By Shakuntala Rajagopal
I have been homebound for the most part since March 10th 2020. I am not known to be a homebody. For my protection, my daughters requested that I restrict my travels to not just within town, but also visits to my extended family which includes 54 plus in and out of town. Although this was totally out of character for me, I decided to honor their caring and abide by their request/rules.
Despite the restrictions, my life was joyful, active and sometimes even hectic because the previous year I had acquired an addition to our family; a new grandson from my youngest daughter. Now I have 3 grandsons! Since I had time on my hands, and even more important, thinking time, I started writing a children’s story for my youngest grandson. As my magical, mystical story evolved I got the idea to make it an illustrated children’s e-book.
This was a totally new territory that I was exploring.
Researching on the Internet, I found information to train myself for my new venture. I attended a webinar, read up about Amazon Kindle and plunged into the process bravely. An additional challenge was finding an illustrator. In my research I found the site Fiverr and found an illustrator. I send photographs of the subjects in my story as well as the places where the story takes place. My illustrator met my ideas approximately 85%. I realized that I could go on revising and editing forever or go ahead and release the story on Kindle.
The hardest part was formatting the narrative to coordinate with the illustrations so that it made sense. Finally, I did.
And then a new idea occurred for the New Year that could make this Book #1 of a four book series.
The resulting e-book is titled “My Magical Journey with My Ammoo Peacock” on Amazon Kindle. The story is about K.G., a little brown boy who lives with his Mumma and Ammoo (Grandmother) in Chicagoland. Ammoo comes to him in the form of a Peacock and flies grandson K.G. on a trip to India to the town where Ammoo came from. Ammoo Peacock tells him that “there is such a lot of world to see,” and this was just an early beginning.
Ammoo Peacock takes him on a short adventure to the very southern tip of India to see the tides from three Oceans mingle at Kanya Kumari. They witness a glorious sunset before returning home.
The message for readers is there’s no place and no person you cannot visit if you have an imagination and an adventurous Ammoo.
My next step will be to create a print book of Book #1. Then I shall keep writing about three more magical trips that Ammoo Peacock will take little K.G.
Thus starts the new year 2021 and new beginnings, after surviving and surpassing the problems we faced in 2020.
