Guest Blog: Grease's adventures in publishing "Ginny Griffin's First Day of School"

Our first guest blogger is Grease Coakes, an author that I met in Second Life. At the time I first met him, he was working toward getting his first children's book published, but did not know where to turn.  I've enjoyed helping him and cheering him on in his quest to find the right fit for him.  What follows has gone through some minor editing in the punctuation department, as I always want to preserve the voice as much as possible.

Let's hear from Grease:

Getting everything together to publish my children’s story has truly been an immense challenge for me. Luckily I found a positive writing group that helped me create a much better Children’s story and gave me feedback. Not only that, an online friend of mine suggested a new ending for my story “Ginny Griffin’s first day of school.” The story - as the title suggests - is about a girl griffin and her first day of school at a new school. She meets new friends and is bullied by the school bully. It’s certainly a challenge for her and her new friends to overcome as they are halted at every turn. It’s filled with a couple laughs and it teaches the reader to be brave in times of adversity.

Next step when I got the story and characters and dialogue together was to find an editor. I did find someone to help edit as I progressed in editing and creating the story. When I finalized it again another friend was nice enough to edit it again. Lots of errors were in the grammar and punctuation, but the story itself was very well done. It took me a good hour or more to fix everything in yellow. The good news was now the written part of my story was complete!
The same friend suggested I go to a publishing website called lulu.com to publish my story. I paid the fee and went ahead and placed my story on the website. Except there was one last thing. I need a cover picture; sadly I can only draw stick figures.

I asked someone who drew a picture for me, in trade for a story, to draw for some compensation. She agreed. When I checked on her recently she gave me a rude response. So all I need now is an artist to draw a professional and child friendly picture for my story, and it’s ready for publishing! Now if only I can find someone who can stick to it!

Grease Coakes from Second Life author of Ginny Griffin’s first day of school.

So here is at least the first part of Grease's adventures in publishing.  Many thanks to him for speaking up about his work, and much luck to him in getting it finalized.  I can't wait to see his project completed and be able to announce his success.  Let's all give him a cheer!