It’s happening!!!

Well, it’s official. I have received the final revisions on all of the illustrations for the book! I really ran him through the ringer, but he handled it with grace and professionalism. He has now transitioned into the next project I hired him for: creating coloring pages!

This week I should be able to wrap up the remaining pages: the glossary, front matter (title page, copyright/dedication page, etc.), and back matter (about the author, review request, website), as well as refreshing my knowledge of the KDP uploading and approval process. It’s pretty intimidating, but I’m confident I can figure it out.

In the meantime, I really need to start building out my “Launch Team”…these are supporters of me and the book who will post about it, purchase the book on the release date, and write an Amazon.com review for it. If you’d like to be on my team, will you please let me know? Feel free to comment on this blog post or email me directly at brandi@forlorncornandfriends.com. Thanks so much!

Considering all that I still have to do, I obviously won’t be able to have a November 1 release date, but maybe November 15th? Either way I’ll keep you updated!

-Brandi

The Adventure Begins…

Hello! Thanks so much for being here. This project - this book - has been a passion project of mine for many, many years. From inspiration to conception to creation…to be honest I can’t even tell you how many.

The Inspiration: From a very early age, my youngest child loved words. There were a lot of adults around during that stage of our lives, and their father and I both have pretty broad vocabularies, so there was ample opportunity for them to hear many words that were beyond their understanding. The reason I knew they loved them was because whenever they heard a new one, they would ask “What does (insert word here) mean?” They would be given the definition, and more likely than not, it became part of their vernacular. It’s no wonder to either his father or me that they ended up being a writer, and are going to school to become a high school English Teacher.

The Conception: How “Forlorn Corn” was actually born (haha), I can’t remember. It was just a silly little coupling of words that I thought was fun. I’m sure I wasn’t the first to think of them. But I couldn’t stop thinking of them, and started trying to think of other ways to come up with fun names for fruits and vegetables. As I begin to choose words to name these new friends of mine, I remembered my youngest…there have to be other young children who love words, too…what if they had names that may actually teach them new vocabulary? At this point, I really felt I was on to something.

The Creation: So off I went: creating a list of fruits, vegetables (and as you’ll see if you check out “A Garden Roll Call” on the Poem page), even some herbs and other adjacent-to-the-garden produce, with (dare I say) fun, interesting, and challenging descriptors as their names. This took some time, but eventually I got to the point where I had more than enough to start working on a story.

And here we are now. I truly can’t believe we are only a few weeks out until the illustrations are complete and the book is ready to be published. It’s been such a labor of love, which is a good thing since there is no guarantee anyone else will even like it!

My hope is that they will though. That YOU will, and that you know others who will, too. If that’s the case, I’d love it if you’d subscribe to the mailing list to be notified of additions to the website, updates on the release date, more teaser images from the book, and anything else I can think of to keep your interest! I promise not to spam you, it will ONLY be things related to Forlorn Corn (& Friends).

If you’re still here, thank you. I appreciate you, and I look forward to getting to know all of you and your literary littles!

-Brandi