A full-time businesswoman is set to launch a new series of Children’s books titled The dogged Adventures of Deefir and Pat following a successful online campaign.
Rosemary Morrison, a full-time business consultant from Belfast, set about achieving her life’s dream of creating educational and entertaining books for children earlier this year and yesterday funders made it a reality. Rosemary achieved 106% of her £6,000 goal through the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter, raising £6,380 to launch the first book titled A Day At The Beach.
Rosemary said: “I am over the moon that we have reached our Kickstarter goal and thrilled at the thought of how lots of children will be enjoying The dogged Adventures of Deefir and Pat this Christmas!
“I can’t even begin to say how much I appreciate the help of my friends, family, colleagues, network and those of the artist David Smith in helping me get this book venture off the ground – everyone has been so supportive and generous.”
She describes the project as: “Great fun, educational rhyming stories about friendship, citizenship, nature and the world we live in.”
Rosemary’s journey started when walking with a friend and her dog on Sketrick Island, County Down. A conversation about a friend’s dog getting lost on the same walk encouraged Rosemary to write a story about two pups who love having fun at the beach but to remember the importance of playing safe.
In spite of working twelve hour days, Rosemary was determined to bring two fictional dogs, Deefir and Pat, to life. Now she says this is just the start of her career as an author: “There are at least five more stories already written. The “Life’s Lessons Learned” theme continues through them all so if this first book “A day at the beach” continues to sell well, then we’ll be picking the next story to get illustrated
“In terms of my future goals, wouldn’t it be wonderful to get picked up by one of the children’s channels like Fox or Disney? A girl can dream!”
She added: “My first priority will be to get the books dispatched as quickly as possible – I have worked with a great team at Print Project in Castlereagh to have everything ready on time. In mid-January perhaps we’ll have an official launch but another priority too is to get the books we promised to Libraries NI.”
Rosemary alongside her husband and co-author Gordon, and illustrator David Smith, intend to provide 120 libraries in Northern Ireland with a copy of the first book.