Yes me of the zillions of ideas is going to do the Picture Book Idea Month challenge yet again – this is where I come up with an idea a day for kids picture books. I like doing this challenge as it jump starts me when I’m lagging.
Not that I have done anything with any of my kids stuff other than make books for my girls. I have friends who want printed copies of the Little Books and I have come up with a plan to aplique some of the baby board book stories I’ve actually written. I am also in the middle of drawing the pictures to It’s Raining but I just can’t get excited about selling stories – I get excited over children and their reactions to my poems and stories.
I like the community on twitter, facebook, blogs and all the rest that surrounds the childrens book industry. I feel they really are (most of the time) looking to entertain and educate children. When I set up the monster blogs it was to infect the human race with story telling, communication and “litrature”.
My only sadness with the challenge is it is dominated by the US and so sometimes I’m perplexed by how say their book start schemes work. However I have started to find inspiration here in the UK namely through Angela Topping who we met at The Cheltenham Poetry Festival and Pie Corbett who did an inspirational talk at one of the schools in my area.
Having had issues with writing and reading myself I feel I want to inspire children to want to read – this to me is the important bit – I worked so hard to learn to read as I could see there was all these ‘films’ locked up in the books, all these cool facts about dinosaurs locked up in the books and if I could learn to read then I would have access to those things.
I feel picture books are incredibly important for this – I used to sit there before I could read (which took until I was 12) and make up my own stories from the pictures – this was an important step in my education even if the teacher didn’t see it that way.
The pictures helped draw me into the stories and I still remember struggling through Tim and The Hidden People because I found the pictures so enchanting and wanted to know what the actual story was.
Anyway basically I like picture books, I think they are important and my eldest loves my stories – though I think this is more the fact I can improvise when we’re stuck at bus stops and retell the same stories to her again and again. I did panic a bit I have to confess that I was doing the wrong thing in making up stories and poems for her – even though that has resulted in me reading in our local Waterstones to kids and being asked for poems about the village I live in. I suppose it is also part of the reason I have ended up running writing and poetry workshops – me of the can’t spell brigade.
I am very excited as I’ve just found out my workshops for outreach have been given funding. This is I think mixed up with me doing these writing challenges and making the monster blogs and probably many other things besides. (it is also the reason I’ve ended up with my art work on display in Cheltenham too!)
Of course this still means I have more ideas than I can possibly do anything with and I have to watch I don’t keep side tracking myself!
So yes I am doing PiBoIdMo again this year and I am happily awaiting the moment!
