Writing update

I had a fairly productive writing week this week. After another Sunday afternoon Panera writing session, I had half of another story written. Progress! :)

This is the last of the five stories in my first "series," and I'll be so excited to get them done! Well, done-ish. They still need a lot of review and revision, and I still need to try to trim them up a bit, but overall I'm trying to feel happy about where I am and what I've accomplished so far.

As I wrote to a friend of mine last week, I've been experiencing a little bit of a block when it comes to these stories. I'm realizing that I really don't know that much about writing children's books. It's a COMPLETELY different style of writing than I'm used to, and just because I'm trained/experienced in several other types of writing doesn't mean I can automatically do this, too.

It's also really, really easy to get distracted by all the other things I'm doing and want to do. But I really want to see this through, so I'm going to stick with it. I think it might be time to revisit and reset my timeline, set some new goals and get cracking on them.

Oh, also: I just had a thought the other day (while I was driving, of course; I get all my best ideas while I'm driving) for another series of children's books. Since (as previously mentioned) I know practically nothing about children's books, it makes sense that all my ideas are in that vein, right? Oy.

Writing update

(So I'm thinking of posting writing updates every Monday, and I actually wrote this one on Monday, but I'm still figuring out this posting thing. So this one's a little late. Gimme a break, OK?)

I've finished my fourth story! Just one more to go. Woohoo!

However.

I've heard some preliminary feedback that the stories are too long for the age range I was initially considering (agest 3-5) and probably even too cumbersome for K-2.

So now I'm left wondering how to proceed. I have four stories that I'm really happy with, but they may not be marketable. Do I change my approach entirely, go back to square one and rewrite the stories to more closely "match" an age range? Do I just keep going, do what I want and to hell with the publishers?

Right now I'm leaning toward a compromise. I like the stories the way they are, and since the first phase of this project is to just WRITE the stories for myself and my family, I'm going to keep them as-is. But, as an experiment, I'm going to try creating a 3-5ish version of one of the stories I've written so far. Just to see how it turns out.

Maybe I can create several different lines of the stories, for all different age ranges. :) And after that, I'll take over the WORLD!

OK, 'til next week...