# Please introduce yourself and your book(s)!
I am Mike Wendling, a dad of three from Edmond, Oklahoma. By day I help run an arena, and by night I write picture books. My first book is Dougie the Dung Beetle: A Story About Sharing, published in May 2026. Dougie finds the greatest treasure in the forest, a giant ball of poop, and cannot wait to share it with his friends. The problem is that nobody else wants it. He has to learn that real sharing means paying attention to what someone else actually wants, not just giving away what you are excited about. It is a read-aloud for ages 3 to 7, and it was written for my own kids first.
# What is the real-life story behind your book?
One night my best friend and I read The Pout-Pout Fish to my oldest son five times in a row. Somewhere around the fourth reading we looked at each other and decided we could write one of these. We drafted a first version that night over a beer, and it was terrible. It took five years of revisions to turn that draft into Dougie. My kids were the test audience the whole way through. If a page did not land at bedtime, it got cut or rewritten, no matter how much I liked it.
# What inspires your creativity?
My kids, mostly. Watching what makes them laugh, what they ask me to read again, and what they act out the next day tells you everything about what works in a story. I also read constantly and bounce between fantasy and economics, which is a strange mix, but both are really about how worlds and incentives work. And dung beetles themselves are genuinely fascinating. They navigate by the Milky Way and dance on top of their dung balls. You cannot invent better material than that.
# How do you deal with creative block?
I write after my kids go to bed, mostly in the notes app on my phone, with classical music on. When I am stuck it usually means the story is not ready yet, not that I am out of ideas, so I stop forcing it and go read something or play with the kids. The idea almost always shows up later, usually in the car or the shower. I have learned to just capture it on my phone and trust the process.
# What are the biggest mistakes you can make in a book?
For a picture book, the biggest mistake is writing for the adults instead of the kids. Grown-ups buy the book, but a child decides whether it ever gets read twice. The second mistake is never reading your draft out loud. Picture books live in the ear, and clunky lines hide on the page and expose themselves the second you say them. The third is making the lesson louder than the story. Dougie has a message about sharing, but if the story is not fun first, no kid will sit still long enough to hear it.
# How do bad reviews and negative feedback affect you, and how do you deal with them?
They sting for a day. I am a first-time author, so every review feels personal at first. Then I read them again and look for a pattern. One person disliking something is taste. Three people tripping over the same page is information, and I would rather know. The feedback I weight most heavily is still the live kind, a room full of kids either leaning in or drifting off.
# How has your creation process improved over time?
I got much better at cutting. The early drafts tried to say everything, and five years of revisions taught me that a picture book is mostly what you leave out. I also learned to test everything out loud on my kids before I believed in it, and to treat the publishing side, formatting, printing, all of it, as a skill I had to learn rather than a chore I could skip. The writing got simpler and the stories got better.
# What were the best, worst, and most surprising things you encountered during the entire process of completing your book?
The best was reading the finished book to my kids and having them ask for it again by name. The worst was how long the middle took, the stretch where the story was not bad anymore but was not good yet either, and there was no shortcut through it. The most surprising was the dung beetle research. These insects are remarkable, and kids are delighted by a poop joke told warmly. Adults underestimate how much joy there is in that combination.
# What are your plans for future books?
Right now I am focused on getting Dougie into as many kids’ hands as I can. My phone is full of half-formed ideas, and if the right one grabs me the way Dougie did, there will be a second picture book. I am not in a rush. The first one took five years, and I would rather take my time and make something my kids ask for by name again.
# Tell us some quirky facts about yourself.
I was raised in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, and now live in Oklahoma, which still amuses my family. I help run an arena for a living, so my days are concerts and games and my nights are bedtime stories. I can recite The Pout-Pout Fish from memory, which is how this whole thing started. And my reading pile is split between dungeon-crawling fantasy novels and books about economics, and I see no contradiction there.
Links
Book (paperback, hardcover, and ebook): https://books2read.com/DougieTheDungBeetle
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/252042851
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wendlingmike
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1175398735648135