Telling Stories to Babies

Earlier this week, I was leafing through the internet or a book, and came across the advice that one should read to babies starting from the very beginning.  

Now, I would love to read to Nova, but she sees books first and foremost as a thing to chew on.  Goodnight Gorilla already sports quite an array of toothmarks.  I went onto one of the parenting chat sites I waste so much time on and asked for advice.  People had all sorts of opinions, as you might imagine, but all in all I was encouraged to give it another go.  The night before last, we turned all the pages of Goodnight Gorilla.  

One piece of advice I found interesting was that you can read a baby your books, by which the poster obviously meant whatever books you are reading, but that wasn't how I read it at first glance. I thought, "Aha!  I can read Nova Scrapplings and all the other books in the Anamat series that I've been trying to write since 2002."  So last night, as I lay there just this side of sleep, with Nova latched on, I tried to tell her the story of Darna's journey to Anamat, because Nova wouldn't sit anywhere near still while I turned the pages of Guess How Much I Love You.

Well.  That was an interesting exercise!  I spotted several flaws with the overall story right away, things I hadn't been able to see a year ago when I was last working on it.  The story is about Darna's struggle to find friends, even as she tries to pretend that she doesn't need them.  At the moment, as it's written, that's not really what the book is about.  I spend too much time on the most superficial external conflicts, all of which are a bit cartoonish in their good/evil contrast, which isn't what I want at all.  

I need to go back to the beginning.  Large swaths of the text are probably salvageable, but I might be better off starting again from scratch.  I also really do think that this is the right place to start the series, that jumping right in with Priestess would set the wrong focus.

"Darna is a sort of under scullery-maid at the far end of the universe," I began, "but she listens, and even there in that outpost keep she hears stories of other places, places that are better and more interesting. She thinks she might belong there, that she might be happy there, so one night, when there's a big party going on, she steals some money and runs away."

From that point forward, I'm afraid that Darna and I have a long way to go.

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