(UPDATE: You can now buy 'Carrie the Limping Lion' through my blog, thanks to Payhip!)
I've been struggling to figure out the format for the children's stories that I want to write. What age group should I target? How do I actually start each story? What happens in each story? All of these are things I've been thinking about and not managing to come up with answers to, until today!
I've decided how to deliver each story, and that delivery is through simple poetry. I enjoy writing it, and hopefully it's more enjoyable for young children to read. Here's my first draught of "Carrie the Limping Lion". (Yes, she's named after me, Carrie-lion!)
Francois will be illustrating each stanza for me to make things more kid-friendly, and to add to the story a little bit.
Please give me honest and critical feedback - I need to learn a lot and improve the way that I write these, if I want to expand on the collection and actually have kids interested in the stories. If children find them boring, then they won't learn anything from them, and what would the point be in that?
Well, here goes nothing:
Carrie the Limping Lion
Carrie is a lion cub
Her knees are always sore
Sometimes when they hurt too much
They make her want to ROAR!
Jumping jacks are bothersome
And running makes her squeal
You can't see what makes it hurt
But Carrie's pain is real
Carrie has a lion's heart
Do you know what that means?
She's very brave and carries on
And joins the running teams
Soreness makes her running slow
And sometimes she comes last
But Carrie has a special dream
Of running Cheetah-fast
Sometimes when the pain is bad
Her mom wraps up her knees
With bandages to keep them warm
But sometimes others tease
The tiger cubs don't understand
So they don't play with Carrie
But that's okay, 'cause Carrie has
A cool best friend called Sally
Sally is a panther cub
And climbing is her thing
But when her friend is tired and sore
She joins her on the swing
They talk about all kinds of things
And like to play pretend
So Carrie is a happy cub
Life's better with a friend
*Update #1: At the end of each poem, I plan to include a kid-friendly description of what affects the character involved and how this makes things different for them. Sort of an educational post-script for children who want to read more about it.
*Update #2: Edited last line from "Because she's with her friend" to "Life's easier with a friend". Also, Francois has started illustrating it in the meantime, working on the opening illustration. Yippee!
*Update #3: Panthers are the strongest climbers of the cat family, so to give Sally and Carrie different interests, I've changed Sally's 'favourite thing' to climbing, instead of running.
*Update #4: Had a lovely phone call with my mommy and got some really useful crit about the metre and some of the clumsier lines. Thank you, Mommy!
*Update #5: Daddy pointed out that Leopards are not the fastest animals, cheetahs are... How has nobody caught this yet? Haha!
*Update #6: If Carrie needs bandages because she's cold, why is she wearing shorts? Changed stanza five from 'Sometimes when it's very cold', to 'Sometimes when the pain is bad', so the poem and illustrations make more sense together.
Showing posts with label different. Show all posts
Showing posts with label different. Show all posts
Thursday, 26 March 2015
Monday, 23 March 2015
The Pros and Cons of Showering in the Great Outdoors
Our bathroom is like any other bathroom. It has a toilet, a basin and a bath. What it doesn't have is a shower. Where we live, if you want to have a shower, you need to walk outside, go around the house, and step behind a screen that Francois and his brother built to create some privacy for us... We have an outdoor shower, and we love it! So, for your amusement (and mine), I've decided to break down the good and bad aspects of outdoor showering in a nice list.
Lovely Thing #1:
Space! You don't get many showers bigger than ours... And yet, somehow, we still manage to bump elbows if we're showering at the same time.
Horrible Thing #1:
Wind Exposure... On a particularly breezy day, the screen does a rather limited job of stopping the cold air from giving you goosebumps.
Lovely Thing #2:
Nature! While showering, we have a view of the forest. We wash our hair and clean our feet while watching birds frolicking in the trees, and examining pretty spiders making their webs.
Horrible Thing #2:
Nature. Our shower is under a fig tree. On the one hand, the huge leaves protect us from rain when the weather is a little moist, but on the other hand, the tree tends to drop leaves and unripe figs into our shower. The leaves make an awkwardly soft shower floor as they rot, and the figs attract fruit flies, which take flight as soon as you turn the tap on, and hover around you while you're soaping up. This leads me to my next horrible thing...
Horrible Thing #3:
Maintenance. Regular sweeping and de-fruiting of the shower is required... Though we don't adhere to that requirement very often. Proooobably should.
Lovely Thing #3:
Maintenance again. We never have to worry about a blocked pipe, a leaky shower, or digging hair out of the drain.
Lovely Thing #4:
A lack of steam. Most people like having hot, steamy showers. I like hot showers, but in summer, too much steam makes me feel really funny, and enclosed showers have a way of trapping that steam and suffocating you with it. Outside, the steam dissipates so quickly that it never becomes a hazard to your breathing...
Horrible Thing #4:
Dirty feet. This is easily solved by wearing slops while showering. The ground under the shower is concreted, with pretty pebbles and what not, but the trek from the shower back to the house is a rather muddy one. Francois doesn't really care about this as much as I do.
