Welcome back! We’re about a month away from the TENTH annual National Picture Book Writing Week (AKA “NAPIBOWRIWEE”) happening this May 1-7, 2018!

I’m excited to announce our amazing line-up for this year’s event. Our picture book author & illustrator Q&A interviews for May 1-7, 2018 will include these amazing folks! Click on their website links to find out more about them!

HELENA KU RHEE (http://helenakrhee.com)

COLLEEN KONG-SAVAGE (http://kongsavage.com)

RITA HUBBARD (http://ritahubbard.com)

CARRIE CLICKARD (http://www.clclickard.com)

KERRI KOKIAS (https://www.kerrikokias.com)

MELISSA STEWART (https://www.melissa-stewart.com)

For those of you who are planning to participate for the first time ever, a brief history about this event: I started it in 2009 as a fun way to promote one of my picture books that was published that year (SHINING STAR: THE ANNA MAY WONG STORY, Lee & Low Books 2009). It was an impulsive blog I had posted on May 1, 2009 in which I decided to pay homage to one of my favorite writing events, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo at http://www.nanowrimo.org) in which you have to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. At the time, I was procrastinating on writing my next picture book, so I thought, “Why not try and write 7 picture books in 7 days?” Hence the birth of National Picture Book Writing Month, AKA “NAPIBOWRIWEE.” 🙂

I had some children book authors offer book writing advice and encouragement in interviews that I posted every day during the event. To my surprise, HUNDREDS of writers (both novice and/or unpublished and veteran published authors) participated. My event went viral and Publishers Weekly even wrote about it!

CAVEAT: I know you cannot write a picture book in one day. Writing picture books is a time-consuming, difficult and demanding writing craft. My inspiration was that I had tons of ideas and half-finished rough drafts and I wanted to FINISH a draft. So I thought, why not just try and write a full draft, no matter how horrible, every day for an entire week? That way at least I have 7 very rough first drafts of 7 different books that I can pick and choose the most promising ones to revise later. As a result, I sold another book thanks to my event, AND wrote a few drafts that would lead to future submissions!

In other words, NAPIBOWRIWEE is just a fun way to fight against procrastination and get that draft done.

The rules are very simple – from midnight May 1st until 11:59 PM on May 7th, we just write! The goal is to finish 7 full picture book drafts by the 7th day. BUT I’m happy if you can only write ONE full draft in 7 days! The whole point is to encourage people to learn how to write every day and how to finish what you started. I will post a guest author/illustrator Q&A blog every day to encourage everyone with their valuable writing advice and insights. You are highly encouraged to participate in the blog by posting comments! On the 7th day, I will choose names of participants who posted in the comments section at random for a fun prize drawing featuring autographed books by our guest authors, my own books, and souvenirs from our NAPIBOWRIWEE Store!

NOTE: You are allowed to brainstorm picture books ideas, research and even outline the structure of your picture books between now and May 1st. BUT ABSOLUTELY NO ACTUAL WRITING OF THE DRAFT. Some people like to just write 7 picture books in 7 days off the fly with no preparation, and that’s cool, too! Others prefer preparing for the event. Either way is fine, as long as you do not write a single word of your first draft until MIDNIGHT MAY 1ST! 🙂

If you want to check out previous NAPIBOWRIWEE events, just go to the ARCHIVES link in this website — that will redirect you to my author website which has all the blogs from the 2009 to 2015 events (http://paulayoo.com/category/napibo/). The 2016 NAPIBOWRIWEE to the present events are in the BLOG section of this website (https://napibowriwee.com/blog/)

I’ll be posting more blogs soon. Until then, please follow me on Twitter @paulayoo and keep up with my author website at http://paulayoo.com You can also join our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/109169309167365/

We also have a STORE! You can order your mugs, notebooks, T-shirts etc. here: https://www.cafepress.com/paulayoonapibowriweeclassic

Until the next blog, remember – HAPPY WRITING! WRITE LIKE YOU MEAN IT! 🙂

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