Hi everyone,
I'm delighted to announce that my children's first chapter book, When Dragon's Came to Alice Street, is finally available for purchase online through Amazon and kindle and eventually through other booksellers online.  It should even show up overseas.

This book was written several years ago specifically to inspire the many children in my apartment building to learn to love reading, and being read to. All the children in the story are actual people, though they are now as  tall as I am! The story is filled with laughs and all the fun of children off on a great adventure on the back of a friendly dragon. But underneath, I also wanted to make children more aware of some of the environmental crises affecting the world, and give them, at least in the fantasy world of children, a way to help fix some of that, and for later when they grow up and can do more, the belief that this is possible.

The long delay was the result of the difficulty of finding or creating art to go with the text. I even sat down with a book on how to draw dragons and ended up just banging my head on the table. But at last my cousin Patricia, a fine artist in acrylic and watercolor,  stepped up to take on the challenge. She also had never tried dragons before but she came up with a cover i just love. I added to it an actual picture of one of the children and even my father's real face in the picture on the wall. Carl Chew, a man with whom i attended high school a million years ago, volunteered to take on the rest of the story just for the fun. Carl is a wonderful semi-retired professional artist with just the right sense of whimsy and I am eternally grateful for the images he added to the story.

This book, like my others, came  to publication via the many new online bookmakers that authors can use now, going around the traditional gate keepers in publishing.  Create Space, the one i used for my last two projects, cost me truly nothing since i provide my own covers. They just take a reasonable cut of those books that are actually sold. The book they deliver is high quality and should make extra fun reading for parents reading aloud to children or teachers reading aloud a story in the classroom. I hope you will enjoy it!  If you click on the link, you can read the first pages of the story on Amazon.  Please be sure to leave a comment on its Amazon page or on Goodreads.com,  if you do. It is comments that make all the difference in author published works like this. Let's open the door to creativity for each other!