Ennice resident Jeff Chandler reads his book "The Fire Dog Champ" for son Avery's class at Glade Creek School.

Bedtime story becomes children's book

A few years after making bedtime stories up "off the top of his head" to tell his young son Avery and foster daughter Donna, Ennice resident Jeff Chandler was able to weave a bedtime story into a children's book.

Chandler explained, "Book writing came about telling stories to my kids at bedtime. Over the years, one story in particular developed into this book. It started out with a dog, then it was a dog with a fire department and the dog turned into a Dalmatian. My wife (Shannon) kept encouraging me, ‘You need to write this down.' We wrote it down. I colored a few pages and stuck it under the bed and pulled it out every now and then to let him (Avery) look at it. She kept encouraging me to send it in."

Along with Avery, now seven, Chandler would spend free time in the family's living room doodling sketches and they watched cartoons. The doodles became the artwork included in "The Fire Dog Champ."

Chandler said it took between two and three years for the storyline for the book to be written because he considered writing the book as a hobby that he would work on during spare time while working at Toys R Us in Winston-Salem and during free moments at home.

The old adage, "The third time's the charm" proved to be true in Chandler's case, who had received two rejections in his quest to publish the book.

"I was getting frustrated and thinking this wasn't going to happen," he remembers. "She (wife Shannon) said, ‘Give it one more chance.' I submitted it to PublishAmerica and they fell in love with it.

Looking at his office desk at Kerr Drug, Chandler stated, "We signed the contract with PublishAmerica in February of last year, so it took a good solid year just to go through the official process of publishing. Through all the rejections, I would say it took three years for it to be sitting right there."

Chandler credits the Alleghany County Library in the book being published. He explained that while working on the book one evening, lightning struck his home computer. His wife had encouraged him to save the information on a disk.