It turns out I’m not sworn to secrecy, and can reveal the movie for which I’ll be writing 2 kids’ activity books: The Spiderwick Chronicles. My deadline for Book 1 is March 1, and Book 2 is March 15. Yep, that’s a rush job, especially considering I haven’t received the script yet! If I say that out loud, it’s sure to come tomorrow, right?

I’ve done some preliminary research on the web site and with the books, and I’m getting other work finished and out of the way so that I can focus on this project when the script comes. It’s going to be great fun to live in the faerie world for a time!

Also as preparation, I’ve added a couple of new puzzle-styles to my arsenal. One of the hard parts–maybe the hardest–of crafting a puzzle is writing the instructions. They have to be clear, but also succinct. It can take me a long time to craft instructions, but once I have them, I use them over and over, every time I use that puzzle style, changing just the puzzle-specific details. I will actually spend 10 minutes or more searching through puzzle files to locate a specific puzzle so that I don’t have to re-create the instructions from scratch! Searching is way-yonder easier than crafting.

Puzzle Pattern Progress: Three internal elements completed, fourth one is half-done. Had to rip a third color selection. While the lighter-color skein looks plenty different from the darker-color skein, the stitches themselves looked too similar and the effect of 2 colors was lost. We had to go even lighter just to see a difference.