From Storybook to Field Guide: An Unexpected Journey Back to Aeternus Pond

Sometimes the best ideas are the ones you never planned for.

After publishing New Beginnings, the fifth book in the Aeternus Pond Series, and redesigning the cover art for all five books, I truly thought I was finished. I had told the stories I wanted to tell, created Educator Guides to accompany each book, and given Gary, Sheldon, Meadow, and their many friends a world of their own.

Then I saw three watercolor illustrations.

They were Gary the goldfish, Sheldon the snapping turtle, and Meadow the leopard tree frog—the three friends at the heart of Aeternus Pond. The artwork was realistic, with beautiful watercolor washes and splashes of color surrounding each animal.

The moment I saw them, they reminded me of the small fish guides I used to read when I was younger—guides to freshwater and saltwater fish that made me want to learn more about the creatures pictured on their pages. And just like that, an idea took hold. ~ What if I created a field guide for my grandsons featuring the actual characters they were meeting in the Aeternus Pond books?

The First Test

I put together a sample and showed it to my grandsons.

When they saw the goldfish, frog, and turtle and immediately recognized them as Gary, Meadow, and Sheldon, their eyes lit up. They began looking more closely at the pages, reading the information, and asking questions.

Then came the question I had secretly been hoping to hear:

“When are you going to finish it?”

That was the moment I knew I was onto something. The illustrations had caught their attention, but recognizing characters from stories they already knew made them want to discover more about the real animals behind those characters. That was exactly what I hoped the Field Guide could do.

An Educator at My Side

Fortunately, I didn’t have to figure out the educational side of the project alone.

My wife is an educator, and I have always valued her knowledge and experience. Early in the process, she helped me focus on what kinds of information about each creature would make the guide interesting and useful to young readers and educators.

After several drafts, she gave the concept her blessing, and I was off to the races.

I knew early on that I didn’t want to create just another traditional wildlife guide. I wanted this to be a Creatures of Aeternus Pond Field Guide—something that connected the fictional world of the books with the fascinating real-world animals that inspired its characters.

Each entry began taking shape with information about the creature’s scientific name, habitat, diet, and behavior, along with sections such as Did You Know?, Nature’s Lesson, and Nature Observation.

After completing the entries for Gary, Sheldon, and Meadow, I knew I had made the right decision. What I didn’t know was just how large the project was about to become.

Twenty Creatures…Then Forty

As I worked my way through the five books, I began rediscovering just how many creatures had found their way into the world of Aeternus Pond.

When I reached twenty characters, I was surprised.

When I reached forty, I was overwhelmed.

Had I really created this many characters?

Seeing them gathered together in one place made me realize just how much of myself I had poured into the Aeternus Pond Series over the years.

It also made me wonder whether the Field Guide was becoming too ambitious. Would more than forty pages be too much for my grandsons? Would teachers, parents, and other young readers find it useful?

Once again, I turned to my wife. She reviewed the completed guide and reassured me that it worked, not only for young readers but also as a supplemental resource alongside the Educator Guides I had already created for each of the five books.

That reassurance meant a great deal to me.

Finding the Look of Aeternus Pond

The artwork was another journey entirely.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted watercolor illustrations. I had seen examples of wildlife paintings that combined realistic animals with loose washes, splashes, and bursts of watercolor behind them. That was the look I imagined for Aeternus Pond.

When I was younger, I was an adequate artist, but creating more than forty consistent wildlife paintings was well beyond what I could accomplish for this project. I decided to use artificial intelligence as an artistic tool to help bring my ideas to life.

But I was very particular about the results. I provided the text of the Aeternus Pond books as reference so the characters could be understood within the context of their stories. Then came a great deal of back-and-forth, generating, reviewing, editing, rejecting, and refining images until I found the watercolor style I had envisioned.

One requirement never changed: the animals had to look like animals. I didn’t want cutesy creatures or animals with exaggerated human characteristics. If this was going to be a field guide, I wanted a child to look at Gary and see a goldfish, at Meadow and see a frog, and at Sheldon and see a snapping turtle.

Once that visual style was established, I began working through the characters one by one.

Eventually, the creatures that had existed primarily in my imagination and on the pages of five books were looking back at me.

Something I Hadn’t Planned to Create

When the final PDF was completed, I felt an enormous sense of pride.

What made that feeling unusual was that I hadn’t planned any of this.

I had already published the fifth book. I had redesigned the covers of all five books. As far as I was concerned, that chapter of the project was finished.

The Field Guide simply appeared as an idea after I saw those first watercolor paintings. By the time I held the completed 40-plus-page guide in front of me, it no longer felt like an extra project.

It felt as though it had always belonged there.

In many ways, I began to see it as a tribute to the Aeternus Pond Series itself, a chance to bring together the animals, characters, nature, and lessons that had accumulated across all five stories.

Why the Field Guide Is Different

The Educator Guides available on my website are free resources. They were created to give teachers and parents an introduction to each book and ideas for incorporating the stories into lessons and discussions.

The Field Guide was a very different undertaking. The amount of time spent creating it, researching and writing the entries, developing its design, and repeatedly refining the artwork until each page looked the way I imagined made it a much more substantial project.

For that reason, I decided to make the completed Aeternus Pond Field Guide available as a downloadable PDF for $9.99.

I’ve also placed a four-page sample on my website so educators and parents can look through actual pages before deciding whether the complete guide is right for them.

My hope is that when they see it, the care that went into creating both the illustrations and the text comes through.

More Than a Field Guide

Of course, my greatest hope has very little to do with PDFs, illustrations, or even field guides.

I hope educators, parents, and young readers fall in love with the world of Aeternus Pond and the lessons each of its stories has to tell.

I hope they find Gary, Sheldon, Meadow, and their friends endearing enough that they want to share their adventures with someone else. And perhaps the Field Guide will encourage a child to look a little more closely the next time they pass a pond, spot a frog, watch a turtle disappear beneath the water, or see a bird soaring overhead.

There is also another connection that makes this project particularly meaningful to me. My parents were not alive to see the Aeternus Pond books published, nor did they have the opportunity to meet their great-grandchildren.

But my grandsons know about them. I tell the boys stories about my childhood, including the many times my father took me fishing. Those experiences helped give me the love and appreciation for nature that eventually found its way into the stories of Aeternus Pond.

My father shared that world with me. Years later, through stories, books, and now a Field Guide, I have the opportunity to share some of that same wonder with my grandsons.

And perhaps, through Aeternus Pond, with other children as well.

For a project I never intended to create, I can’t think of a better reason for it to exist.