BLOG BREAK Ambition and Accidents

Nick Cross presents his fortnightly selection of must-read blogs.

How do you read a picture book? It seems like a simple question, but this excellent Picture Book Den blog post by Chitra Soundar reveals a whole new way to analyse what makes a picture book great.

I loved Claire Watts' incredibly useful list of thirteen ways to end a chapter, although it did make me want to stop writing this and obsessively check all the chapter endings of my work-in-progress!

Life happens, despite our carefully laid plans, and Claire Fayers' ambitious goals for 2021 were derailed by a minor accident. So Claire has come up with her own set of tiny goals to celebrate every achievement.

Writer's retreats have been a much-missed feature of the last year, but here's Tracy Darnton who's had a retreat without intending to!

Finally, next Sunday is Mother's Day in the UK, so Rachael Davis is selecting her new favourite picture books about motherhood.

Nick.

*Feature image: Blog Break logo by Nick Cross

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Nick Cross is Words & Pictures' Blog Network Editor. An Undiscovered Voices winner, he both writes and illustrates for children, and was honours winner of the SCBWI Magazine Merit Award for fiction.

Nick also blogs for Notes from the Slushpile. His most recent post finds him Mixing it Up - Challenging My Unconscious Biases to Add Diversity to My Writing