Originally posted by mrsMxyzptlk:
My daughter is 7. She was jealous that I was teaching her older brother some rudimentary html and css, so I showed her how to do it, too. I set up the basic html for the page and showed her how she could type in the file and show it in the browser. After experimenting for a bit, and asking for help with styling it to have purple script font on a red background, she proceeded to type a bunch of text into the paragraph tags. When I read it, I was surprised to find that she had started a My Little Pony fanfic.
At this point, she's more interested in continuing her story than in learning what the html tags mean.
Awwww. Like Mommy like daughter.
When I started writing again, after taking too long of a hiatus when my children were born, my children saw me and also got the writing bug.
Mostly they have been picture books with rudimentary stories or captions. The closest to fanfic my kids have done is the above story my son told to me about Superman vs. The Egg (more oral story than anything else).
My daughter did one about our cat, who died of kidney failure shortly thereafter.
After that, she returned to just coloring and has given up the writing bug.
In the past year, my son has gotten really interested in writing books. He illustrates and has me caption about one story every week or two. I have at least three of them sitting on my desk to save (I've been scanning them into the computer and sending them to the family.). Mostly they are monster stories told from the monster's POV. The humans ALWAYS (with one exception) get eaten. Most recently, the stories have started including a moral. ("Don't leave a mess after you eat" for example.) The one he brought me last night was about a monster created by a mad scientist, who then gets eaten by the monster he made. Sadly, the monster also ended up dying and becoming a ghost. Since I haven't yet captioned this one, I'm not sure exactly what caused the monster to die, but if I had to guess I'd say indigestion.
He even draws a bar code on the last page of the book.
Mrs. M, I'm envious of your computer skills you're able to teach your children. I don't think I even have those basic skills. This will put them way ahead of their peers in that respect.
