My Children's Book is Getting Published!

I recently shared this exciting news on social media, but in case you missed it, I thought I’d share on my blog too and go into more detail on how this all came about. While I can’t say a lot about the actual book right now, I thought I’d share what this process has been like for me. And boy is there a lot to say.

I’ll start with the press releases that recently came out…

So now you know the title, what the story is about, who my agent is, and who I’m publishing with.

What isn’t in the press releases is just how much work it took to make this all happen. Writing and illustrating a children’s book had been a lifelong dream of mine since I was a kid. As a shy kid, books were a HUGE part of my childhood. It’s what originally got me interested in illustrating. I was assigned a project to write and illustrate a book in 7th grade, and I put EVERYTHING into it. It should have been obvious to me then that I was meant to do this work. You know how it goes though - life gets in the way and you get off course. Now, more than ever, I feel like this is my true calling.

Despite my passion for this work, I had no idea where to start. And I knew I had a long road ahead of me.

Getting myself to begin working on the book was the hardest part of all. I had the idea in the fall of 2022 while I was on a walk. I use a lot of polka dots and stripes in my art, so that was my original inspiration. The idea came at a time when we had just experienced a tragedy. As some of you know, we lost our son when I was around 6 months pregnant in May of 2022, on Mother’s Day of all days. It all happened in a very traumatic way. For most of that year, I was really depressed and having a hard time coping. It’s hard to understand that kind of loss unless you’ve been through it. My grief took over my life. I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything. I’d lost all interest in my art - the thing I love doing most. I was looking for something to bring me back to life and this felt like a good thing to focus on. I was initially really excited about the idea. And it felt good to be excited about something again.

However, getting myself to sit down and work on this massive project felt impossible. I had no idea if I was even any good at this. I’m lucky that, as an artist, I’m familiar with feelings of resistance. I truly believe that the more resistance we feel around something, the more important it is that we do the work. And I’d never felt this intense level of resistance before, so I kept telling myself the project must be really important. That’s the only thing that kept me showing up.

Working on the project consisted of a lot of stopping and starting. I began with the easiest parts of the book - a tip I would recommend to anyone trying to tackle a big project. Momentum is everything and it’s important to harness as much as you can early on. The book is highly illustrated, so some pages felt impossible at first. I saved those for the end. I told myself if I could just get started, that would be a huge win. I was pretty excited that I had around five spreads completed early the following year. It felt like this dream of mine was finally happening.

Then, we got pregnant with our son Connor in the Spring. I had a lot of anxiety around being pregnant again, so I barely worked on the project at all during the pregnancy. I just couldn’t access that joyful part of myself. It was a roller coaster of emotions because I didn’t know if my body could even carry a baby to full term. I was told by a high risk doctor that Connor could come any day at 24 weeks. Not something you want to to hear. I was scared of doing anything that might trigger early labor. I mainly just slept, read, and streamed shows the entire pregnancy, doing as little work as possible.

Low and behold, we made it to 39 weeks and Connor was only 3 days early. A few months after he was born, we’d found our stride and I was getting a little more sleep. Suddenly, I felt this momentum for the book I’d never experienced before. I wanted to finish the project for our two sons. And there was a part of me that felt like it was now or never. I could easily settle into motherhood, taking on some client work here and there and running my print shop, without ever picking up the book again. I could feel how easy that would be for me, which was terrifying. I had come so far! I had to finish this thing! Thanks to a lot of help from Ryan, I got the project over the finish line that summer when Connor was around 8 months old.

The craziest part is that once the book was done, I was facing another uphill battle - actually getting it published. I knew how competitive the industry was and I was aware that this was probably more difficult than even writing and illustrating the book. Also, I had no idea where to start. Luckily, my good old friend ChatGPT was gaining some popularity at this point, so I used it to learn all about the industry. Boy, was I clueless.

For those of you who don’t know, it’s pretty impossible to get a book published without an agent, unless you want to self-publish. Most publishers won’t even accept submissions directly from authors. For me, self-publishing felt like settling after all the work I had put in. I’d heard some crazy stories about people that had self published and then the book was picked up by a publisher later. However, I knew this was rare, so I wasn’t ready to go this route yet (or maybe ever).

So I started querying agents. I told myself I was never going to give up. Lo and behold, my top choice of agent, Rebecca Sherman at Writers House, was interested. For those of you who don’t know, Writers House is probably the top literary agency in the U.S. for authors of all genres, with some huge titles coming out of there. And Rebecca specializes in children’s books there. Let’s just say I was pretty starstruck by the fact that I even got a response, much less that she was interested. Rebecca swooped in like a fairy godmother and helped me get the book to a good spot to submit to publishers. There was so much I didn’t know about the submissions process. By last September, the book was ready, so she started sending it to publishers. I couldn’t have been more excited!

I was incredibly lucky that Rebecca found the right home at Chronicle, a publisher I couldn’t be more excited to work with. They are women-run with a big focus on design. Literally, they couldn’t be more up my alley! Working with them has been a dream and I’m lucky we’re so aligned on our vision for the book.

Finishing my first book and getting it published felt like an uphill battle. However, it gave me the confidence that I can do this. And there’s no way I’m stopping at this book. I already have several other projects in the works and they’re moving along faster than Polka Stripes ever did. I see now that I was my own biggest hurdle, with my lack of confidence standing in my way.

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I share this story with you because often we read about other’s successes and think they just got lucky or that they happened overnight. In my experience, this is rarely how things work. This project has been something I’ve spent most of my late thirties devoting my time to!! And it still doesn’t hit shelves until 2028! Also, the journey wasn’t just rainbows and sunshine. This project emerged from the ashes at a time when I was at an ultimate low in my life. I think that’s often how these things work too. Sometimes our lowest moments play a role in our biggest triumphs.