I have a story.

I have a story that was inspired my my experiences working in an auto parts factory over the past year or so. It started as scribbles to my friends on a notepad each night at midnight after I came home from my shift, but it took on a life of its own. Something more needed to be done.

In response to a dare and a deadline, I boiled my scribbles down to a draft, and sent it off to the awesome Jackie Brown of Jackie Brown Books, who was recommended to me by the equally awesome Rosanna Ieraci-Whyte.

And a little while later I received a report. And what a report!

Jackie had looked over my draft, written a cool blurb to start the report off, and gone into great detail about what market the book might be good for. She provided examples of comparative books, and examples of styles of illustration and layout that might work. (My illustrations will be pencil, watercolour and india ink — the way I’ve always drawn.) She provided tips on what might be needed next for my characters and plot. She suggested what next steps might be. The report really impressed me and my friends.

Therefore, I hired Jackie to help me plan, write, edit, and illustrate my story, get it ready for publication, and market it!

I’ve been calling it a “children’s book”, but we are aiming more at a young-adult market.

I have suspended all other projects to do this: the web development, the transit blog, the time machine simulator (it’s art! Honest!), the personal websites, the game development, the 3D animation lessons… This is IT. This is the Big One. All else is on hold.

And I originally had something of a deadline. I was hoping to have a presentable book by the beginning of August 2020, for that would have been the start of the world congress of Esperanto speakers in Montreal… and I wanted to have a translated version ready to show there… but of course other things happened, and now the conference is re-scheduled for 2022. This is actually good for the book, because it’s giving me much more time to rewrite it.

Oh yes, it’s going to be translated. It will be translated into as many languages as I can manage, if I have anything to say about it. Starting with Esperanto (which I speak), then French (our other official language, which I speak badly). Then Indigenous languages (Ojibwe, Mohawk, Inuktitut, others), and other languages I hear around me in daily life (Tagalog, Hindi, Italian, Chinese…)

And Jackie will, I hope, be able to guide me through the fuzzy worlds of marketing and publicity… the people stuff, the difficult stuff.

And who knows what may happen?