(W)restless Writing

Ain’t it beautiful? I found it in Yellow Springs

I might as well tell you, my most faithful friends, this is a picture of what will become a one-of-a-kind print run. When I say print-run…I mean I intend to fill this fine volume with the most fantastical story you might hope to imagine.

It started off as a way to get my kids to sleep. Like any self-respecting father, I find myself enamored with the bedtime ritual of The Bedtime Story. For five to ten minutes every night, I get to snuggle up with one or the other of my two favorite people and literally leave my world with all of it’s grown up responsibilities and concerns, and weave a tale that attempts to either make sense of or confound (hopefully both) my daily experience.

It started with a dragon. I have a spirited little girl who has historically found it very difficult to settle down at the end of the day. It’s hard to put a little girl to bed when she has so many other things going on in her mind that just need to come out through her mouth.

Spoiler Alert: If you don’t want an expert parenting tip for your own 4 year old, stop reading here.

I discovered that I could grab her attention, she would become riveted, hanging on my every word within 30 seconds flat, if I introduced a dragon and made the story as scary and suspenseful as I dared (don’t worry, I was always sure never to cross a line I couldn’t walk back from if it got too intense).

This is a truth as old as time itself; the human imagination is captivated by good storytelling. It’s how our minds make sense of our world while we sleep. It’s how we tease apart good and evil, friends and enemies; stories are how we create meaning for ourselves and the world we live in.

So my little girl and her brother love dragons, unicorns, gnomes and the like. They’re no strangers to Bigfoot. There’s a magical mouse in our story and plenty of adventure.

Full disclosure, when I started telling these bedtime stories, I would often wrap them up and say “The End”. That seemed like an appropriate way to end the story and move on with the evening.

The flaw in my logic was exposed when my kids started protesting every night when I would say “The End”, they would wake up, sit up, rouse themselves and chant in protest “Noooooo!!!” “Please”, “What happens next?!” This kind of response, as you can imagine, dear reader, is the opposite of what you hope will occur at the end of a bedtime story.

So I started to say “To be continued”. This gave them the hope and security that they needed in order to comfortably fall asleep, safe in the knowledge that they would hear more of the story the next evening.

This gave birth to the idea that I could, with some effort (and skills gained through Lindenwood University’s MFA program), stitch together a cohesive narrative featuring the characters that have become household names here.

“Why stop with the aural tradition?” I wondered. Enter a weekend retreat we attended, where I happened upon the beautiful work of art you see above. It’s a goat leather bound journal, filled with blank pages. I decided, almost on a whim, to purchase the journal for the purpose of hand-writing this bedtime novella, complete with colored illustrations (a friend is working on some watercolors), all in the hopes that one day my kids will treasure this volume with a sense of nostalgia. (Yes, I will probably try to make two copies).

So, that’s a not-too-brief introduction to one of my most recent projects. I’m actually working on it on the computer, and once I get it where I want it, I’ll copy it by hand.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Since I’ll have a digital copy of everything (maybe even the watercolors), the only thing preventing me from self-publishing this thing is inertia. Would you like a copy? Some of my unfortunate friends and family members might be getting a copy for Christmas this year (that’s my hope)…but I’d love to sell a few more if you’d like to incorporate something like this into your own bedtime routine! The working title I have is…”To Be Continued…”

The first thing is getting it done. I hope to introduce a few characters and plot points here and there in the coming months without giving away too much of the story.

Let’s see where this thing goes! 🙂 To Be Continued…