Inside the Making of dog+girl.

I did not set out to write a children's book.

One day I was simply looking at my dog, wondering what life was like for her. What did she think was happening around her? The doorbell, the keys lifted off the counter, a conversation with someone who wasn't in the room, the same walk at the same hour every day - what did any of it mean from where she was standing? Dogs spend their whole lives watching us, and we rarely stop to wonder what they're making of it.

I began thinking back over our life together, writing little observations in the Notes app on my phone. There was no outline, no publishing plan, and no real intention beyond catching the thoughts as they came.

Then I started rhyming.

Once I found the rhythm, I was hooked. One line led to another, and the notes slowly began to feel like a story. It was only when I had nearly finished that I stepped back and realized I might have written a children's book.

That question shaped everything that followed.

The story belonged to the dog from the start. Sascha was not a character placed into an idea; her personality, her perspective, her way of moving through the world were the idea. Telling the story from her point of view let ordinary moments feel new and funny. A basketball is a thing that must be caught. A long drive is a gift. Her sense of what matters is complete and entirely her own, and it is rarely the same as ours. Loops is there on nearly every page. Sascha does the telling, but she never does anything alone.

Everything in the book is true. It is categorized as fiction, because a dog is telling it.

That is what decided the next part. A traditional publisher takes the manuscript and it becomes part of their publishing process. They choose the illustrator, decide what moments from the story will be illustrated, shape the visual direction, and make the final decisions about how the book will look. An author may or may not be consulted along the way, and they typically do not have final creative control; the author is not usually asked what the dog looked like on a particular afternoon. I could not hand something this personal to someone else and hope the illustrations came back looking like our actual life. I already knew what that life looked like, because we had lived it. So I founded Lyvro Publishing - and then began researching what founding a publishing company involved, in that order.

I was lucky in what came next. The illustrator I found draws beautifully, which is rare enough on its own. But she also heard what I was describing and drew it back to me.
She's a rockstar.

From there, building the book became a much larger undertaking and a lesson in patience. There were countless revisions. Illustration decisions. Conversations about paper, color, binding, typography, and the little details that most readers may never consciously notice - but that quietly shape the experience of holding a book.

Those details matter.

I wanted dog+girl to feel warm, timeless, and enjoyable to read aloud. The rhythm had to carry the story without overpowering it. The illustrations needed to hold both humor and tenderness. And the finished book had to feel like something a family would want to keep.

I almost did not publish it. Books two and three had come quickly, because I was not inventing anything - the days were already written down. But once they existed, the first book looked too close to home. A private thing about my dog and my ordinary days, and I could not imagine why it would matter to anyone outside this house.

Today, dog+girl has found its way into homes, classrooms, bookstores, and boutiques - and into a record store, a museum shop, and a spa. It has won five awards across several categories, which I am grateful for. But the moments that stay with me are the smaller ones: hearing that a child asks for the book again, that a family recognizes its own dog in Sascha, that someone paused to wonder what life might look like from their dog's side of things.

That is the part I had wrong. What made the book feel too personal to publish is exactly why it reaches people - every house has these days in it, and every dog is somewhere nearby, drawing its own conclusions.

dog+bone is now in development, with dog+leash to follow - each continuing to explore ordinary life from Sascha's unmistakably dog-shaped point of view.

That is where the story began, after all. Not with a plan to publish a book, but with a dog, a question, and a few lines typed into a phone.