A twist to Gail Condon’s story
NURSE Gail Condon could never have dreamed that her attempt to cheer up a six-year-old who came into hospital with an asthma attack would turn her into an entrepreneur.
Shortly after Gail had qualified in paediatric nursing, she met the little girl, who was nervous about being in hospital and worried about using the nebuliser with which she had been issued.
Gail, who had also had asthma as a child and loved drawing, empathised with the little girl’s fears.
To cheer her up she quickly sketched a little drawing:
“I did a little personalised drawing of her using the nebuliser and it broke the ice.
“It was like a special gift to her — it helped her to understand why the nebuliser was being used and, along with a clear explanation, why she in particular needed to use it.
“It’s about including children in what needs to be done,” she explains.
The little doodles came naturally to Gail, who is artistic and loved drawing all her life.
“We always drew a lot in our family. My sister is very talented, my aunt is an artist and I learned a lot about drawing from my granddad. I always used my drawings in school for projects, for example. I love communicating through pictures and drawings.”
Gail qualified as a nurse in 2010 and worked for three years at Cork University Hospital and Crumlin Children’s Hospital — and following the incident with the six-year-old, she didn’t initially reflect much on the positive effect of the sketch on her young patient.
However, as time went on the Cork city native found herself doing more and more little doodles to reassure and amuse children in hospital. Sometimes she would make a little card for them, or even sketch out simple one-off information pages.
“If for example, they were coming in for a tonsillectomy I would do a drawing of what was due to happen to them .
“They were simple little drawings. I’d do them particularly for children who were a bit more nervous than others about certain procedures.”
The funky drawings of little people with big eyes seemed to get through to children in a way that words did not, recalls Gail, now 28 and a mum-of-one.
“I’d just have a few pages of personalised drawings or a little doodle explaining what was going to happen — the children could keep it, and it was on their level.”
Her success with the children in hospital inspired her to write a blog about how to communicate with children generally.
That evolved into the creation of hand-drawn eBooks for children under the age of 10, called Writing for Tiny and an accompanying website, also called Writing for Tiny, on which the books were sold.
The personalised eBooks are specifically designed to help parents and children to communicate about things that they may find difficult to talk about — moving school, going to hospital, a visit to the dentist.
Sometimes it can just be hard to find the right words, says Gail, who believes this is where Writing for Tiny can help.
“The child loves the story because they are in the story. The parent has a tool through which they can get their child to understand and to open up,” she explains.
Topics cover everything from the arrival of a new baby in the home to a stay in hospital.
As time has gone on, Gail has found she was unable to keep up with the demand to personalise large quantities of books by hand.
So she decided to see if she could design a type of sofware to personalise the books instead.
In 2012 she switched to part-time nursing to begin a four-year degree course in Speech and Language Therapy.
Around that time, however, Trinity College Dublin began a programme for start-up companies. Gail entered her range of books —- Writing for Tiny —and was accepted into the college’s first Business Incubation Programme, Launchbox, in the summer of 2013, and deferred her degree.
Her range of books expanded to take in the subjects of bad dreams and moving house, and a software developer came on board.
Throughout the summer and autumn of 2013 she worked on getting the software ready and re-building the website.
That November her daughter Rosie, now 10 months, was born.
In June 2014 she was accepted for New Frontiers, an entrepreneur development programme run by Enterprise Ireland based at the Dublin Institute of Technology.
“The focus here is to develop my business skills.”
Demand for her books has grown to such an extent she is now moving into publishing a range of printed hard-back, 64-page books, all made in Ireland.
The range, which will be launched in mid-October, will feature the child and his or her family members and even the family pet as the main characters in the book.
“It’s very exciting — lots of stuff is happening,” says Condon who has since launched two more eBooks —Starting Montessori School and Starting School. There are now six titles to choose from.
As a new mum, Gail regularly compares life as a start-up founder and mother in her blog, Writing for Mummy.
“Children may be able to tap, zoom, and replay, but they still love books. They still love spending time with their parents, and they still love learning about the world around them.”
* www.writingfortiny.com
