Cha-ching!  This is my first blog.  I thought I would start with the “idea” for this book.  The book took way longer to publish than originally thought ( like most things in my life) but I’m finally there. The idea for the book came to me about 6  years ago when I started collecting pennies for a floor I was thinking of doing (which later became a beautiful penny wall of a moose head that is quite impressive)  I’m quite crafty and love making things.

My penny wall is quite impressive.  I had to sort over 6,000 pennies.  Some pennies had to be cleaned as it is harder and harder to find shiny pennies.  There are sections in the wall that have 60 years of pennies in a row. The oldest penny is upside down (1938). I’ve got some sections in the antlers that are showing the monarchy from the different years.   I’d say it took about 60 hours but it was much longer just to sort than it was to put it all together. I’m hoping to collect more Canadian pennies but they are harder and harder to find.  I thought of donating actual cash from any pennies collected at a rate of 3 cents for every penny.  That’s close to how much they would cost to make one these days.

Holding the penny in my hand made me think of where it had been in its years of circulation. No one would truly know its story. I imagined the different places it would have been used, the hands that held it, the special hiding spots and piggy banks or actual banks it would have been housed in. Were they used to buy penny candy, were they used in the dish “Leave a penny, take a penny” at the corner store, were they used for art?

I thought I would name this penny Penny. I drew Penny on a Post-it note (which I still have) and gave her human form (which I later found out was anthropomorphism)  There was a dime and nickel on a magnet bar where I was sitting and I thought they should be a family. They all shared the same function but were different in so many ways. I called the dime Diamond and the nickel Nick (which later became Nico).  Then later added Quartz, Tony and Dolly (which later became LooAnny)  I always tell my husband David about my inventions and ideas and the reaction I get usually gives me a thought if it is a good idea or not. He doesn’t get excited often but when I told him about my idea, he thought it was good. 

I knew I had to continue to develop it but life gets busy. The idea was put aside as I was preoccupied with renovations at the cottage and a fixer-upper, a full-time busy job, trying new crafts (burning wood, making wooden rings), sports, volunteering, family, friends, different inventions.  About two years after the initial idea, Covid happened.  My daughter who had just graduated from university was not going to find a job in her field of forensics so she came back to live with us to save rent money. It was nice to be able to bond with our family during the isolation period. Since I had more time on my hands, I thought I would resurrect the idea. My daughter is artsy so I asked her to draw the characters of Penny and Nico. This too was put aside for about a year because life is busy nuts! I thought I would wait for retirement when I had more time.  Then I thought, if I don’t start this thing now, I may never start. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and then decided I’d start writing a children’s book. It started off quite simple with a few sentences about each character but the ideas of how I could present this to the world were pouring into my head and on my phone during the wee hours of the night (due to my chronic  insomnia) 

Each character had their special niche.  I have a little bit of myself in each character.  The Coin Family of 7 are the main characters. Then I needed friends, neighbours, a community which would be part of their lives. Would they be coins, bank notes, credit cards, debit cards, gold bars, what about cryptocurrency, points cards that are not legal tender?  The possibilities were endless. I started creating their world but there were many things that still needed to make sense. I wanted it to be similar to our world so that children could learn life lessons. They would be able to see themselves through the eyes of the characters, especially Penny and Nico who are their age.

The family dynamic is one of a blended family which is quite typical in this day and age and one familiar to me.  I thought about how this ‘family’ of coins would come alive, the ideas of other characters, places, and the interactions of money were endless. I titled the book ‘The World of Currency’. I started giving the Coin Family human characteristics based on what they felt to me.

I developed each of them also incorporating a little something of the coins they represent and a bit of me into each of them even if they are very different. At the time of developing these characters, we were doing DiSC profiles at work. DiSC is an acronym that stands for the four main personality profiles described in the DiSC model: (D)ominance, (I)nfluence, (S)teadiness and (C)onscientiousness.  This gave me insight on how my characters could interact with each other. 

Doing research into currency and all of history, and pop culture and all the good or all the evil money and currency can bring into this world is limitless.  My vision is to continue the story of the Coin Family in subsequent books, which I have already started to write.  I have also been approached to have the book translated in French, which I think is a great idea.  I also think this would make a great cartoon.  It has so much content and adventure and current world situations.  I will also start developing my own resources on the centsofhumour.ca website.

This adventure has been fun and it seems like I’ve done this before and have visited the World of Currency.  Everything just seems to “fit”. 

I’d like to thank my older sister Julie, who gave me my first lesson in money.  When I was too young to know the value of money but she knew, she proposed a trade of all her coins, which happened to be all pennies, with the small quantity of my coins.  To me, she was giving me more.  I didn’t know why she was being generous.  My mom then explained it to me and I would later found out why!  By the way, we both had Colonel Sanders banks like the one in this photo.  Look how much more a dollar in pennies looks as compared to nickels, dimes and quarters.

Interestingly enough, I have made up some new words in the book such as  Coinaval, Coinspiracy, Coincert. This is called coinage – the inventing of a new word or phrase in a language.