Tomorrow I will be attending a children’s picture book writing workshop at the Orem Library with Rick Walton, who has published over 6o children’s’ picture books. I first heard about the workshop while browsing the library event calendar on my lunch break at work. The calendar first listed a free introductory meeting on Thursday, so I attended that to see if it interested me and sure enough it did.  The workshop runs two Saturdays and by the end of it I hope to have at least one book (manuscript) ready to send to publishers. Why have goals if I don’t work toward them, right? Next goals to complete that are half-finished: prepare kids TV show treatment and send to producers, and finish my first feature length screenplay.

This will be my first attempt at writing a children’s picture book, which may pose to be more difficult than I can imagine without any kids of my own to pipe in and correct my kid lingo. I have two children’s stories I have been working on, but the trick is figuring out the whole kid target audience thing. Only if I could only travel back in time and talk to my 5 year old self. I would watch him color outside the lines and ask what is your favorite type of story? Maybe I should dust off the old family photos for inspiration or better yet get cracking and have kids of my own. I know my wife would love to hear me say that. Or I could call my almost 4 year old niece up and let her imaginative wanderings inspire me over the phone.

Now that I’ve digressed super abundantly, let me return to the point of my journal entry – the workshop. I’m attending the workshop with one semi-completed story in hand (Nicholas Zimmer and the Magic Feather Duster) and two more story ideas in mind. One of the story ideas originates from my wife’s beautiful noggin’. A tentative title that hints at the story is “How Many Frogs To Kiss To Get Your Prince.” It will be a best-seller with the princess in all women and girls out there. The other idea has no tentative title, but will include such silly characters and items such as a wombat who wants to be a DJ, Millie the mini-pony who ate an apple a day to keep the doctor away, lime green sidewalk chalk, toy parachute men, people who walk backwards to turn back time, parents who spell out words like nap to their kids, and many other fun stories.

So in the up and coming weeks, I will post a synopsis for a few of the stories I have completed in the workshop and an update on what I learned from the workshop.