8-year-old writes book, hides it on a library shelf. It’s a hit
During his Christmas break, Dillon Helbig, an 8-year-old boy from Boise, Idaho, wrote a book that he wanted everyone to read.
He had spent a long time on it — four days to be exact — and filled 81 pages of a journal with a richly illustrated tale about how he gets transported back in time after a star atop his Christmas tree explodes.
But he did not have a book deal. (He’s only in second grade, after all.) So when his grandmother took him to the Lake Hazel branch of the Ada Community Library in Boise at the end of December, he slipped the sole copy of his book onto a shelf containing fiction titles.
“I had to sneak past the librarians,” said Dillon.
Over the next month, a series of circumstances made the book one of the library’s most sought-after titles and also inspired children in Boise to write their own stories.
The book, “The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis” by the author “Dillon His Self,” had
drawn so much attention by the end of January that 56 people were on the waiting list to check it out, said Alex Hartman, the manager of the library branch.
The night after Dillon surreptitiously left his book on that library shelf, he came clean to his parents, his mother, Susan Helbig, said.
They called the library, thinking they could pick it up from the lost and found. But the librarians were so charmed that they played along.
The librarians entered the book in their catalog system.
In his “Crismis” tale, Dillon, the protagonist and the author, goes on a time-traveling adventure after the star on the tree explodes.
“Santa comes,” he said, explaining the next part of the plot. After that, Dillon comes across five trees, and one of them “was like a tree portal.”
The portal takes him back in time to the “first Thanksgiving” in 1621, a date that he had to confirm with his mother, Susan Helbig said.
Dillon has been writing “comic-style books” since he was 5, his mother said, but this one is certainly his most successful.
Children have told Hartman that they, too, want to write books for the library. A local author, Cristianne Lane, has offered to work with Dillon to create a children’s writing workshop at the branch.
Dillon has exciting plans for a sequel: “My next book,’’ he said, “is going to be called ‘The Jacket-Eating Closet,’ based on actual events.”*