The writer of the children’s book Dream House Adventures/Droomhuis Avonture, Lauren O’ Connor-May, always loved to write, but she never dreamed of becoming an author.
Dream House Adventures is published by Lapa Publishers and explores themes of imagination, growth and family adventures. It is a welcome addition to the genre and had the reviewer, who is a peer of the author, engrossed.
O’Connor-May is a journalist by day, but one could say the seed for her debut book was planted at night.
“Everything about this book is inspired by my family. It started when my second youngest daughter Verity needed a new bedtime ritual because she had a new baby sister. So we started having collaborative bedtime story-telling sessions until she fell asleep. Verity would choose the theme and the characters (usually animal or fairy versions of her baby sister and her) and for the most part controlled the story until she fell asleep. On the night Dream House Adventures was born, she asked me to tell her a story about a house. Unlike other nights she listened to the story very quietly without interrupting or demanding changes and I was allowed to let my imagination run wild. By the time I finished the story she had long since fallen into a deep sleep and I had been talking to myself for several minutes already.
Curious
“I was curious as to why the story had intrigued her so much so I told my other children the story the next morning and immediately it started a discussion which almost escalated into an argument and that’s when I realised there was something about the story which children liked. I typed it up and pitched it to a few publishers and Penguin got back to me and told me that they were interested but could I tweak a few things. I had stuck with the original character count dictated by my daughter (two sisters, Verity and Max). The children’s book editor at Penguin however liked my background and wanted me to expand the story to include more background characters based on my other children and to make the adventures more recognisable so I used our own family adventures as a model of what the fictional versions of us did,” says O’Connor-May, a mother of seven daughters.
The author grew up in Eastridge, Mitchell’s Plain, and currently live in Strandfontein.
“I’ve always liked writing and my mom used to regularly find and collect snippets of poems and stories that I wrote when I was a child, but I don’t think I ever thought I would be an author.
“Children’s books are by far the hardest to write because you have tight word counts and have to be able to successfully capture and keep a child’s attention and imagination in only a few words. I never set out to write a children’s book and knowing what I do now about publishing and the children’s book market I feel very blessed to have had even one book published as I don’t think I’ll manage another.
Write for yourself
“I think the most important thing I learned from writing and about writing is that it is; so always write for yourself first. Keeping a journal when I was a teenager saved my sanity and many years later when I moved and discovered a box of old diaries. I was surprised to see how I could track my own emotional growth when I read through a few of them. I ended up burning the whole lot though. Also, if you want to finish a creative project, allow yourself time to be bored. Don’t fill your free time up with screens. At the moment though I don’t even have enough free time to feel bored,” she says.
And what can we expect next from O’Connor-May? “The Lord alone knows. I have more half finished stories than I can count and while some of them have fully formed storylines (in my head), getting it on paper is a challenge with a big family and a full time job.”
The book is available at all good book stores.
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