Countdown! – The book is still coming!

It has been an interesting and educational journey, going from inception to reality of my first children’s novel.  The editorial and publication process since signing the contract to publish The Wonders of the Peculiar Parasol has been much more entailed than I ever realized.

While that process is chugging along (and it is moving close to completion each day), I thought I would share how we got here in the first place.

One of the most common questions I get asked is: “Where did you get the idea for the book?”

After I retired, I had been toying with creating a children’s picture book, aimed at the 3-6 year old market, and had actually worked up a draft.  On a trip to Europe in the spring of 2018, my wife and I met up with my niece Gina and her husband and son for a few days in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Gina was living in Kosovo at the time, just a few hours away.  By the way, Ljubljana is pronounced “lyoo-blyah-nuh”.

Gina naturally asked what I’ve been doing since I was retired and I told her about my book idea.  Her husband then encouraged her to tell me about her idea for a book.  Which she did and this is what she had said:

“I was attending a friend’s wedding in September 2015 in Lucca, Italy, at a beautiful villa.  The three nieces of my friend carried parasols into the ceremony rather than flowers.  After the wedding, the three young girls and their brother and I invented a game that if one of the children twirled the parasol, it would transport them to a different location and no one at the wedding would know where they had gone.  One girl said that when she twirled the parasol, she went to England to have tea with the queen.  Another went to Egypt and rode camels in the desert.  The young boy went swimming under the sea with a purple octopus.” 

After hearing this cute idea of a magical parasol, we started kicking around other ideas of how to build on the story.  Over the course of the dinner, we came up with the theme of a group of cousins who discover an enchanted parasol and ultimately learn that they have magical powers.

I offered to write a short story that we could share with our families and Gina agreed to let me run with her concept.  Ultimately, we formed a partnership to develop the stories into books and set out on our adventure to get it published.

I feel extremely lucky to have gotten to this point and am very happy that “Wonders” has been selected by Cresting Wave Publishing to be published. I hope all of you and or your kids enjoy the story and will become fans of Mandy Mandez and her extended family.