The thing that held me back in my writing kids’ books turned out to be all of the rules. The only rule I could go all in with was that if you word could not be found in a middle grade dictionary it should not be used in a story, book or article.
The great thing about the time we live in is the availability of not just books on editing but word processing applications with multiple levels of edit-checks built right in.
After reading the uncut version of The Stand, well, ‘the kid’ added a creep factor and I never really bonded with him. In my readerly opinion, ‘the kid’ should have been cut from the first round.
