1st Draft of The Magic Box 2

Just finished the first draft of The Magic Box 2. Probably the easiest thing I've written since the first magic box back when I was six years old. It's going to be a fun little book once it's polished and illustrated. 

The most difficult thing about writing it was having to revert to a grade school vocabulary. I've learned a lot of new words since then. Words like shimmering for instance. Do five year olds know what shimmering means? I'd ask myself. Just to be on the safe side, I would think about what I really wanted to express by the word and choose a simpler form.

I also had to refrain from writing in the moral gray area where most of my characters tend to reside. Example: I had a scene planned out where a pirate captain explains that the buried treasure he and his crew are digging up belonged to someone else, so technically it was stolen-stolen treasure.  The end of the book depends on the main character (we'll call him moral compass) taking the treasure the pirate captain offers him. And I couldn't have Moral Compass taking anything that he knew was stolen, so I had to toss my original notes and rewrite the scene so that the treasure they are digging up belongs to the pirate captain. Splitting hairs, I know, but it was a very important hair.

Glad to know that tomorrow I am going to be returning to my morally ambiguous and anti-heroic characters.