The concept for the book “Nest County” was based on the comic strip of the same name which I created back in 1985.

I decided early in the project that the story had to feel like an animated film. I wanted the reader to visualize this new world as close as I did when I created it. My first idea revolved around a happy place considered a bird’s paradise which gets invaded by snakes who are stealing the bird’s eggs for food. At that point, the leading character comes up with the idea to fly to a supermarket, get some eggs, and place them in their nests for the snakes to steal. The mission flops when the birds get bagged by accident at the supermarket and end up in somebody’s refrigerator in the city. Although I was tempted to continue developing the story along this line, I realized that involving humans was going to bring an unpredictable level of complexity with an unfortunate side effect of taking away from the bird’s side of the story. It was at this point that I decided to keep the story as natural and organic as possible with just birds and snakes. No humans beyond this point. No humans allowed. After this simple decision, the story literally wrote itself up. Midway into the writing, I realized that the story line itself was creating a whole brand new universe that was in need of its own set of rules, which I quickly began to put together as I needed them. Distance was now measured in flaps and curls instead of miles. The official currency became seeds instead of dollars, and so on.

Along these lines, I also discovered that I had to use my engineering skills to make sure that the geography and the timing were both synchronized and compatible with the various scenes and events that involved space and time throughout the story. This realization alone forced me to create a map of the new virtual territory using the new units of measure so all the events could develop without violating any space-time related laws of common sense. I finally had a theater of operations for all the characters involved. I had just created a new world. Welcome to “Nest County”.

“Nest County” is available in iTunes at www.itunes.com/nestcounty

“Nest County” is also available in Amazon at www.amazom.com/nestcounty

You can read the first few chapters here: NEST COUNTY – Sample

Also, you can see below a short video that will be the opening credits for the upcoming narrated book series.  The theme song is titled “Happy Bird Day”.