Kitninny Catness
New Dog in the Neighborhood
By John Villegas-Grubbs
with illustrations by Becky Bohanon
1. Intro to Kitninny
Years ago one of my nieces urged me to make a book out of a story I told her and her sister when I babysat them. It is about a cat that gets chased out if his home neighborhood into a forest he had never entered before. The story tells how he was lost and confused, and his adventures with the other animals of the forest and how they helped him get home.
So I wrote the book, Becky and I worked together to get all the illustrations planned and done, and we went to print. The purpose of the story is to try to depict the innocence of children, seen through the lens of logic: all a story needs to be believed is for it to be 'logical' (the conclusion follows from the premises). But the premises do not have to be true; they only have to sound like they are. Kitninny carries with him perfectly logical beliefs about the world, but they are completely different than the beliefs of the animals he finds there.
But I inadvertently created a problem. Most of the characters speak in accent and I wrote the conversations phonetically, which ended up making the book (177 pages) difficult to read.
So, I've decided to record videos of myself reading each chapter, compose the background music, use Becky's wonderful illustrations and tell the story through the set of videos.