Natalie, Denise and Odor with Natalie’s Book

Since “Not Like the Others: Harley’s Story” was my first book I was not prepared for the overwhelming feelings of honor when the book is loved, even treasured by a reader.

The feedback from my young readers reminds me why I write, to share my love for our furry family members and reading with another generation.

There was an additional bonus I hadn’t expected, inspiring a young reader to write. A few weeks ago my friend Jammie’s 9½ year old daughter Natalie sent me a text (through Jammie’s phone) that read, “This is Natalie and I want you to help me make a book about Odor”. Odor is their family’s pug. I can’t describe the feeling except to say it was amazing and that doesn’t really do it justice!

I’m not a teacher, so I started researching how to help and ran into a great web site https://www.readwritethink.org . It taught me how to guide the process. Two weekends ago Natalie and I sat down and worked on her book. Natalie had a few great ideas for a title (in fact I think she plans to write again and use a few of the others as well). Since we couldn’t decide we decided to work on mapping characters and conflict to help us chose the title. This led to her choice of a title, “Tales of the Curly Tail”.  Then she chose a few of her favorite books so we could dissect her stories beginnings, middle, end, characters and conflicts and she took this knowledge and started writing. We divided up the writing sessions, which helped with focus and the creative process.   She also started taking and sorting through pictures. This helped develop her story line. After about 2 days of writing, picture taking and organizing we went to https://www.shutterfly.com and picked a theme. As we wrote her story into the online picture book we realized we needed and wanted to change some of our photos.   This led to an afternoon of photo taking and Facebook downloads. Thank goodness 2 of her 3 characters, Odor and Shasta, were present and her 3^rd character Bella had a lot of Facebook photo ops.  Her book turned out great!

What a fun experience, I hope Natalie had ½ the fun I did! Additionally, she asked to have a book signing like we did for “Harley’s Story” so her mom and I are working on arranging it. Maybe someday she’ll be holding it up in a photo taken of her as a famous author with the first book she ever wrote.

Bella, Brandon, Denise and Harley’s Story

That brings me to my next small point. I’m still getting used to the title “author”. So Bella, one of Harley’s stories biggest fans, and absolutely adorable in her love for the book (I’m very honored Bella) calls me famous – at first I squirm. She says her teacher is related to a famous person as well, and my 1^st response is, “I bet he is way more “famous” than I, what does he do?” She tells me he is a “Park Ranger” (who I admire too), which puts it all in perspective and reduces my discomfort with the word! It takes me back to my childhood feelings about my favorite authors. I loved them for their book and what it meant to me not caring how many books they had sold – isn’t that exactly why we write?   Natalie, Bella, and all of my readers, both young and not so young, thank you for embracing my book “Harley’s Story”!