Circumstances still being what they are, I’m still not working on what I’d thought I’d be working on this month. But you know what? I really like what I’ve been doing instead.

And what I’ve been doing instead, besides more pleasure reading than I usually get around to, is working on picture book manuscripts. Five of them, in fact, in varying degrees of completeness and quality.

These aren’t new ideas I’ve ginned up in the past few weeks, but things I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while and just hadn’t taken the opportunity to do anything with. If my own track record is any indication, at least four of them won’t amount to much, but these five seem to be the most promising of all the story ideas I’ve had filed away.

I hope to wrap up work on these — for now — next weekend, share them with my agent, and move on to another previously scheduled project while waiting to see what, if anything, happens next with these picture books.

And while I have no idea what I’ll be working on next January, or next March, I plan to spend next February doing the same thing that I’ve been doing this February: working for pure pleasure on new picture book ideas that accumulate in the meantime. That, at least, I can control.