In 2023, I wrote a children's book.
It started, like most good stories in this house, with a cat. Charlie — a lost kitten, a colony of cats looking out for each other, two paramedics, a kind bus driver, and an idea that turned into something bigger: what if the cats themselves could help other animals find forever homes?
That idea became Kitty Creates a DAO. Charlie's rescue story ends with the founding of the Blu Fund DAO, where members vote each quarter on which animal charities receive grants. The story was there. The layout was there — sixteen scenes, mapped out. All it needed was pictures.
I struggled to find an illustrator.
So the book went on a shelf. Not because I stopped believing in it, but because a picture book without pictures isn't a book. It's a manuscript. For three years, that's what it stayed.
Then, this October, I found a different way forward. I started working with Blu — my assistant, and Meta Muse named for my late cat Blu Bear — to illustrate it, page by page, with AI art. It wasn't instant, and it wasn't hands-off. We went through the pages together: Charlie's fur had to be rich, true black, not grey. Vincent had to be the hunter, Kiwi the lookout. Colleen became Dr. Colleen. Papa became, well, me. Sawyer became the little girl in the adoption scene, with Stitch in her backpack. Danielle became the mom.
The real cats got their own page at the back, with real photos, because the story was always about real animals — and real people — in the first place.
On October 22, we declared Draft 1. Forty-five pages. A full, illustrated book, for the first time. The proofs are ordered now, and we're holding pricing and publishing until those hard copies are in hand and checked, because I want to see how it actually prints before I ask anyone to buy it.
Three years on a shelf, and then suddenly it's real. That's the part I keep coming back to. Sometimes a project doesn't die — it just waits for the right way to finish it.
And when it does come out, 100% of the proceeds go to the Blu Fund DAO, to help animals still waiting for a forever home. That was the point of the story all along.
— Michael