2012 Tomie dePaola entry

Here is my entry in SCBWI's Tomie dePaola contest. Winner will be announced on January 9, 2012. The text selected by Tomie this year is from the Chicken Licken story. I've included the text below so people can see the part of the text that was illustrated.

So they went along and went along until they met Turkey Lurkey
“Good morning, Goosey Loosey, Ducky Daddles, Cocky Locky, Henny Penny,
and Chicken Licken,” said Turkey Lurkey, “where are you going?”
“Oh, Turkey Lurkey, the sky is falling and we are going to tell the King!”
“How do you know the sky is falling?” asked Turkey Lurkey.
“Ducky Daddles told me,” said Goosey Loosey.
“Cocky Locky told me,” said Ducky Daddles.
“Henny Penny told me,” said Cocky Locky.
“Chicken Licken told me,” said Henny Penny 
“I saw it with my own eyes, I heard it with my own ears,
and a piece of it fell on my tail!” said Chicken Licken.
“Then I will go with you,” said Turkey Lurkey, “and we will tell the King!”

Update on NaNoWriMo and PiBoIdMo

I find that November always seems to be one of my busiest times of the year. In the past I've done the NaNoWriMo and although I didn't quite make it to the 50,000 words, I did fairly well. This year I added the Picture Book Idea Month which challenges participants to come up with one idea per day for a picture book. As of today, my totals are:

NaNoWriMo - 10,000 words - very far behind where I need to be!
PiBoIdMo - 19 ideas - right on track!

If nothing else the picture book ideas will give me stories to write and illustrate all year long. The novel writing month will give me a good start on the next novel to complete.

I'm taking the NaNoWriMo and the PiBoIdMo challenge!

There are two challenges this month for people who write. One is the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which challenges writers to write a  50,000 word story during the month on November. This challenge is looking at quantity of words, NOT the quality of words. It is a perfect way for a writer to get a first draft down, or most of a first draft down without worrying about the things that come with revisions. It is all about spontaneity and ideas.

 The second challenge is the Picture Book Idea Month (PiBoIdMo). In this challenge, the writer is to come up with 30 ideas for picture books in 30 days. Since I love writing and illustrating picture books, I decided to take this challenge too! If you are interested in this challenge, go to taralazar.wordpress.com to sign up.


I'll try and post updates as to word and idea counts to let you know how it is going. This is day 1. Time to start!

Illustrating next story

I am currently illustrating my next story, which is currently in the storyboard phase. The manuscript has gone through numerous revisions and is finally tight. There is always the chance that as I progress through the storyboard phase I will discover some pacing issues that would require some additional refining, but at least for now it is done.

Flash Animations

I've posted two flash animations on the animation page of my website and currently am in the process of developing some more short animations.

Please visit my website!

I finally have my website up and running. On the animation page, I need to make some changes that will allow iphones, ipods and ipads to view the simple animations I created. At the present time, any devise that does not support flash can not see them. I am excited to have learned the html and css necessary to launch my website without templates. I think in the future this will give me a lot of flexibility to create a creative online environment. To check out my website, please go to www.lindanorman-lyman.com

Thanks!

Website and flash animations

For the past month or so, I've been working on creating my website. I have my domain name and a webhost set up. Learning to code the content rather than using the templates that come with the sites has been fun and challenging. Hopefully, it gives me a lot more flexibility in design so that things end up looking the way I want them to look. Hopefully I'll have it up and running next week sometime, once I make the final changes to the coding.

I will post once I have it up and running!