For the longest time, I knew that I wanted to write children’s books. When I graduated from undergrad when people asked me what I wanted to do my answer was, ‘I want to work in a small-town library and write children’s books.’ Even though I knew that, I didn’t have the courage to embrace that dream for myself, and every time I would bring it up I would kind of dismiss it and laugh it, laugh it off right away with those questions of like, who am I to write a children’s book? And all of that.
But one day I was driving around with my wife and she said, ‘You know, you act as if you failed at publishing a children’s book, but you’ve never actually finished an idea and sent it out in the world to even give yourself the opportunity to fail.’
So that was kind of the kick in the pants I needed because I was notorious for having stacks and stacks of like notebooks in my home with like half-baked ideas. That gave me the motivation I needed to finally pick an idea that felt closest to the finish line and just take it as far as I could.
And at that time the idea for Let Me Finish was the one that felt the most complete. So, I was going to pick this one out of the pile and just see how far I could take it.
It’s a book about a child who’s trying to find a quiet place to finish a book and these animals comes, and they keep spoiling the story. I think there was like maybe Harry Potter, the newest one was out and I was just like there’s something very beautiful about that communal experience of a book or a story where the danger is that people love it too much, and that they can’t hold, hold in their love of that story and they end up spoiling it for other people.
It felt like a really fun entry point into the world of books, one that’s both fun to read with kids and also one that shows, in a fun way, reading and stories as a thing of value, right? That you are cherishing and that you want to carve out time and space for. So, fortunately when I was sent it out for consideration, I had had enough of a name within the industry from reviewing and writing about children’s books that people at least had a sense of who I was and saw some of my other writing, and that definitely, that definitely helped me get through the door.