I'll Tell You a Story

When I was a little girl living on Candy Lane, my mother used to take me to the library once a week to pick out a stack of books. I loved this ritual. Really, I can't express the brilliance of going to a place where books are stacked to the ceiling once a week, pick out ten titles, read them over and over for seven days then bring them back and pick out ten new titles. Who ever came up with this, must have had a place in his heart for novelty or known small children who bore easily. Anyway... One of my favorite kind of books to borrow were picture books. The kinds with no text. Why? Because I liked to make up my own story. In fact, I was pretty sure I was very good at this storytelling and used to make everyone in the house -- mother, grandfather, uncle, baby sister, babysitter -- listen to me while pointing out the pictures. And can I just tell you, sometimes one page would take three minutes. (I was very long-winded as a child. I bet you're shocked!) Flash forward thirty years....

After a business trip to New York where I met up with a friend and her six-year old daughter, I was inspired to write a children's picture book about the experience. I came home, wrote up the text, and sent it off to my former roommate and asked her to illustrate. The pages came last week with my birthday card. Over the weekend, I laid out the pictures to rewrite and shape the text so that visuals and story flowed seamlessly. About mid-way through the project, I got light-headed and had a bit of a flashback to when I was a young girl racing outside to show my father a picture book I got from the library and to tell him the story that I imagined it told. Here was that same exact experience, but this time in real life. It was no longer a fantasy, I was actually writing the story the pictures told.

Whether the book gets picked up by an agent or whether it gets published is almost not the point (almost), but it occurred to me that I've been a very fortunate individual. I have lived out most of my childhood dreams and fantasies. I have created them and made them into adult experiences. And that does count for something.