With Kaylie Seed
Arnelle, congratulations to you and your illustrator Taiye Okoh on your adorable children’s book! Daddy on Duty brought some much needed sunshine to my life right now. If you wouldn’t mind, I have some questions for you about Daddy on Duty as well as your writing process and some personal questions about what inspires you to write.
I adore that you focused on parenting styles as the theme in Daddy on Duty. Where did you get the inspiration to focus on parenting styles for your book?
Thank you! My inspiration came from a very basic day that I had with my dad. My experiences with my dad are not the same as the story, but a similar outline—which is mom is gone, dad is in charge, and he does what he wants to do. Me focusing on parenting styles just came as I finished the story if that makes sense. Once I finished the story, I was thinking about what message I wanted to convey and it happened to deal with parenting styles.
You wrote Daddy on Duty and Taiye illustrated it. How did you find working with, and collaborating with, an illustrator to create this book?
I found Taiye through this website called Fiverr. This website is awesome and has a bunch of freelancers all in one spot that does different things—such as T-shirt designs,growing your YouTube, gaming, and more! Taiye was listed as a children’s author, his picture examples were great, and I thought he would be the missing key in helping to bring my book to life!
What was the most surprising thing that you learned while going through the process of creating and writing Daddy on Duty?
I learned that going through the process of writing isn’t the hard part. It is publishing week as well as marketing. Those are the two hardest things within the process.
With such a great debut children’s book, I have to ask, will there be another book from you soon?
I am not sure, maybe in the future, but as of right now, no. Although I do have plans to do more with this book so stay tuned!
Now that you’ve finished this process of publishing your first children’s book, what advice would you give to aspiring authors?
Do not be intimidated to write a book if that’s what you want to. It is very doable and anyone can do it if they really want to. Take the idea and own it! After that, everything will fall into place and work itself out! Trust me!
What is your “must-read” book recommendation and what book has had the most impact and influence on your writing?
To be honest, I do not have a recommendation because this was a random idea that came to me one night. I did not have the opportunity to look at other books because everything was closed due to COVID.