Tara Lazar

Every January, Tara Lazar hosts an amazing challenge/event called StoryStorm, in which participants are challenged to come up with 30 story ideas in the 31 days of the month. These ideas can be for picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, young adult novels — whatever you write. They can be detailed, with ideas for characters, plot, and setting, or as simple as “bunny needs new earwarmers,” or a character’s name: “Bunny’s name is Barkins, Jr.” Each day there is a post on Tara’s blog, from a guest poster who is an author, illustrator, editor, agent — someone in the kidlit world who has wisdom and encouragement to share. Often there are prizes connected with these posts (drawn for at the end of the challenge.) There is also the potential of winning one of the grand prizes, if you amass at least 30 ideas (all on the honor system — no ideas are to be shared) and your name is drawn from the StoryStorm winners. The best prize of all, though, is to have these bright, shiny, new ideas to work on in the coming year. Who knows — maybe one of them will become a child’s favorite book! It all starts tomorrow, but registration is open until January 7th. If you want more information, or if you want to register, click on this link. It will take you to Tara’s StoryStorm Registration post. Hope to see you there!