Work in Process

That would be that picture book that has been on the back burner for a few years. Yes, years. Life gets in the way sometimes.

On other social media you might have read there are six different stories in the works. There is one picture book that has been hung up by research and decision making.

In the next week or two I will be trying to complete the research and assess where the story is. Most picture books have an average of 32 pages. Not sure how many this one will have. That is where the research has been holding me up.

Not trying to be mysterious or be dramatic, there is a question in my mind of how many pages based on the flow of the story. Have I done enough research? Earlier this year there was a pause while I looked at some recently published picture books. If you follow me on Goodreads, I reviewed the books that I borrowed from the library.

I wanted to see what was out there. We know that rhyme and repetition are all good elements for a picture book to have. It only takes looking at the books the little ones keep bring to have read to them. I am think of The Monster at the End of This Book featuring Grover, Good Night, Moon, and my old favorite, Me too, Mommie.

There are images and prose already completed. I need to determine how many pages this story should have. This will be based on infancy to teens development. How many stages of development? I have researched this, even had a college course on growth and development. There are opinions about how many and what distinguishes one from another.

For this story, it involves not only how many and what they are but being able to attribute characteristics to those stages that can be drawn. In the first few years a child goes through many significant changes. As humans age instead of months of big changes, they become more subtle. Do I concentrate only on the little ones, or as I originally thought, going all the way through to teens. That then makes me question what age group this story would actually be for? Obviously not the youngest, but how young?

So you see, this are big questions.