Lovely Thing #5:
Feeling fresh after a shower. That lacking steam mentioned in the last lovely point really contributes to this one. No matter how hot and humid the weather is, a shower leaves me feeling clean and fresh. In the past, using indoor showers in the heat of summer, the bathroom would get so steamy that I'd start feeling sweaty and icky very soon after getting clean.
Horrible Thing #5:
Unexpected visitors. This one is really irritating. Garden services are supposed to come every second Friday to cut the lawn... Sometimes they come on a different day without any warning. Once, I was showering when they arrived... This was before the screen was built, by the way. Aaaah!! Luckily, Francois noticed them arriving and chased them away before they saw anything saucy. I hope.
So that's five points to each side, ten in total... Honestly, the good outweighs the bad for me. The outdoor shower is one of my favourite things about this little cottage, and I'm really going to miss it one day when we move back to a place with a boring, conventional, shower... Though I won't complain about the increased level of privacy. Hehe.
 |
| This is our shower! |
Space! You don't get many showers bigger than ours... And yet, somehow, we still manage to bump elbows if we're showering at the same time.
Horrible Thing #1:
Wind Exposure... On a particularly breezy day, the screen does a rather limited job of stopping the cold air from giving you goosebumps.
Lovely Thing #2:
Nature! While showering, we have a view of the forest. We wash our hair and clean our feet while watching birds frolicking in the trees, and examining pretty spiders making their webs.
 |
| The pretty, pretty view from our shower. |
Nature. Our shower is under a fig tree. On the one hand, the huge leaves protect us from rain when the weather is a little moist, but on the other hand, the tree tends to drop leaves and unripe figs into our shower. The leaves make an awkwardly soft shower floor as they rot, and the figs attract fruit flies, which take flight as soon as you turn the tap on, and hover around you while you're soaping up. This leads me to my next horrible thing...
 |
| Dead leaves and rotten figs and tiny icky FRUIT FLIES. |
Maintenance. Regular sweeping and de-fruiting of the shower is required... Though we don't adhere to that requirement very often. Proooobably should.
Lovely Thing #3:
Maintenance again. We never have to worry about a blocked pipe, a leaky shower, or digging hair out of the drain.
Lovely Thing #4:
A lack of steam. Most people like having hot, steamy showers. I like hot showers, but in summer, too much steam makes me feel really funny, and enclosed showers have a way of trapping that steam and suffocating you with it. Outside, the steam dissipates so quickly that it never becomes a hazard to your breathing...
Horrible Thing #4:
Dirty feet. This is easily solved by wearing slops while showering. The ground under the shower is concreted, with pretty pebbles and what not, but the trek from the shower back to the house is a rather muddy one. Francois doesn't really care about this as much as I do.
Lovely Thing #5:
Feeling fresh after a shower. That lacking steam mentioned in the last lovely point really contributes to this one. No matter how hot and humid the weather is, a shower leaves me feeling clean and fresh. In the past, using indoor showers in the heat of summer, the bathroom would get so steamy that I'd start feeling sweaty and icky very soon after getting clean.
Horrible Thing #5:
Unexpected visitors. This one is really irritating. Garden services are supposed to come every second Friday to cut the lawn... Sometimes they come on a different day without any warning. Once, I was showering when they arrived... This was before the screen was built, by the way. Aaaah!! Luckily, Francois noticed them arriving and chased them away before they saw anything saucy. I hope.
So that's five points to each side, ten in total... Honestly, the good outweighs the bad for me. The outdoor shower is one of my favourite things about this little cottage, and I'm really going to miss it one day when we move back to a place with a boring, conventional, shower... Though I won't complain about the increased level of privacy. Hehe.
Sunday, 22 March 2015
A Sci-fi Story Concept
What you're about to read is an idea for a science fiction story that I came up with quite a while ago. This concept led to some brainstorming with Francois, and we thought about creating a comic called "The Last Apple Tree" together. I ended up being horrible at creating content for him to work from, and it got put on a back-shelf for later... Now that I'm writing more regularly again, I'm going to try my darnedest to churn out some interesting adventures for our sci-fi characters to go on, so watch this space!
Lizbeth's just a regular human being, and that's her problem - nobody's regular these days.
Lizbeth's just a regular human being, and that's her problem - nobody's regular these days.
What's worse? She can remember being better, and every now and then she re-lives it again, when her faulty implant decides to wake up and jump back into action.
Most of the time, when it doesn't work, she can barely do the tasks required for simple physical labour - her normal human physiology isn't fast enough, her normal reactions not quick enough, to work with the machines of today.
Even worse, she can feel her stupidity. No, not her regular intelligence - her actual stupidity. She fights to learn more every day, she struggles to think better... But after so many years - so many generations - of relying on the implants, human beings (and Lizbeth) have stopped exercising their own brains.
