Welcome to The Letter C of the Alphabet Blog Challenge

The picture is courtesy of a writer friend on Facebook. I hope he doesn't mind but cat is a C word and the picture is adorable.

Writing for children is no different than writing for adults when it comes to constructing a good story. Books for children need Conflict in the story to keep the readers interested.

 Conflict is my C word today because it is one of my areas of  "need for improvement" in my stories for children. It ranks right up there with writing bold. I imagine serious situations with intense conflict but I don't necessarily portray that intensity in my stories because of my lack of boldness. I again fear worrying parents, giving kids ideas they may not already have, and basically ( here I am inserting my boldness) don't want to piss off school board members if my stories should ever be in school libraries.

What is wrong with my thinking?

• First, I don't even have a book in the school library
• Second, I need to quit equating conflict for not being perfect. Characters have flaws. I have flaws. Life is not perfect.
• Thirdly, and this is the most important to me. I need to get over my fears of ( here I go again with the bold thing) pissing people off including family, friends, or colleagues who might assume I am writing about them.
• Fourth- I really hate using bad words. Somehow when they slip out of the mouth they don't seem as obnoxious as when I see them spelled out. I just don't like writing that way.

I feel so refreshed and ready to write bold with a good old fashioned conflict now that I have that spelled out in black and white. I still don't think I can write too many bad words though which might pose a problem because last time I talked with teens, they use words like that in every sentence. Wish me luck.

Writing prompt: C words for K-2 Write a 200-400 article or story with these C words from the Children's Writer's Word Book

creep, coyote, clay, claw, climb, catch, came, call, cap,cat,

Notice the action words in the list. See what you can do with this list and feel free to share it with us.