Writing and Creating my First Children’s Chapter Book – The Inspiration and Process

Never one to miss an opportunity, Buddy dashed for an unattended, partly open backpack.

Writing and Creating My First Children’s Chapter Book – The Inspiration and Process

I started writing the story of the Dog with the Crooked Tail waaaay back in 2016. I moved to a house with a big fireplace (actually, my first childhood home, a work of art built by my dad – which is a story in itself). My mom, the pups’ grandmama, said something to the effect of, “Well, if you’re going to be sitting by that nice fire all winter, you’d better write a story about Buddy! He would make a good book character.”

Back in 2019, my older niece was in grade 1 and had a boy named Fred in her class – so I decided to make them characters in the story. At this point, I had only created an introduction and figured out how Buddy would sneak into the school via a backpack full of lunch – but I had not thought much further to the main plot events and additional characters. The third character I had created by this time was Ms. Kibblesworth – the grade 1 class’ teacher.

As with many projects I have (I write songs also, and I teach), I left this dog book project on the back burner for awhile and somewhat forgot about it. 

A few years later, in 2019, I happened to bring up the book idea to a good friend, Paul, who said, “You should finish this book draft by the end of this summer!” The encouragement of an inspiring friend definitely helped bring this book to life – and in fact, I am fairly sure I would not have done it without his encouragement. 

By the end of summer 2019, I had the idea of starting an Instagram account to document Buddy’s life and the process of writing the book. I think my Mom was unintentionally responsible for this Instagram idea, only by mentioning how much she enjoyed my sister’s Instagram posts. So, I made an account and posted a pic of Buddy sitting on my lap while I was working on the first book draft that summer. 

In that first Instagram post, since the book draft was nearly finished, I realized the book would need an illustrator soon! So, as part of that first post, I asked if anyone knew any illustrators who would be interested – and right away, I got a response from a good family friend, Tim – who said that his partner Meghan would love to do the illustrations! Meghan created one sample (the illustration of Buddy inside the backpack eating snacks) – and I knew right away that she was the only person for this job, without even looking at any other illustrators’ work!

With both myself and Meghan working full-time jobs outside of writing/illustration, it took us around a year from that first sample to communicate back and forth to get all of the images right for the text. Meghan did such a fantastic job – and I really think her illustrations make the book exactly what I dreamt of when I wrote it! My strategy here, since I had never written a book before, was to give Meghan a draft of the story with detailed descriptions of what should be happening in each image.

As we continued our work together, Meghan created the beautiful logos for the Buddy and Ladybug characters that you see on our website. You can find her on Instagram @talonserena.

In following posts, I’ll discuss my self-publishing process, colour scheme choice, creating Instagram content, and phodography – AKA walks and hikes with dogs, involving lots of photography!