The String follows an ordinary young boy who discovers an ordinary ball of string and uses it to go on adventures with his imagination. What was the inspiration for your story?

That’s a great question. I was reading my picture book, It’s Music Time, to a 1st-grade class at one of our local elementary schools where I live in Brown County, Indiana. I say reading, but it’s really a near-wordless picture book with 15 words at the beginning and 15 at the end. Anyway, as I flipped through the pages, one little boy in the class had a small hand-sized rubber ball he was playing with. The teacher quickly took it away from him, but I could tell by the look on his face that he was in some faraway magical land playing with his rubber ball and didn’t like it at all that he was brought back to reality by the teacher.

The very next weekend, I was thinking about that little boy’s expression, and I knew all he wanted to do was play in his imaginary world with his rubber ball. So I looked through the drawers in my kitchen cupboard, and the first thing I saw was an orange ball of nylon string. And it hit me all at once. At that very moment, I knew exactly what the little boy in my story would do with that string.

​The art in this book is fantastic. What was the process like to create the art while writing the story at the same time?

Sometimes I will do a drawing and become inspired to write a story because of that drawing. My young adult novel, The Good Witch of the South, was like that. When I first gazed upon the fairy that I used for the front cover of my novel, I knew she was the daughter of the Good Witch of the South and knew precisely what she would become in that story.

My String book was different. When I first saw the ball of string, I sat down and wrote the story while catching glimpses of illustrations in my head as I was writing.

Once I finished the manuscript, I started the illustrations. Once the drawings were completed, I did a small dummy of the book. From there, I changed some of the text and added a couple of new drawings. For example, in the original manuscript, the little boy didn’t use the string, or his sister, to pull a loose tooth. He didn’t have a loose tooth. But when I made my dummy, I needed to add more illustrations and decided to add a loose tooth to the text. And that made the illustration of the little boy brushing his teeth funnier. All in all, it took over a year to write, draw and put the book together.

What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?

One of the best ways to discover what we will become when we are children is by using our imagination. Children love to pretend to be this or that. Mostly, I want children to know they can be extraordinary in every way. All they have to do is try. When children see the little boy in my book doing all the amazing things he can think of doing with his ball of string, it is my hope it will inspire children to take flight with their imagination.

Who knows what extraordinary things they might achieve?

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

Oh yes, my next book . . . I am incredibly excited about my next book, which will come out in 2024. The title is, That Will Never Do. It’s taken me over a year to do the illustrations for this book, just like The String.

I have to say, though, That Will Never Do might actually be one of my favorites.

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Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2023/02/05/in-some-faraway-magical-land/