in, but only on the condition that it actually be a teeny, tiny book. That way my pain would be over quick and I could get back to what I knew I liked and was good at.

So a picture book it was. Luckily I had already done a lot of research in this area, reading countless numbers of picture books to my kiddos, over and over and over. And really, how hard could be, a few words here, a picture there, cute little story, slap it all together, done!

Well, not quite.

Turns out, picture book writing is rather difficult. How many really great stories have you told that can be written in only about 500 words? Every word counts.  Not to mention it's got to have a solid beginning, middle and end, should contain a conflict and a resolution, and needs to be able to keep the interest of a fidgety, easily distracted child. Yikes, it's starting to sounds like an impossible college final exam paper! Where's the door?

So, it should have been a big flop, right? One of those crazy ideas that pops in you head, you try it out and later think "where did that come from?"

Wrong again! Turns out the idea was just write. I loved it!!! And now I can't stop.  My only plausible explanation is someone up there knows more about us than we think we know about ourselves.  Good thing he loves us enough to show us. And maybe tomorrow you'll wake up a math genius. You never know, stranger things have happened.