Over twenty years ago I wrote The Adventures of Francis T. Bear for my children. Each day I would sit at my IBM typewriter and Francis would record more of his antics so that I would have something to share with my children before they went to sleep at night
Now an eight-year-old in Boston, Massachusetts and a seven-year-old in Sydney, Australia, who met on the Internet through their mothers, are having an adventure with a tooth fairy. On Friday night, once a week I go online and read their latest adventures to a child in Adelaide, Australia, from a microphone connected to my computer in Trenton, New Jersey. The stories are for her Saturday morning listening pleasure.
Times change. Characters change. But the love in the writing and telling doesn’t change. It still protects the innocent, and it will travel half way around the world in a flash to do so.
I’ve promised the child who hears the story to publish a series of books as the girls and the fairy have their adventures together. I told the child who inspired these stories that I would dedicate each book to her and she would see her name within each. She has no idea how involved finding a publisher and competing against thousands of other writers will be. She doesn’t need to know. She’s a child.
The story will write itself, as it has been doing, but the publisher won’t come looking for it. Research, query letters, submissions, rejections, the blood, sweat and tears of the real world, will all have to be faced and surmounted.
A promise to a child is a promise to keep.
