Today, I'm excited to have Kathy and Karen Honaker today to tell us what it's like to create a picture book with your sister. This interview was made possible by iRead Book Tours. Be sure to check out the guest post below and enter the book giveaway!
Thank you for joining us today to talk about what it was like to write a book with your sister. We can't wait to hear your story!
Writing a book with my sister could have been a delight or a disaster! Thankfully, our experience was wonderful. We are both busy and wear many hats during our daily lives. We are both wives, moms to teenagers, we volunteer, and we both work outside the home. We love spending time together, but we don’t get many opportunities to see each other and do things on a regular basis. Writing this book gave us a chance to spend time together and see one of our favorite childhood memories come to life.
We believe Kathy came up with the initial idea to write a children’s book about the memory of having a Traveling Tootsie of our own as children. Karen quickly jumped on board and found a class through our county’s adult education program, and we found ourselves surrounded by other wannabe authors learning how we were going to get this done. Needless to say, this process was not going to be as easy as we thought, but we didn’t give up. Along with a few of our classmates, we formed a writing group, and we met regularly to share ideas and get critiques about our writing. Unfortunately, our busy lives took over, and our writing group stopped meeting. We put Traveling Tootsie on the shelf, but it was always at close reach to pull it out when the timing was right.
About three years ago, we dusted off the manuscript and got busy again. We met when we could find the time, exchanged texts and emails, spent countless hours on the phone and/or FaceTime, and we even took a couple of trips to the beach to work on our book. Being twins we have similar ideas and tastes. We have been known to “finish each other’s sentences” and this was this case during this writing process. We had so much fun trying to remember details about Tootsie and combining them to create the whole memory. It was relatively easy to pick an illustrator because we both had the same vision for what we wanted to see on the pages.
Neither of us would trade the opportunity and experience we had doing this together, and we cannot wait to continue the series. Traveling Tootsie has so many more adventures to go on and our imaginations are full of fun ideas!
Thank you Karen and Kathy for joining us today! I think it's so neat that you wrote a book with your sister. I know if I did it wouldn't have gone as smoothly. TRAVELING TOOTSIE is available for purchase on Amazon, B&N, and most book retailers.