Penelope is my Great-niece. The night that my niece, Susan, gave birth I was in Florida visiting with my father. That was the first night I wrote the first book, Penelope. It really is a poem and although I love the content, now after learning so many things about writing and publishing, there are some changes I would make, and probably will, when I discontinue my contract with Page Publishing.

The second book, Penelope Picks Her Pals, was inspired by a first-grade classroom I worked in as a paraprofessional. That year I had written a “book” and included all of the kids in the class. I used alliteration throughout the entire book. It was so long ago, but if I remember correctly, I made a copy for each student before leaving that position, to go to my first teaching position. I love alliteration, the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words (Webster). Penelope Picks Her Pals is an alliteration book. It is a tongue twister. It is definitely for an adult to read to youngsters because of the vocabulary. While reading this at a local library I had the children laughing because I had such a hard time reading it fluently.

The third book, Penelope’s New Puppy, in my opinion is the best. It is about Penelope getting a new puppy from her grandma, which is my sister-in-law Jean. The book is about colors and opens up discussion for parents to have with their children exploring colors. Penelope wants to name her puppy according to the color and tries to come up with some names, yet she doesn’t know what the puppy will look like yet.

The fourth book, Penelope Still Picks Suzie, is a story about Penelope and a classmate she has that has a hard time behaving in school. I wrote this book because I began my teaching career in a school for socially-emotionally disturbed children. It was at this school that I learned all the behaviors that come with childhood conflict and trauma. When I say all the behaviors, I mean all the behaviors. Anyhow, what I learned was that these kids are stigmatized because they don’t know how to act correctly, which in turn isolates them, and makes behaviors escalate. Suzie is my niece, Penelope’s mother, so I used her as the misbehaver. In the book I also included Penelope’s father, Frankie, who is a police officer. In the book Frankie is one of Penelope’s friends who loves reading and wants to be a policeman when he grows up.

All of my Penelope books have a learning element. I have others in my files but since I used what they call, a Vanity Press, I don’t have the money to publish anymore right now. I may try to publish on my own, however the pictures would be different, since I hired an illustrator at Page Publishing. The pictures are technically mine, so I can reproduce them, but my books are still under contract so I hate to mess with any of that.

On Amazon, the books are about $11.95 each. I think there are sites where you can find them more around $10 each. On my blog I offer them signed. I have added on a fee for postage, since I would be mailing them out, but hey, I will sign them for anyone and make it personal.

I hope you will check out my books. The kids seem to love them and I know someday, when Penelope is old enough to understand (she is two now), she will love seeing her name in all those books.