With Picture Book 25 and 26, the Picture Book Marathon is finished. It has been a fun thing to participate in. Doing a picture book idea a day might lead some people to think that it is fairly easy to come up with ideas and to finish the writing and drawing for picture books. Ideas do come shooting out of the air and hit me at odd times. One idea came as I was riding a bike on a trail. The first line of the book popped into my head and the light bulb went off. Then I had to keep repeating the line in my head until I got home to write it down because ideas can pop in and out of my brain with the same speed and then they are gone for ever.
It takes a lot of rewriting and rethinking and redrawing and letting your brain live in the book before the idea is ready to read in a critique group and then more rewriting and rethinking and redrawing. It can take up to one year to refine a 32 page picture book and then you have to take the time to try to sell the idea to an editor or agent. But it is a lot of fun to see a book progress from that first bike riding idea scribbled on a note pad to the finished book dummy. Opening a new box of printed picture books is like Christmas for a 10 year old.
Sherry
Here is the link for the Picture Book Marathon Blog