Picture Book Marathon–Day 14

Last month, I blogged that I was going to to do two big chal­lenges: the pic­ture book marathon and the Word­Press PostAWeek. I’ve pret­ty much been keep­ing up with the Word­Press PostAWeek chal­lenge. I think I’ve put up some good posts so far, but I’m still a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed with the results. I was hop­ing to get a lit­tle more inspired, get a lot more into the flow of reg­u­lar blog­ging, and get more com­fort­able shar­ing more about what I’m learn­ing and doing. Per­haps that will come in time. After all, I’ve been fair­ly well con­sumed by the Pic­ture Book Marathon all this month, too!
The PB Marathon is a chal­lenge “dur­ing which children’s writ­ers com­pose one pic­ture book each day until they have writ­ten 26 pic­ture books.” Today is day 14, and I’m pleased to say I’m half way there! So far, I’ve writ­ten 13 brand-new pic­ture books includ­ing every­thing from non­fic­tion sci­ence and biogra­phies to pure­ly fic­tion­al goofi­ness to tra­di­tion­al folk­tale retellings. It’s been a lot of work, but I have def­i­nite­ly learned that I can com­mit to a dai­ly writ­ing prac­tice. (Well, Mon­day through Fri­day, any­way. Week­ends have been near­ly impos­si­ble!) I’ve also been pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by the results. I was expect­ing per­haps two out of 26 to be worth pur­su­ing, but so far, I think maybe there are only about two that should prob­a­bly just be delet­ed right now. Some are bet­ter than oth­ers, of course, but I think most of them do have the poten­tial to be devel­oped into some­thing inter­est­ing. And since I like doing revi­sion much bet­ter than writ­ing first drafts, I’ll be set for quite some time (although I am def­i­nite­ly going to con­tin­ue with some type of new writ­ing work every day—just not a whole book)!
So, Feb­ru­ary is half over. And 2011 is look­ing to be a very pro­duc­tive year. Over the hump and on down the oth­er side!