I have received all of the final colored illustrations from Winda. Again, she has done a beautiful job with all of them. I am really excited to see them all together in Pickles, Pickles, I Like Pickles.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had created a “dummy” for my book entitled Pickles, Pickles, I Like Pickles so that I knew what I wanted for the illustrations.  Once I received the sketches of the illustrations, I inserted them into my “dummy” and made a few changes with the story, which I wrote about in a different post. I have been looking through the latest dummy, and it still doesn’t feel quite right. Now that I have all of the colored illustrations, and I am putting them together as a book, I have decided to change the book layout even more. In my book, I plan to have the phrase “pickles, pickles, I like pickles” repeated numerous times throughout the story so that preschool aged children can partake in the reading of the story. I hope that this will make it more fun and enjoyable for them to “read”. As I was looking at my second dummy; however, I felt like the repetition was too repetitious. The children may still enjoy shouting out the phrase, but as an adult, I found myself purposely skipping over the phrase even as I was proofreading my story. That didn’t seem right to me. So, looking for some inspiration, I looked online for a list of children’s books that have repeated phrases in them. Once I had my list together, I went to the library and checked out 11 children’s books that include repeated phrases (and numerous other children’s books just for fun).  Thankfully, children’s books aren’t very long, so I was able to read through all of them in one night. As a result of my research, though, I have decided that the phrase is repeated too many times, which has led me to reformatting the layout again. Hopefully, I will have it just right when it is finally published for children and adults to enjoy together.

Stay tuned for more information about Pickles, Pickles, I Like Pickles.