Bug's Nap — The Writering

If you are of a cynical turn of mind, you may be scoffing at the idea that I’m about to create a post about the writing process for a 16-page picture book. I mean, how many words can there be? (148. There are one hundred forty-eight words in my soon-to-be-award-winning, universally beloved children’s book, the second in a series.)

Well, it turns out creating a 12-page, 148-word book about an anatomically incorrect insect is a lot like writing your romantasy trilogy.

After Bug’s lunch went so well, Bug kept popping up in my head, and so I did what Ludwig van Beethoven would do: whip out my WASTE BOOK and start scribbling ideas. I actually wrote the all-caps headers first and then just let the shinyperfects crowd in. You can see I’m already setting up running jokes and callbacks through the series.

In your romantasy trilogy, you have no doubt done the same thing: sketched out what happens in which book, which characters appear and reappear, where the threads of the plot intersect, all that kind of thing.

You’ve already seen a lot of the details of how I seeded the ideas for NAP across my mini-mockup and how I then started moving text blocks around to spread out Bug’s encounters.

You might want to go back and take a look at how I fleshed out those shinyperfects in the WASTE BOOK and started tightening the idea that Bug will ask the reader to use the pros and cons to decide the best spot to nap. You can also see traces of my making sure that nothing sounded actually dangerous to Bug — our Bug is not going to be eaten by a deer or drown in a bellflower.

And of course, just as in your romantasy trilogy, once you have that outline even mostly shinyperfected in place, you have to write that opening page.

Yes, I am STEALING FROM THE BEST by simply copying the original file and then moving Bugs and ants and stuff around.

You will notice — as I advise on p. 71 of Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy — that in the epigraph I have simply replaced the original “bon appétit” with “XXX.” I might forget to figure out the joke there as I’m working on the other eleven pages if I don’t leave myself a visual cue.

The same kind of thing is happening to the other pages as I begin to replace the action and dialog from Bug’s Lunch with the new adventures in finding a place to nap, which we will explore…

NEXT: Bug’s Nap — The Laying Out