When I first got online in 1996 there wasn’t a lot of writing resources available. I was actively pursuing my writing at the time and I was discouraged with how little information there was available online. While there were a few writers living in my area, none of them were focused on writing for children. In my mind writing is writing, regardless of what genre you choose to market. While there may be some truth in that concept, I have found that the writers of different genes are not interested in a piece of writing that’s outside of their genre. In other words, they aren’t interested enough to read and critique your writing if it’s not in their focused market. I understand that and there may be good reasons to have a single focused genre writing group. I just needed to commune with other writers but because of my genre, I wasn’t welcomed into the existing groups in my town (there were only 2). Oh, they had good enough excuses, such as, we don’t know anything about writing for children, or we want meatier material, you know, adult content; violence, sex and rock-n-roll. Yes, well … obviously none of them had read a young adult novel. Oh, well, such is life.

So I went online in search of like-minded writers. It took awhile to find anything to do with writing. The search engines were not as good as they are today. Google hadn’t even been thought of yet. Yahoo was around but my search engine of choice back then was Excite.com. It was annoying when I’d do a search on writing and get porn in the list of sites, especially when you didn’t know it was a porn site and clicked on the link. Ugh! There were no warnings like there are today and you couldn’t do a search for anything without having porn show up in the search return. But Excite had a directory and that’s when I started using directories to look for what I wanted instead of search engines. It was much easier once you learned how the structure was laid out and no more porn!

Anyway, I did finally find a few good sites on writing. All are gone today except one and it has changed. It’s not as busy with controversy and creativity. It used to be a fun place to hang out in, with lots of different characters to exchange lively conversations with. Conversations that often developed into flame wars. Writers! They can be very vocal and each have well defined opinions and have no problem voicing them, or in this case, scripting them. It was a great place to get character ideas and play with those characters development. And they had a section just for children’s writers! I was in heaven and had found a home for my writer-self. I even met a few writers who have gone on to be published, one has several published books and lots of awards. Kimberly Willis Holt wondered into the children’s fiction forum and we struck up a friendship. She wasn’t published yet but it wasn’t long after I met her that her first book was accepted for publication and I received a signed copy of her first book, My Louisiana Sky. Sadly, the writers forum changed when a new owner come into power and many friendships have gone their separate ways, including my short but treasured friendship with Kimberly.

I have the first two books Kimberly published and now see that she has been busy the last six years or so and more books have been published. Her newest book, Keeper of the Night, looks interesting and I may have to buy it. Her books are so well scripted that anyone would enjoy them, regardless of age. And anyone interested in writing for children and want to explore the development of a writer/characters voice, then they really should read Kimberly’s books. I just found her website at, Kimberly Willis Holt. I would have designed it differently but then, when she knew me I had no interest in creating websites.

The writing resource I found long ago is, Writers BBS Forums, and it’s still a good resource if you can ignore the ads, especially for new writers. There are forums for every genre, some more active than others and there are still a few published authors who participate on the forums and help aspiring writers. It can also be a good place to get critiques and tryout new writing techniques. It’s definitely worth visiting.