A Book Is Born

This image was one of the first illustrations that I drew myself. Initially, I was very enthusiastic about sketching the illustrations. As you can see, I’m not an artist by any means, but I took my time drawing the first few pictures.

This image is towards the end of the book, I realized that drawing was not my thing, so my enthusiasm for illustrating dwindled. I got lazy, and I ended up drawing stick figures for the rest of the book.

After I sent the illustrator a "mock up" version of my book, which included the text, my drawings, and a description of each page, he provided me with a full set of pencil sketches to look over.

It was so exciting to see the story finally come to life with each illustration.

The entire illustration process took over three months to complete.

Once I approved the pencil sketches, the illustrator then provided me with the full-color illustrations.

This is the first color illustration I received from the illustrator.

There’s a big difference between my drawing and the artist’s drawing, don’t you think?

Fall of 2006

The first time I saw my daughter, Lexie, talking to her imaginary friend, she was a little over two years old. She and I were outside playing when I saw her holding something in her hand. She walked over to her swing set, placed this “something” onto the swing, and then began pushing the swing, as if someone were on it. I asked her what she was doing, and she answered, “I’m pushing LaLa.” Not knowing what she meant, I asked her what a ‘LaLa’ was. She then reached toward the swing, as if she were picking something up, held out her hand and said, “This is LaLa.” There was nothing there. . .

February, 2007

One day as I watched Lexie having a conversation with her imaginary friend, LaLa, the idea struck me that this might make a cute children’s book. I began writing a fictional story—and the idea for the book was born. The story started off a lot longer, so it had to be revised a bit to make sure it was a suitable length for a picture book.

March - August, 2007

Because this story was inspired by my daughter, and her imaginary friend, it was close to my heart. I knew I wanted total creative control over the story, and the only way to do that was to publish it myself. I started researching the many different Print-on-Demand publishers that were out there and what kind of publishing packages they had to offer. I finally decided to go with Outskirts Press because they had a good reputation, and their publication packages seemed to fit my needs.

August 13, 2007

I submitted my manuscript to Outskirts Press for review.

August 14, 2007

The manuscript is accepted for publication.

I struggled with what I wanted the imaginary friend to look like. I had asked Lexie what LaLa looked like, to see if she could give me some ideas, but since she didn’t really have the vocabulary at that time to describe him, she’d just say, “I don’t know.”

I started playing around with an illustrating program that I bought, not really knowing how to use the software. But after a little fiddling around, I finally created a little character that I thought might work for the story. Lexie did mention that her friend was blue, which was her favorite color at that time, so I decided to make him blue. I also dressed him in many different colors because I wanted him to be appealing to a child’s eye.

My next task was to find a freelance illustrator who was willing to work with me in creating the illustrations I wanted. And because I wanted the main character to be modeled after my daughter, I didn’t want anyone owning the rights to her image or the image of the imaginary friend that I had created. So I had to make sure that the illustrator I hired would turn the illustration rights over to me when the job was done.

I found three freelance illustrators and provided each one with the text from one of the pages in the book, a picture of Lexie, and my version of the imaginary friend. I wanted to see what each of them would come up with. The samples I received were all nice, but each illustrator had a different style, so I had to go with the illustration style that was closest to what I had envisioned for my story.

September 11, 2007

I finally chose the illustrator I liked best. I provided him with a mock-up of my book, which included the text, the illustrations that I had sketched out myself, and a description of what I wanted for each illustration. I sent the illustrator a down payment to begin working on the illustrations . . . and waited patiently.

In the meantime, I was having a hard time naming the imaginary friend for the book. I didn’t want to use LaLa, because I had no way of knowing what Lexie’s imaginary friend looked like in her mind’s eye. I didn’t want to confuse her by giving my character the same name, and I also didn’t want to use a common name like Max, Joey, John, etc. I wanted something different. I even looked through a book of baby names, but nothing appealed to me.

Then one day, Lexie asked me for a lollipop. We were going through the bag while she decided on a flavor, and it hit me! In the story, the imaginary friend was wearing many different colors—just like the colors of the lollipop flavors in the bag. So after struggling with a name for a while, I decided on the name Lolly, named after Lexie's love for lollipops.

September 17, 2007

It took about a week or so for the illustrator to provide me with black and white pencil sketches of every illustration in the book. It was so exciting to see the book come to life with each illustration. It took about a month and a half, before I approved them all for the next stage—full-color.

November 1, 2007

The illustrator began sending me a few color illustrations at a time. It was even more exciting to see each illustration come to life in color. It took another month before the full-color illustrations were done and approved.

December 4, 2007

The color illustrations were completed and approved, so I went ahead and submitted them to the publisher. I also sent a mock-up version of the book to the publisher, so they could see the layout I wanted. It took them about a month or so to provide me with a digital proof of the book to view online.

January 24, 2008

I was so excited to receive the first digital book proof. As I was going through it, I couldn't believe that this was actually happening. I wrote a story, it was illustrated, and now it was actually in the process of being published. It took another few months of editing the layout and making final changes before the book was ready for printing.

May 2, 2008

The whole process—writing, illustrating, editing, and publishing the book—took about a year and a half to complete. It's hard to describe the feeling of actually holding the finished book in my hand for the first time and also seeing it listed on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and various other online booksellers.

The whole experience was time-consuming, expensive, and frustrating at times, but it was also exciting, fulfilling, and rewarding, and I'm looking forward to going through it all over again in the near future.

I was a little nervous of what people would think of the book. Of course my family and friends all said they liked it . . . but it wasn’t until I won my first Literary Award that I felt that I did okay.

January 9, 2010

In 2009, I started the process of re-publishing the book under my own publication company, Little Sunshine Books. The book was officially re-published in January 9, 2010.