Although I like the process of writing, its finding the time in the day to be able to create content with a full time job and family to juggle that is the challenge. That’s why you are seeing this blog post about a month after the last one. My goal of writing at least one post a week well and truly went out the window.
Over the past six months or so I have been slowly chipping away at a children’s book inspired by my daughter and one of her soft toys that she named Cookie. Cookie the Unicorn became a part of the nightly bedtime routine for a while and I used that to draw inspiration to create a group of characters and flesh out a children’s bedtime story.
At the time my daughter was going through a stage of being scared when going to bed and especially of the dark. This is nothing new for kids and a lot of them go through it. My wife and I even devised some ‘potions’ to help her settle in for the night. We had a bottle of magic ‘no bad dreams’ oils that my wife had made by actually mixing oils that are supposed to aid sleep and calmness as well as a ‘monster spray’ that we sprayed around the room to ward off monsters. It was just water in a mist spray bottle. They seemed to work and help her settle in for the night although like most parents we still get her coming out of her room because she has an itchy foot, or she heard a noise or she needs some water.
Rhyme like you mean it
Anyone who thinks writing a rhyming children’s book is an easy thing to do actually comes to the conclusion that it’s extremely hard within the first week. I had instances of writer’s block where I had to leave it sitting for a week or two before jumping back into this new world I was creating.
So six plus months of tinkering with this script and it’s now at a stage to hand across to an editor to be brutally honest with me on how good or bad it really is. I also have enlisted the services of my wife who is a school teacher to test it out with some of her students. I guess that will be the real test!
We also have an illustrator onboard who has already brought the characters to life with his creativity but there is still a lot of work ahead to put these into the story and created these 30 odd pages of colorful art.
Creating artwork and the cost of printing is no small expense so my plan is to try to get it funded through a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter. I have seen a number of Children’s books funded on KickStarter. The more I research, the more I find that the process is very involved and the success rate is only around 30%.
I have used some of our initial artwork to create some books that we will launch on Amazon to help introduce kids to these characters.
New Books on there way!
We have a couple of new books coming out in July featuring Cookie and her Mystical Creature friend’s including a gratitude journal and coloring book so keep an eye out on our blog or emails for when this is released.
If you are interested in finding out more about our Children’s book or any of our other Journals and logbooks for kids then please click HERE to get a free download for your kids and to sign up to our mailing list.
