My Muse is always looking for the next shiny object, something to get excited about writing. She has once again turned down the path of throwing ideas for series of children’s books at me.
She has already thrown two ideas for series at me, one mystery and one sci-fi.
The mystery one came about because growing up I was a fan of the Three Investigators books. The basic idea behind it was three teenagers, Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews went around getting involved in mysteries, often at the behest of Alfred Hitchcock. They fell into the same vein as The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, and others. The boys investigated weird mysteries that ended up having reasonable explanations. Kind of like Scooby Doo. Robert Arthur, Jr., who created the series, tied them in to movie Director Alfred Hitchcock, thinking that having a big name like that would draw more attention to the series, which it did.
My Muse wanted to continue those stories, so instead of ending up writing Three Investigators fan fiction, she came up with her own team of junior sleuths. They work out of a treehouse, built by the father of one of the kids. I always wanted a cool tree house to live in after seeing Walt Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson. I figure if you’re trying to be a crack sleuthing squad, you might as well have a really cool office to work out of. I haven’t quite decided if I’m going for more standard mysteries or the ‘weird menace’ type mysteries. Probably the latter.
The sci-fi one comes out of a mixing of Dr. Who, Explorers, Sliders, and Earth Star Voyager. In this one, a trio of kids end up inventing a device that can transport them to anywhere in the galaxy, possibly the Universe. Unfortunately on the first use the calibration gets screwed up and they can’t get back home. The series is their adventures trying to make the device to get them home, and the many worlds and cultures they visit.
And now, the Muse is coming up with a third series, this one based around cozy fantasy. It came about the other day when A. A. Milne’s birthday (January 18) went by. He wrote the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, which I enjoyed. This series would lean heavily into friendship, empathy, and compassion for others. I’m imagining a series of connected stand-alone tales. They would all be related but they could be read in any order. It will most likely be tales of anthropomorphic animals like Redwall, The Wind In The Willows, or the Frog and Toad tales. The Muse has an idea for an overall story arc which I think might work.
There is one other consideration when writing kids series. The stories I’m writing under my own name are likely to deal with more mature themes that kids aren’t likely to understand, nor should they be exposed to them at a young age. Or they will have weird humor that kids aren’t likely to get. So, if I do write these series I’ll most likely have to write them under a pen name, so I can keep my audience of adult fans separate from my audience of kid fans. If I do that, I wonder how interviews would go? I couldn’t show my face during an interview depending on if I’m being interviewed for my adult works or my kids books. Interviews by email would work I suppose. I’m getting way ahead of the game at this point, though. I need to write the books first and get them published, then build an audience.
And all of this is going to be on the back burner to the supernatural soap opera and the flash fiction collections.
I’m glad that my Muse has so many ideas and directions she wants to go in. Now all I need to do is figure out how to consistently write ten thousand (10,000) words a day, or more, to keep up with them.
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Judith Viorst, Judy Blume, Shel Silverstein and Ursula LeGuin are just some of the writers I can think of off hand that wrote both for children and adults, without using any pseudonyms.
Yes, that’s true. Still, I think it’d be better if I kept my writings in two separate genres under different names.