Running Out of Steam

You’ve been there, I’m sure. I have been there for a while. In the doldrums. The Horse Latitudes. A period when little seems to be happening, so you just sit back and wait for the horse to come back so you can climb back on.

How’s that for mixed metaphors!

For the past six months or so I have been playing a waiting game on a proposal for a project that I was really fired up about. But over the last while have simply been blowing air on the few coals of enthusiasm that I could muster while I awaited The Word. (I know. More metaphor.)

But I am hoping to hear the final outcome of the proposal in the next week or so, and then will have a better idea of where to go from here.

Meanwhile? I have been learning to paint with watercolours. Presenting virtually to schools and libraries in three provinces during Canadian Children’s Book Week. Following the progress of SHELTER as it made its way into the world. Writing a few pieces of memoir poetry. Teaching writing, and most recently – and thanks to a group in Alison’s Acheson’s Unschool For Writers – digging back into a few picture book stories that have been languishing for a while.

But now it’s summer. Camping calls. Hanging out with my grandson. Enjoying our lovely environment here on Vancouver Island.

And on August 26 I leave for a two-week holiday in Sicily. Sun. Sea. History. And good food. That’s what I am going in search of. And as long as I don’t get hung up on delayed or cancelled flights or lost luggage, I plan to make the very best of every minute.

I hope your summer is interesting and satisfying. However you spend it. And that if your writing has been languishing in recent months, here’s hoping a spark soon alights your interest and energy and you can get back to it.

Lipari, Sicily. Photo. A
Lipari, Sicity. Ph. Italy Tourism

I hereby resolve…


Some realizations come slowly, like an incoming tide. Others, they’re on me like a rabid dog.

On Monday, January 4, in the midst of sewing a handful of dummy books for a couple of picturebook ideas I have been toying with, I realized that THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO NOW. Work on capturing, exploring and developing picture book stories.

My grandson, immersed in one of my storytime favourites

I’ve had fifteen years of writing fiction for primary to middle school kids. I am proud of the eight books I’ve published for those readers. And gratified by the response from readers, teachers, librarians and awards judges.

I am coming to the end of almost two years work on my first – and what may be my only – midgrade nonfiction book, Shelter – Homelessness in Our Community, due out from Orca Book Publishers in October 2021. (You’ll be hearing much more about that as things develop.)

But now, for the next year I want to have fun. I am not as yet – but ever optimistic that I will be – published in the picture book genre. I have loved them for years, having shared hundreds with children in my own family and at library storytimes, and admired them for the delicate marriage between text and imagery and their poetry-like attention to language.

They are a hard sell, in more ways than one. I’ve sent many off into the unforgiving – and often unresponsive – picturebook publishing ether. The closest I came was with one story My Boots, Your Boots, which was accepted, the first payment in the advance paid, and then, like so many other projects, disappeared without a trace during a change in editors at the publishing company. A more recent story Spit and Polish, about the unlikely topic of PTSD, has been doing the rounds for quite a while.

I am now ready to try again. And to keep trying.

I am on Day Four of the StoryStorm picturebook challenge, aiming for at least 30 ideas in the next month – I’m at six so far. In a few days I will be signing up for the Julie Hedlund’s 12×12 Picture Book challenge, during which I will try to come up with drafts of 12 picturebook stories over the next year.

I will still be teaching and mentoring – something I truly love doing.

But for 2021, I am going to commit myself to dancing dogs, puddle jumping, the world of underwater flowers, Morning Monsters, angels with frozen wings… and small children exploring and surviving their challenging lives.