Hey, I recognize that kid...

In fact, I just wrote a picture book manuscript, Bell, about him. Here's what he's like, according to Chris Mercogliano in a post at Beacon Broadside:

[W]e say that kids with minds like hummingbirds, who aren’t yet inclined to spend long stretches of time reading, writing, and figuring, are “flighty” or “easily distracted,” not that they have attention deficit disorder. The interesting thing about these children is that given the chance to pay attention to what they want to pay attention to, they will often spend hours at a time working on a drawing, or a birdhouse, or a new skateboard move. When it is their choice, they will devour good books and stories and keep asking for more. But if you try to force them when the desire and excitement are missing, indeed that is when the trouble begins.

In my story, that boy is a hero. But I wonder if others would read it and just see him as a pain.

Hmm -- sounds familiar...

Here, in no particular order, are selected words that appear in at least two of the five picture book manuscripts I'm currently working on:

Blast
Jackhammer
Sledgehammer
Dust
Explode
Horn
Tail
Fire
Brick
Scratch
Hole
Luck
Monster
School

For what it's worth, "dynamite," "avalanche," "danger," "obliterate," and "defied" each appear only once, and none of them in the same manuscript.

A brief month for a brief focus on brief manuscripts

Circumstances still being what they are, I'm still not working on what I'd thought I'd be working on this month. But you know what? I really like what I've been doing instead.

And what I've been doing instead, besides more pleasure reading than I usually get around to, is working on picture book manuscripts. Five of them, in fact, in varying degrees of completeness and quality.

These aren't new ideas I've ginned up in the past few weeks, but things I've had in the back of my mind for a while and just hadn't taken the opportunity to do anything with. If my own track record is any indication, at least four of them won't amount to much, but these five seem to be the most promising of all the story ideas I've had filed away.

I hope to wrap up work on these -- for now -- next weekend, share them with my agent, and move on to another previously scheduled project while waiting to see what, if anything, happens next with these picture books.

And while I have no idea what I'll be working on next January, or next March, I plan to spend next February doing the same thing that I've been doing this February: working for pure pleasure on new picture book ideas that accumulate in the meantime. That, at least, I can control.

Well, perhaps just one more cookie. And then I've got stuff to do.

Recently I received word from the Department of Circumstances Beyond My Control that, due to the usual, a couple of my projects will almost certainly take longer to see the light of day than I'd been expecting. The immediate impact is that, well, I've got nothing to work on at the moment.

I've already wailed and gnashed my teeth over this, eaten maybe one or two cookies more than I should have, and made a mix CD, so what else is there to do?

Write, that's what. Filey has been holding on to a yellow folder full of story fragments that I've accumulated since who knows when. I've got few other ideas that haven't been committed to paper, and perhaps still more are lurking in my subconscious.

I intend to pick one, work on it until it's not fun, and then move on to the next one. Rinse and repeat. Being down in the dumps about obstacles I can't do anything about and momentum I may not have anymore was enjoyable for only so long. Now I'd like to regain a little control of my creative life, and the only surefire way of doing that is to focus on the part that doesn't hinge on anyone else.

Oh, I'm not going totally solo. Last night 4-year-old F listened as I read the first draft of a brand-new story. He was a polite audience, but the material stank. Looks like I've got some work to do after all.