Finally, a children’s book written by a child. In this adventure fantasy about a multiracial family (like ours!), a teenage girl and her twin brothers are sucked through a whirlpool to a strange island full of mysterious inhabitants and must figure out how to get back home–but not before helping their new friends battle the dreaded Pineapple Pirates.
When I.B. Stanley was 8, he told me he wanted to write a “real book” like my published plays. I told him fine, let’s do it. He wasn’t able to type yet, so our process was to start with my asking him to come up with a protagonist and a basic storyline. I suggested limiting it to 10 short chapters, and explained that each chapter should end in some kind of cliffhanger to encourage the reader to keep turning pages to find out what happens next.
After a few days, he told me who the characters were and what should happen in the first chapter, as specifically as possible, at my urging–what are their names, how old are they, where do they live? We had done a lot of camping, backpacking, and canoeing, so I wasn’t surprised that those elements came into play in his imagination.
I’d then type up a draft, print it out and read it to him. He would approve or reject each element and tell me specific changes to make and I’d make them. When he was satisfied with a chapter, we moved on to the next one. And thus we proceeded over the course of about a month.
He then wanted me to draw a picture for each chapter. I am not a visual artist in any way. I’d draw a pencil sketch for a chapter and get his approval or disapproval, working through the drawings the same way we’d worked on the chapters.
The story is his, the title is his, he approved all of the content. I just acted as his mechanism for making it concrete. We self-published it privately on amazon, ordered a bunch of author copies and gave them out to friends, family and teachers. Seven years have passed since then and we’ve now taken it live.
We hope you enjoy The Magical Island of Weirdos, available on amazon.
