Evie's Book

It was probably April when my daughter, Meagan, asked if I would be willing to help Evie edit and publish her book. Until that moment, I wasn't aware that 11-year-old Evelyn was writing a book, but I agreed to help her, just the same.


All of Meagan and Andy's kids are homeschooled, and the four oldest kids are pretty good writers, hand-writing letters to various friends and relatives at least once a week in recent years. The best way to learn to write is just to do it often.

So, Evie brought her Chromebook to my house at least once a week for the next few weeks. I sat next to her as we read her story together, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. I soon learned that Evie really knows how to tell a story! Her story was a riveting adventure tale that left me wondering what would happen next.

Evie had decided, at the outset, to name and model some of her characters after her siblings and other friends and relatives. That makes the book extra special for those of us who know them. But, rest assured that "cruel Aunt Marge" is not modeled after her own great-great-Aunt Marj, who she has only met a couple of times, and doesn't really remember!

Evie had divided her book into chapters and paragraphs, including much conversation, but she didn't realize that she needed to start a new paragraph every time a different character spoke. That made the editing process rather tedious, and it took at lot of time. I also showed her how to use her Chromebook to search for synonyms of words that she was using frequently, words like "said," for example. And, every once in a while, I asked her to add some words of explanation to some of her descriptions, reminding her that she needed to help her readers understand the things she assumed they already knew about her characters or settings. Evie's English-teacher-dad did a final proof reading and made a couple of suggestions to improve her character development.

I was familiar with the publishing process, so I formatted the book for Evie, and guided her as she considered what to write for her Acknowledgement page and her Author page, as well as her Dedication, chapter headings, and Table of Contents. Most of the time, I just explained what she needed to do, and she was able to get it done at home without any further assistance.

Evie asked her brother, Tobin, to draw some illustrations for her book. At 13, he is an accomplished artist but, as Evie indicated in her Acknowledgements, Tobin would have preferred to be drawing Mandalorians. When he finally realized that her book would really be published, he added some detail to some of the pictures he had drawn so quickly in an initial effort to just get it done. Meagan inserted Tobin's illustrations into Evie's manuscript, and it was ready to go.

Evelyn knew that she wanted her book's cover to be dark green, with gold lettering and accents. I encouraged her to add one of Tobin's illustrations to the front cover, and write a brief synopsis for the back cover. Uncle Levi was glad to put the initial design together, and I finished it up on Microsoft Publisher.

When Evie's book was nearly ready to be published, we hit a snag. Publishing requires a dependable Internet source, but our home Internet quit working. Bill's company provides our Internet, bouncing a signal from his office to a small dish on the roof of our house. However, Bill was swamped with work, and when he had time to work on our Internet problem, the weather refused to cooperate; it's difficult to work on the roof or at the top of a tower when the wind is blowing a gale or the lightning is streaking across the sky. Finally, two months into the summer, Bill was able to track down the Internet problem, in the last place he looked, of course. When our service was restored, better than ever, it didn't take long to publish the book, using Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program, which is free and relatively simple for anyone to use.



And after waiting for so long, Evie was so-o-o-o excited.

Her first book is worth reading, and the second book in the series is already in the works. The books are targeted toward kids between the ages of seven and 11, but people of all ages will enjoy reading them. You can buy Book 1 now on Amazon, and I expect Book 2 will be ready before we know it.






May you live to enjoy your grandchildren. -Psalm 128:6

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