So I wrote a children’s book. Actually, co-wrote. My step-mother-in-law and I put our heads together over a wine-filled Napa weekend last year and came up with a plan to write a book based on our dogs. Sara, aka “Evil”, the affectionate and tongue-in-cheek name for my step-mother-in-law, knows a guy who knows a gal who happens to be an unbelievable illustrator Erin Wainscott.

So we got to mapping out this book on our dogs. We love our dogs, but why would anyone else? I guess that’s a question anyone who writes a book around themselves or their lives must ask. Who cares? This didn’t matter to us getting started – it was the process, not the end result, we were excited about. If we printed two copies for our own bookshelves and that was it, so be it. We decided to bring back the animals-have-an-owner aka Christopher Robbins style, get these dogs up to no good, have their confident and carefree female Irish red head 10-year old owner Sam (Sara And Megan) teach the dogs (and the kids out there!) good values and life lessons

Seven months later and after a lot of story-boarding, research, many edits, ample phone calls, several in-person meetings (she lives in San Francisco and I in Vancouver), a lot of wine, an enormous amount of back-and-forth on the illustrations, more edits, advisory phone calls, publisher calls, and then some, we have a book.

And it’s beautiful!

We used a service called Blurb – it’s an easy way to print and self publish – and we’ve started cracking on more books in the series. This stuff becomes addictive. The market is incredibly saturated with a TON of competition. It’s not the goal to become a rich kid’s writer – does that even exist outside of JK and Dr. Suess? But this project was a blast. Maybe a website and being able to purchase the book (and dare I say the series) could be coming down the pipeline some day in our future. Then we’ll start knocking on some publishers doors, but for now, Blurb was just perfect.

And this is a look at the real Capo and Jasper.