Picture book author, Tara Lazar, started Picture Book Idea Month (PiBoIdMo) in response to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The great thing is you just have to come up with one idea (not an entire story) per day. Of course, the plan is to have a few manuscripts result from these ideas, but we don’t have to flesh those out unless we’re inspired.

I decided to do it this year and I’m excited so far. See that pic of my blank calendar below? I printed that on Friday. It has been filled in with five ideas–today’s idea isn’t on there yet, but it will be! I wanted a blank calendar in this post because when I print a blank calendar in connection with writing goals of some kind, I get itchin’ to fill it. I thought it might inspire you the same way.

Why Did I Do It?

I never seem to be without ideas, but I had a moment a couple of weeks ago, after I’d sent another version of a new PB to my agent, when I thought:

What’s my next picture book? 

The answer: I don’t know.

That kind of freaked me out because with my novels, I always have three or four ideas waiting in the queue. But with the picture books, I’d been so focused on writing and revising the two that are currently out on submission that I hadn’t thought about what would come next.

I immediately jumped on my computer–okay, not literally, because that would be bad–and sifted through my picture book folder.

A sense of relief flooded me as one title caught my eye. I got excited, wrote and rewrote furiously, and sent it off to my online critique group.

But then the question popped up again:

What’s my next picture book? 

Enter PiBoIdMo!

Now, I will confess that I went back through my picture book folder again to see if there were any other ideas that grabbed me. There were three. So three of the five on my calendar are existing ideas. If you think that’s cheating, that’s okay 🙂 . My goal is to get 30 mostly usable ideas on that baby and if an old idea fit, I wrote it down. If you’ve got viable old ideas, use them!

If you’re a picture book writer and haven’t already, I encourage you to sign up (you have until tomorrow, Nov 7). In addition to the satisfaction of making it happen and getting inspired by the guest bloggers, there are cool prizes.  😉