How I Spent the Mesozoic Era

Does it seem to take FOREVER to get a brilliant (they all are!) book published for kids? Even as a published author and an agent, months and yeas pass between burble of idea and book in hand.

The Idea

Somewhere between the Construction Equipment Phase and the Superhero Phase, the Dinosaurs roam. Kids are fascinated by the huge lumbering beasts. One theory is that small children, feeling powerless, imagine themselves as awe inspiring predators with gigantic teeth! Roar!

The original inspiration for this story was in fall of 2014, when my youngest grandson was 3 years old and had many things on his mind to do with dinosaurs but few with getting dressed. James was in the dinosaur phase where he can’t pronounce “broccoli” but can say “Pachycephalosaurus” and correct my mispronunciation. He also owned dinosaur themed shirts, hats, socks, jackets, and underwear. And hundreds of plastic painful-to-step-on in-the-dark dinosaur figures.

So how about a book that empowers the child to feel the capabilities of the dinosaur channeled toward the mundane task of getting ready for the day?

The Writing/Editing

It was a brain burble that became first a badly rhyming text – what rhymes with Diplodocus? (Hopped aboard a bus? Was oozing green pus? Super-flu-i-us?). By 2016, I shared “Dressing a Dinosaur” 12-page board book with my critique group. They found things to improve in the 199-word manuscript – and that is why I appreciate them!

A year of tweaking, renaming to How to Dress a Dinosaur and trimming to 181 words. They reviewed it in again in 2017 and thought Dinosaur was ready to roar.

In February 2019 I sent this manuscript to a critique service, and it received a “GO”!

The Publishing

On to my agent, which required a full proposal with marketing ideas, sales of earlier work, and comp titles – far more than 181 words. Luckily in the meantime no one else thought of this and wrote it!

The Book

By March of 2022 I expect to celebrate 10 chewable pages of How to Dress a Dinosaur! (In a later article I’ll discuss the stages of preparing the world for this jungle shaking this even!)

Soooooo…

If you are counting, that is a total of 8 years for a board book! Take away: know your reader, edit, edit, edit, wait wait wait, but believe that the best ideas out there will find a home! Even if it seems to take longer than the Pleistocene era!

Award winning author Robin Currie led children’s departments of Midwestern public libraries before being called midlife to ordained ministry. She has a special love for children’s literacy and Bible storytelling. She serves in Chicago area parishes and annually volunteers teaching English in developing countries. She and her husband actively grandparent 5 wonderful kids.

Robin has published seven library resource collections of creative ideas for library story times, and more than 20 Bible story books for children.