"We've evolved too quickly with technology," she realises, "and we've devolved without even noticing it..."
Lizbeth has heard rumours that a huge electro-magnetic flare will be coming soon. Apparently, there have been safeguards put in place, and nothing will be affected. "That's good," Lizbeth supposes, but she can't help but wish that something would go wrong... Maybe afterwards, she wouldn't feel so alone. Maybe afterwards, she'd be the better one.
Thursday, 19 March 2015
A Different Collection of Children's Stories
(UPDATE: You can now buy 'Carrie the Limping Lion' through my blog, thanks to Payhip!)
There's an idea that I have for a collection of children's books. Basically, I want to write about children who are different, like I was (Or should I say "like I am"? I don't think I'm a kid anymore...). Now, everybody knows that I'm different from most kids. I'm a complete weirdo, after all, which is apparent to many people. The simple fact that I only just learnt how to ride a bicycle is a huge indicator of my weirdness. But that's not the kind of different that I'm talking about here.
What makes me different is that I have Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. I'm one of the very few lucky people who are currently in remission, so you don't need to get all worried about me all of a sudden. Sometimes my knees or hips hurt, but that usually only happens if I'm particularly stressed out, or overworked... Which is a big part of why I currently live in the Garden Route (so calm and pretty!) and only work four days a week as a waitress (which is actually very easy and stress-free). However, that's not the way that it used to be when I was a child.
Back in the day, when I was but a wee lass, I was very sore - very often. I wore bandages around my knees to keep them warm when the days were a bit too cool, and I couldn't take part in a lot of sporty activities with my friends. During school assemblies, I didn't sit on the floor with everybody else, because it bent my knees too much - so I'd sit on a chair with the prefects and teachers, which drew a lot of attention. So few children understood why I couldn't join them in their games every time, and it might have made things easier if they knew more about Arthritis in general... Which is what gave me the idea for the children's books. Really short, nicely illustrated stories about children who are different, and how they go about their daily lives.
Children with Arthritis (like me!), children who need glasses, children who are deaf... Children with all kinds of differences. My brother, Benjamin, calls children (and grown-ups) like this "diff-abled". We're still able to do most things that other people can do, but we're forced to do them in a different way. By the by, Ben has recently discovered that he has Asperger's Syndrome, so he knows what he's talking about when it comes to being diff-abled.
Of course, I can't finish this project alone. Ideally, I'd like to get input from as many people with as many differences as possible. Perspective is so important, and at the moment, the only perspective that I have is my own. If you'd like me to write a story about you, please leave a comment or drop me an email so that I can chat to you about your experiences as a child who was different.
I'd like to show children all over the world that although we're different, we're still just kids, and we don't want to be isolated and bullied, we don't want to be misunderstood... We just want to have friends.
There's an idea that I have for a collection of children's books. Basically, I want to write about children who are different, like I was (Or should I say "like I am"? I don't think I'm a kid anymore...). Now, everybody knows that I'm different from most kids. I'm a complete weirdo, after all, which is apparent to many people. The simple fact that I only just learnt how to ride a bicycle is a huge indicator of my weirdness. But that's not the kind of different that I'm talking about here.
What makes me different is that I have Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. I'm one of the very few lucky people who are currently in remission, so you don't need to get all worried about me all of a sudden. Sometimes my knees or hips hurt, but that usually only happens if I'm particularly stressed out, or overworked... Which is a big part of why I currently live in the Garden Route (so calm and pretty!) and only work four days a week as a waitress (which is actually very easy and stress-free). However, that's not the way that it used to be when I was a child.
Back in the day, when I was but a wee lass, I was very sore - very often. I wore bandages around my knees to keep them warm when the days were a bit too cool, and I couldn't take part in a lot of sporty activities with my friends. During school assemblies, I didn't sit on the floor with everybody else, because it bent my knees too much - so I'd sit on a chair with the prefects and teachers, which drew a lot of attention. So few children understood why I couldn't join them in their games every time, and it might have made things easier if they knew more about Arthritis in general... Which is what gave me the idea for the children's books. Really short, nicely illustrated stories about children who are different, and how they go about their daily lives.
Children with Arthritis (like me!), children who need glasses, children who are deaf... Children with all kinds of differences. My brother, Benjamin, calls children (and grown-ups) like this "diff-abled". We're still able to do most things that other people can do, but we're forced to do them in a different way. By the by, Ben has recently discovered that he has Asperger's Syndrome, so he knows what he's talking about when it comes to being diff-abled.
Of course, I can't finish this project alone. Ideally, I'd like to get input from as many people with as many differences as possible. Perspective is so important, and at the moment, the only perspective that I have is my own. If you'd like me to write a story about you, please leave a comment or drop me an email so that I can chat to you about your experiences as a child who was different.
I'd like to show children all over the world that although we're different, we're still just kids, and we don't want to be isolated and bullied, we don't want to be misunderstood... We just want to have friends.
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