Red Balloon

With the new ski friends I’m making up in Bralorne coupled with the sunny weather and starry skies beckoning me outdoors for every spare moment, I have not had much time to collect my thoughts on the blogging front. I’m also taking an 8-week course on writing for children, which has been interesting. The online aspect is not something I’m especially thrilled with—I much prefer the interpersonal feel of actual face-to-face—but since I’m living in these parts I’ll take what I can get.

As I’m sure you may have figured out, I do a LOT of writing each day, most of which lives forlorn in the notebooks that seem to be the staple item in every room of my house. Ideas swarm in my head, make it out onto the page somewhere in a hurried unraveling, and when they have successfully flown the coup of my mind I go on with my day and don’t look back in the rearview for what gems I may have sped past. Keep on truckin’ is my motto with writing.

This is about to change. Hopefully. If I can find the scattered notebooks which are filled with, somewhere in their finished pages, the inklings of a few children’s books. I am an ideas woman, apparently, and delivery of a finished product that is reworked and edited down to a manageable manuscript that I would not cringe if others read is where the course comes to my rescue. I paid hard-earned money for it, so now the work begins, right? I’m not going to let this be akin to paying for a gym membership that I never use. Not this time. I’m going to get something done here, something edited that I could maybe let someone in my family read. Someone who already loves me and would therefore probably tell me that it is a great story “honey” but what about on the third page where you used the f-word? Oops. Forgot to edit that out. Sorry.

I’m going to write a kid’s book, for myself more than anything, just to “finish” one of these ideas. How many words could it truly be, right? It’s not like I’m writing a novel. Yet. Just a kid’s book. For myself. If only I could find that notebook from last summer, where somewhere in some city backyard there is this little girl in a frilly dress and shiny see-your-face-in-me shoes. A little girl who finds the string of a bright red balloon caught high up in a tree branch and decides to pull it loose.