What I do when I'm supposed to be writing
So approximately three weeks ago (I know because I checked the timestamp on the concept art) I got this horrible urge to write a children's book. I was supposed working on novel outlines. (Have I mentioned that I sometimes have trouble focusing?)
So I made cover mock-ups and got my kids to tell me which ones they liked, and asked my daughter what she thought would happen if a little speckled owl decided to go Trick-or-Treating.
Her answer was that his cat friend who belonged to a girl named Lisa who lived in the house next door would help him out. (Obviously.) This was exactly the story prompt I needed to turn my vague ideas into a concrete narrative. So during the day I wrote novel chapters, and at night before bed I propped up my pillow and snuggled under the covers and wrote about shy little screech owls who fall into candy bowls.
Done, right?
No, because everybody said a chapter book needs interior art. Fine, ok, so I did interior art.
And at this point the entire project had taken far more time than I'd budgeted and had also turned out way cuter than I'd expected and so instead of this quickie little fun family project that I slap up on kindle and forget about, I find myself formatting and reformatting the stupid PDF files so we can make a print copy too, and by now I'm so invested in the dang thing that my stupid writer brain insists that we should promote it and by the way there really ought to be a sequel because the cat deserves a story of her own and...
Sigh.
So that was probably way too many details. But, yeah. Itty bitty easy reader. Five chapters, medium vocabulary, happy ending. This is what my subconscious does when I'm trying to avoid writing.