cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I Wrote a Children's Book [Note that this is actually yesterday's entry. The power went out yesterday morning before I could actually post it and we ended up going home early after hours of waiting for the office to have power again.] We got a Christmas tree yesterday and decorated it. Well, Trish actually went out and got it. I managed to go the entire weekend only leaving the house once to run to the grocery store on Saturday night. Which was awesome. All I did on Saturday was play with the baby and play computer games. Plus I did some dishes and shit like that. But mostly I just played. Sunday was much the same except that I played with Ida more. Ida demands a constant stream of new stories. In the car or before bed. Books will usually not do. She wants me to invent a new, complete story right off the cuff immediately. Usually she wants one about Little Bo Peep. I don't know where she came up with this but she's latched onto the Little Bo Peep character. Maybe Little Bo Peep leaves one of her dolls to watch the sheep while she goes off to watch TV and she comes back to find that the wolf has eaten a sheep. Hijinks ensue. Last night I couldn't do the Little Bo Peep thing so I told one about how Captain Hook lost his hand the first time that he met Peter Pan. Peter and the Lost Boys were once much more innocent in this story. All they did was play all day long until one day a pirate ship anchored in a little cove and the mermaids swam off to tell Peter about it. It was only when Peter insisted on going to investigate that Tinkerbell first gave him some fairy dust so he could fly out of danger if he needed to. The way I see it, actually cutting off a man's hand and feeding it to a crocodile has to be a transformative event in a child's life. Peter actually wasn't half so bossy until after this happened. It was also the act that placed all of Neverland into serious danger for years afterwards, because Hook then became obsessed with getting his revenge on Peter and kept coming back to this random island in the middle of nowhere for that reason. Also, in this story Ida found out that at least half of Hook's crew is made up of former Lost Boys, who either defected willingly in rebellion against Peter's increasingly domineering personality or agreed to join the crew when they were captured. There used to be a lot more Lost Boys then there are at the beginning of the book/play/whatever when Peter first meets Wendy. They join the pirate crew for whatever reason and immediately begin to grow up. I had the most ridiculous idea for a children's book this morning. 'Lil Lovecraft. A selection of H. P. Lovecraft's stranger horror tales retold for small children, with accompanying illustrations. I could totally write that. Nobody would buy it, but I could certainly write it. A children's book on deer hunting. Now that would fly off the shelves. A picture book about a little girl going on her first deer hunt. Publishers probably wouldn't touch it, though. Because they are mostly going to be urban, NYC non-hunting types who would flip out at the very idea. Yet there are millions of families in America that hunt and there's not much out there for explaining the whole thing to their small children. It would be all about getting, say, Cabelas to carry it in their catalog. You'd sell easily tens of thousands of copies of the book through Cabelas alone. I know that Trish's parents would buy a copy of that for every kid in the extended family. Ok then. In the last hour or so while I had this window open, I wrote the book. That was easy. It's called 'Ida's First Deer.' It's 22 pages with a couple of sentences on each page and obviously needs illustrations to go with it. That's the real work. My father-in-law is a professional wildlife illustrator and does illustrations for textbooks and that sort of thing. Anatomy and such. I bet he could do a good job. Then we'd need to find someone who would actually publish it. I seriously think that the way to go with this thing would be to get Cabela's to carry it in their catalog. I bet we could get them to do it. Oh man, we'd totally fucking clean up with this thing. If it could be in the catalog next fall then we'd make rather a lot of money. This catalog goes out to millions of hunters. 1:33 p.m. - 2007-12-11 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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