Bibliophobia - It's good for kids

OK, so maybe I've gone a little overboard with all of the books I've published on Lulu.com lately. I had a bit of a back-catalogue that was waiting for an outlet. Erik threatened to find me a support group to help deal with my apparent addiction to publishing. Fair enough.
My latest book is different from all the others. Style. Look. Shape. Target demographic. Purpose. All different.
I've written a children's book.
For the second year in a row, I've been invited (as an alleged local celebrity playwright - go figure) to read to some school children for Family Literacy Week (January 23-27). Last year I read "Curious George Learns The Alphabet" to a grade 1 class. I had a great time.
They told me that I could let the teacher choose a book or I could bring a book of my own choosing. The risk of saying something like that to a writer is that he may just write something.
And I did."Marty Scribbler Was Afraid Of Books" is the story of a young boy who is (you guessed it) afraid of books. When his class goes on a field trip to the library, he has to face his fears. In doing so he discovers that books aren't scary at all; they're actually kind of fun.
In many ways, this was my most challenging project as a writer, but also the most potentially rewarding. I didn't want to do just a generic funny-animal story. I wanted to somehow tie it all in to Family Literacy Week and follow the overall theme of encouraging kids to read. After I got the story itself figured out, I then had to pick up some pencils that hadn't been put to proper creative use in many years. I had to do the illustrations for the story. I experimented with all sorts of different looks and debated endlessly whether I wanted the book to be in colour or black-and-white; hard cover or paperback. I finally settled on a look that I liked, with a combination of watercolours and black ink.
I'm proud of the final result and the first copy will be donated to Esker Lake Public School when I read it to one of the classes at the end of the month.
The title of this post notwithstanding, children need books. If you have children, either your own or nieces and nephews, young cousins, street urchins that follow you around at lunchtime, whatever, please do all you can to get them reading. We were lucky with my son. He started reading at a relatively early age. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that there are billions of books in my house and the whole family enjoys reading. As a two year old, Robert would see everyone else reading books and didn't want to miss out on whatever it was everyone was doing.
Read to your kids. Read with your kids. Read in front of your kids. Whatever it takes, but get them reading.
Read "Marty Scribbler Was Afraid Of Books" to them. (Yeah, you knew that was coming.) Or read them something else. I won't mind.
Just read.