I love to read to Ella. She has so many great books. The book above is one that I bought for her and it is full of animal puns. I know that I bought it because I love otters, and hope she loves them, too.
One thing I have often thought about is writing a children’s book. As I read book after book and rhyme after rhyme, I often wonder if I missed my calling. I was always the one that the boys came to when they needed a poem for school. Every year for his birthday, I used to write a long poem for my former brother-in-law. Just recently, when DMX died, I let my radio pal, Johnny know with the following:
“Listen up, Homey! Don’t look back. Rapper DMX is dead of a heart attack. His words were nasty, and his clothes were nifty. He is now no more – he was only fifty. Word!”
Stupid? Yes. It took me all of 3 minutes to jot that down. I have used rhyming and poetry often and with a little thought, I’m sure I could come up with an idea for a children’s book. I can rhyme just like those authors. I am sure I could come up with something. I mean, some of the books don’t even need to rhyme. The books I really don’t like reading to Ella are the ones that are just one word on a page or picture books (though I understand how those can be good to teach kids things).
Just for the hell of it I looked up “kids books about otters” in Google. There were about 50 of them that came up at once.
Would kids be interested in the Adventures of Otto the Otter? Maybe. Would they sing along with the songs of Ollie the Otter? I don’t know. Could they learn colors and shapes with Oscar the Otter? Perhaps.
I don’t know the first thing about writing a book, let alone having someone illustrate it! That seems to be the way it works – someone writes it and someone else draws all the pictures. Even if I did that, I wouldn’t have a clue about how to publish it and do it in such a way that it actually made a little money! Just another pipe dream…..
Maybe one day……
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 