Some writers are always writing and others, like Jessica Wilson, wait for a good idea.
“I can’t write until it hits me,” she says. “If inspiration hits me, the words start flowing.”
Inspiration struck in early April, about a month after the Colorado Springs program planner and mom of two began working from home. She saw a Facebook friend post something funny their daughter said about “surviving the quarantine.”
“As soon as I saw those words, I thought that would be a cool book to have,” Wilson said.
She turned the idea into a children’s book called “I Survived the 2020 Quarantine.”
To get started, she looked at the faces of her two sons, who are ages 3 and 5.
“What do I want them to remember 20 years from now about all of this?”
The words flowed. She wrote the whole book in a day.
“The book is really through the eyes of a child looking at everything that’s happened over the last few months,” Wilson said. “Like, look, this was real and I lived through this.”
It’s available now via Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon.com’s e-book publishing unit.
The rhyming lines tell all about recent life during the coronavirus crisis. “In the year 2020, a pandemic hit the nation,” the book opens. “My family spent months at home, in our first required staycation.”
The pages continue to talk about virtual school and work. Birthday parties being celebrated via parades of cars. Restaurants closing their doors. Not being able to go to the park. Having to “get creative” without toilet paper.
Some lines borrowed from her family, like, “Everything was a little crazy, but dad said, ‘We’ll be fine.’”
Wilson has written more than 20 children’s books, which she calls her “side hobby.” She started her first one after overhearing her son tell his dad, “I love you from the moon all the way down to the cars.”
She’s published three books so far, including “I Survived the 2020 Quarantine.”
She hopes it will be read for years to come.
“I think it’s a cool keepsake and memento,” Wilson said. “It’s a way to look back and remember what this was like. Maybe we can look back and have some warm fuzzy feelings about a bad situation.”
She’s hopeful, too, that one of the last pages of the book comes true: “All got back to normal and everything turned out all right.”
This content was originally published here.
