The Story Behind Mil0

A dream that started with a sketch, a setback, and a decision to just go for it.

I grew up in a single-mom household. So I know what it feels like to walk into a room, a birthday party, a family gathering, a Sunday morning at church and quietly notice that your family looks a little different from everyone else's. Nobody has to say anything. The silence does that work all by itself.

A lot of children are living that same experience today. And lately, it has been on my heart more than usual.

I started noticing something: almost every children's picture book I picked up showed the same family. Mom and Dad. Both parents, always. And I kept thinking — where are the books for the kids who go home to just one? Where are the stories that show their life as something whole, and beautiful, and enough?

I wanted to write books for all the single moms out there. A bedtime read-aloud that says to their child, quietly and clearly: your story matters too.

That thought planted a seed. And a seed, if you tend to it long enough, eventually becomes something you can hold in your hands.

It started with a drawing. A little boy on a hiking trail, just a sketch, the kind you make without a plan. My daughter Ce'Nadra saw it and said, almost matter-of-factly, "This could be a cute story. He looks like a Milo."

And just like that, he had a name.

Ce'Nadra brought ideas for his adventure and helped shape what the story could become. She saw the pictures before they were fully drawn and believed in them before I did.

My daughter Katelin had always known I wanted to be an illustrator — she carried that belief in me even when I had set it down. When she met an illustrator at a mom's playgroup, she got the contact information and handed it right to me. "All they need is a website," she said, with the kind of simple certainty that only people who truly love you can manage.

So I reached out, maybe a little naively, before my portfolio was truly ready. The owner of the company was gracious. She told me I needed to update my portfolio and make myself more sellable. It was honest advice. And in that moment, it still stung. I felt like an imposter. I wanted to quit before I had even started.

But then something shifted. I thought: What if I just do this myself?

I had been talking about writing a children's book for over a year. More than a year of someday and when things slow down and I'm not quite ready yet. And I realized — I was never going to be perfectly ready. Nobody ever is. You just have to start.

So I became an Indie Author and Illustrator. I taught myself what I didn't know. I spent late nights learning things I had never heard of, canvas sizes and bleed margins and fixed-layout eBooks. I drew every page myself. I wrote and rewrote. I got things wrong and figured them out.

Five months later — give or take a few very long nights — Milo was born.

Milo is a little boy who goes on a camping adventure with his mom. Just the two of them. It is a story about wonder, and the outdoors, and the particular kind of safe that exists when someone who loves you is right there beside you. It is the family I grew up in. It is the family so many children are growing up in right now.

I made this book for them. For the child who needs to see themselves in a story. For the mom reading aloud at bedtime who needs her child to know: what we have is more than enough.

Milo is out in the world. Find Milo, Mom and the Magic on the Trail at Amazon.

With love and a little woodsmoke,

Linda