A Fairytale Legacy For Your Family – Write A Storybook Featuring Your Children #62 #cong24 #legacy
Synopsis:
Classic children’s fiction has been providing a magical escape for young minds and expanding little imaginations for generations amidst changing technologies. So why not leave your children and their children a special legacy by writing a magical story just for them? Better still, put them in it.
Total Words
Reading Time in Minutes
3
Key Takeaways:
- Fiction is especially magical to children – so why not put them in the story and in the picture?
- Anyone can write and everyone has a story in them – The Hobbit started as a bedtime story for Tolkien’s children.
- Modern technology (AI) gives you illustration for free, layout blanks and affordable vanity publishing. It can even write the outline (!) but that would be cheating.
- If they like it, your children might read it to their children. Perhaps a legacy from you to young future generations of your own family.
About About Mark Keenan:
I am a dad of three based in Dublin. I have written professionally for six national media platforms and published a book on growing food for beginners. I like to fish, grow stuff and walk along rivers.
Contacting Mark Keenan:
You can connect with Mark via email.
By Mark Keenan
LEGACY : There and Back Again on the River Dodder: A family fashioned fairy tale.
As a life long writer for media, I reflected on what legacy I could leave my children other than memories and inheritance.
I thought about my own childhood and the stories I loved, from Blyton, to Tolkien. So many authors who enabled us kids to disappear up magical winding roads, to have adventures alongside fabulously imagined characters.
So I decided to write and illustrate a fairy tale for my own children that could be read to their children. I’d make each of my kids the subject of the story. A personal family legacy that I hope could be magical. But what story would I write for them?
Along its banks I have been able to show my kids forage they can eat – the tender dandelion and nettle leaves, the roots, the blackberries and the mushrooms. How to catch minnows with a brandy bottle or a plastic mineral bottle. I have taken photos of them proudly holding up their first caught fish(which all went back).
This river walk has magical landmarks. The giant gates of the Loftus estate, a 19th Century lime kiln and even a life sized bronze statue of a rhinoceros stranded in the river.
It was a natural setting for my family fairy tale which I have started.
The story features younger versions of my children searching for the family dog along the river after it is stolen by the ‘little people’.
Sequenced geographically, it is also being designed as real life accompaniment for children for that walk.
The tubular brick laundry chimney at Milltown becomes a transporter “cannon” that fires passengers held safely in giant capsules; to be captured safely in a great net set up on its trajectory further along the route.
The lime kiln is a ‘troll farm’, housing dozens trolls of fairy tale fame (they normally live under bridges) who create bedlam online. Even the bronze rhino gets a look in.
I hope it can become a bedtime story they can read for their own children which will also keep our own happy river memories alive after I am gone. If I’m lucky I might even get to read it to their children, and take that magic river walk with them too!
Anyone can be a fiction writer, if even for just one short book for your own children or grandchildren.
These days it’s easier than ever to produce a quality book you can hold in your hand. There are firms online who specialise in professionally bound photo albums with words. Free Ai can provide the illustrations and software to help with layouts. You could put it up on on Kindle!
If your family fairy tale can go there (and back again), it might even prove a success for a larger audience. Just like The Hobbit.