Early bird catches the worm 🐾

I woke early this morning and spent a couple of hours reworking the first picture book in the Bartholomew Adventures series, All Aboard, The Jolly Bear.

Following feedback after the Curtis Brown Creative Writing and Illustrating a Children’s Picture Book course, I knew that I needed to enable my characters to develop during the course of the story. This was difficult as the nature of the book involves a task with clues that takes a lot of words.

This morning, I focused on the counting of the rhyme included and then moved onto the character development. I am pleased with what I did in the end and within 640 words. Some of the words might disappear in an illustrated version as the illustrations can speak instead of the words. I have also wondered about using the illustrations to capture some of the rhyming clues rather than using up words for each of them. I’ve left them in at the moment but this is entirely possible.

The characters progressed a lot in this story. This now poses a challenge for the progress they make across the series. I will need to give this more thought...