^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com June 25, 2013}

In case you haven’t read the tail end of my blog entries lately or haven’t noticed the high-pitched girlish scream of excitement that has been emanating from northern Vermont since April, my newest novel Greystone Valley is on sale. I’ve got a lot of reasons to be happy with this book, including the fact that it’s one of the most fun stories I’ve ever written, I get to work with a new publisher, it’s a thing of beauty thanks to cover artist Jessica von Braun, and actress Serena Scott Thomas is reading the audio version. But topping all of that is the fact that this book really represents a transition in my life toward being a husband and a father. It’s a novel that wouldn’t exist without everybody in my family.

Happy family fun is not exactly something that I’ve ever really worked with in my fiction. My other two novels, Shadowslayers and Reality Check, deal with death, resurrection, and some very dark themes. My most successful short stories include “Fantasy as you Like It,” wherein the main character is a mutilated survivor of a nuclear blast, and “Eight-Bit Heaven,” which deals with a negligent alcoholic mother and an angel who is plotting to destroy the world. The first step in the creation of Greystone Valley was having a wife who inspired me. She was a schoolteacher and has always loved kids, while I was generally lukewarm on the idea of having children myself. Thanks to her influence, I decided to take a shot at writing a young adult novel.

My wife’s influence extended beyond her general personality. As a gift, she bought me Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain series, which I first read when I was in sixth grade and which I still consider to be the best fantasy series ever written. Rereading those books as an adult reminded me that even something that was written with kids in mind can be entertaining to an older audience. Taking a bit of Lloyd Alexander’s work, a touch of my wife’s own personality, and a mish-mash of other things I loved as a kid, including but not limited to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, I started crafting the type of story that I thought a young reader might enjoy.

I wrote Greystone Valley over the course of about two months, but it took a couple of years after that to find a publisher. I think it would still be lying in my collection of unpublished stories if it hadn’t been for my son.

The biggest thing I looked forward to as a dad was reading to my son. As soon as he could hear voices in the womb, I started reading bedtime stories to my wife’s belly. At one point, I dug out my manuscript of Greystone Valley and started reading that. And, as it turns out, reading a work aloud is a terrific way to edit it. This unfortunately made for a bit of uneven reading time, as I would start reading a sentence, stop, mutter, “Well that doesn’t sound right,” and then rewrite the paragraph before continuing, but it helped me iron out the story. I noticed that the villain was underdeveloped, so I added a new chapter that brought him into the story earlier. I polished up some dialogue and changed a plot point or two. If I hadn’t gotten married to such a wonderful woman, my story would never have happened. If we hadn’t decided to have children, the story never would have become the polished and publishable book that it became.

Reading the manuscript to my son wasn’t the only thing that influenced this book. I also cracked open other fantasy tales, including The Hobbit and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Reading these books out loud got them lodged in my unconscious, and that affected my own prose. (Sadly, however, I was never able to work in my favorite line from The Hobbit, “Also, eagles are not forks!” Maybe in a sequel…)

Now the book is published, and my son is two years old. I’m in the process of reading the book to him as a bedtime story. Rereading my own work is generally something I don’t look forward to, since I always notice a few things that I could have done better. However, this time things are different. Maybe I’m getting more forgiving to myself or maybe my family helped me polish the book up even more than I expected, but this time I’m just enjoying the telling of the tale and having fun with the book now that it’s finished.

If you’re a writer or any other sort of artist, be sure to produce some work specifically for your family. They are a great source of inspiration, and they can help transform your work into something much better than you can make it alone.

On a final note, with our daughter on the way, I’m starting the process of reading bedtime stories to my wife’s belly again. I haven’t cracked open any of my own writing just yet, but so far the bedtime stories have included Terry Pratchett’s The Color of Magic. If some clever British wit slips into my next tale, I can thank my daughter for that.

_{Featured Image: Jessica von Braun}