There isn’t really one defining moment that made me want to make a children’s book, but if you asked me what was the biggest thing that started me on that path (other than having children), it would be this.
In the summer of 2020 I “attended” my first virtual gaming convention, and one of the events was a scavenger hunt run by Nona Knows Games. My twins were under a year old at the time, so I didn’t have time to participate in many of the gaming events. But I was able to do random scavenger hunt tasks throughout the day, so that was a lot of fun for me.
One of the tasks in the scavenger hunt was
Create a board game ABC using game titles
Since I had been reading The ABCs of RPGs to my babies a bunch, the first thing I thought of when I thought of a board game ABC was a rhyming children’s book. So that’s what I did.
A is for Arkwright, let’s build a factory
B is for BattleCON, it’s just you vs me!
C is for Catacombs, it’s time to flick some disks
D is for Deep Sea Adventure, will you take the risks?
…
I took a few liberties with game titles since I only used games in my collection, but after writing it out, I decided to take a picture of each one and format it into pages! Here was my entry for the scavenger hunt on instagram.
A few weeks after that, I even printed it out, laminated it, and made it into a physical “book” for my kids to read!
I knew this book written as is wouldn’t be appealing to most people since it was very specific to my collection, but a lot of people enjoyed it anyway, and that sparked the idea in the back of my mind to someday write a more general board game children’s book.