Last weekend my daughters and I were outside staining the chairs on our front porch together.
Well, one daughter was staining the chair with me. The other daughter was just sitting on the porch swing watching us.
But I won’t name names.
“Hey, I need your help,” I said to them. “I’m doing the final edits of my book before I send it to the editor, and in one scene I need the main character to leave her kitchen for a minute. But it can’t be because her phone or the doorbell rang. Â Any ideas?”
“Maybe she needs an ingredient that’s in another part of the house,” one of them suggested.
“Maybe she wants to light candles at the dinner table and needs to go into another room to get them,” the other suggested.
“Hmm … okay. Keep throwing ideas at me,” I said as I continued staining the chair (which, as it turns out, is not a bad activity for trying to sort through such dilemmas.)
One of their suggestions led me to figuring out exactly how to handle that scene. I won’t say any more about that right now because, you know, no spoilers. 😉
But it struck me how much the kids’ have helped me with the book over the years (yes, years).
For example, my son named two of the main characters. One of them he named after a friend of his at the time, and another he named after his favorite preschool teacher. (I told you it’s been years.)
My younger daughter came up with the concept for the cover design, which I’ll discuss more when I post the official Cover Reveal.
And my favorite example was one afternoon several months when I was driving both girls and one of their friends to a rehearsal.
I told them I needed a make-believe name of a kids’ TV show, and the three of them starting calling out the names of different animals, then a first name to go with it (ie “Freddy Frog”), and then finally their friend came up with the name of the show, which is …
Mille Mallard’s Pond of Fun
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