Blog October 20, 2026
Slow progress is still progress
People ask where Shelly came from. The real answer is that she came out of a pretty hard year.
After my motorcycle accident I spent a long time relearning things I'd never had to think about before. Ordinary things. And the progress I was making was so small that most days I couldn't see it at all.
I had a physical therapist who kept saying the same five words to me. Slow progress is still progress.
She said it when I was doing well. She said it when I was crying. She said it enough times that it stopped being something she told me and turned into something I believed.
When I finally sat down to write a children's book, that sentence was just sitting there waiting for me. It became Shelly's Journey to the Sea. One small turtle, a whole lot of sand, and no way across except one step and then another one.
That's the thing I most want a kid to take from these books. Not that they should be brave all the time, and not that the scary thing turns out to be easy. Just that slow still counts. That you can need more time than the kid next to you and still get where you're going.
It's in all of them now. Shelly's scared of the waves and goes in anyway. She doesn't know what Christmas is so she asks. She makes something lopsided and loves it.
If you've got a kid taking the long way around to something right now, I hope Shelly's good company.