Guest Blogger: Autistic Picture Books by the Dog Walker

It just feels so recent since Mom asked me to guest blog for her. She wanted to blog today, but she went to a Girl Scout Retreat that would make her spend one night at a Girl Scout camp to watch her daughters deal with a Girl Scout reunion or something like that. I'm not sure how that works, but Mom will keep you posted about that. Anyway, I wasn't quite sure what to talk about until I figured out that I'm working on a little bit of homework and I thought I should tell you about what I'm doing.

It's the last semester before I get to graduate from UVU and I'm working on a Capstone project where I need to interview some people and get some ideas on how I can achieve my project. The project I'm doing is planning to write and illustrate a children's book about a child who has autism. Whenever I went to class, my teacher really likes the idea I came up with, but I'll still need to find some people to interview with who are experts with dealing with a child with autism and when I interviewed some people, like a librarian, a caregiver, and a philosopher, they thought it's a good idea that I write and illustrate a children's book.

But when I met with a couple of librarians at the local library, they looked up online to see that are a lot of picture books about children being autistic and there are also children's books for autistic children who love to read. I was a bit worried that if there are a lot of other children's picture books about a child with autism being the main character, my teacher would recommend I come up with a different approach for my project. But with a little bit of encouragement and firmness, my mom told me that I can still write and illustrate a children's picture book about not an autistic child in third person, but in first person story form.

I didn't see this book from the librarians, but I saw it myself. It might be a good book to read to children who love elephants.

I already started writing the story, but with a lot of assignments being put online with due dates, it gets me a little worried that I'm not going to be able to get the story done, if I still need to deal with other assignments that have to deal with the project. One of the assignments is to interview people who have empathy towards my project and I need to come up with an annotated bibliography and put them all into a PowerPoint, because I will be presenting my project in front of community judges on the last day of the semester.

I have lots to do, but I'm still trying to keep my other priorities straight, like my marriage, my family, and my employment. I hope that I'll be able to get all of this done in time. But I'll tell you that by the time I'm done writing that story and I present it on the last day of the semester, I'll get the story published.