Kyle Otten is the author and illustrator of both his books from The Little Polar Bear series, Time For Chores and Waiting For Christmas. He couldn’t have created these books without the help of his late wife, Ashley Otten, and his nine-year-old daughter, Felicity, who is the muse for many of the book’s messages and illustrations. Ashley was diagnosed with non-smoker’s lung cancer in November 2022, and she lost her fight earlier this year (2025). Kyle has to take on the new challenges of raising his daughter and trying to keep Ashley’s name alive, while continuing to work on the books they created together as a family.

The Little Polar Bear books are oriented towards children who are four-to-eight years old; they are built to teach children that chores can seem fun. For example, within the series’ first book, Time For Chores, the main character, Puddles, has to clean up and do her chores before she can play outside in the snow. Everyone has had a similar encounter with their parents, especially as a child: “Puddles is enjoying the view, just wanting to play. Puddles’ mom said, ‘Not until you get your chores done today.’ Puddles pouted and shouted, ‘Please Mom, I don’t like chores.’ ‘Well, what if we start with just the floors?’”

Kyle is serious about his work and expressed that he would never sacrifice quality over quantity and takes pride in it. He is passionate about creating books for his daughter and for any child that would pick up his work.

Shaylie Muehl: How did you get into writing and working on your books?

Kyle Otten: Let’s see. Since I was a kid, art was all I did, even in school. I got in trouble for doodling after finishing tests. Teachers told me you can’t go anywhere with art. I got sent to the office a lot because of doodling. They thought I wasn’t paying attention, but I was just done with my tests early, so I just kept doing what I always did. Mom and Dad told me to keep doing it [drawing] and I went to college for Art.

I never really wanted to write. I’m not an English major and I don’t want to be. I wanted to do other things than just Graphic Design because I can do more than just a graphic designer can. Ashley, at the time, was trying to get me to make a book and I kept telling her ‘no, no, I don’t want to.’ It just takes a long time to make. Eventually, when she got sick, we sat down and I was like, ‘you know what, I’m going to be at home. Let’s just do it. Let’s make some books now.’ It helped because we got cut back to one paycheck, too. […] I was trying to do it once or twice a year to just bring in some extra cash and it ended up becoming just once a year because of all the other stuff going on: driving Felicity around and whatnot. So, I accidentally fell into it, let’s just put it that way. I could do the rhymes and that’s what these books are. I just like doing those kinds of puzzles where I’m trying to figure out how to make the story rhyme. Felicity and Ashley would come up with the ideas of the story, and I would just make it work. I would have people revise it and then I’d go in and draw all the pages that I saw fit for the book. That’s how that all came about.

SM: What made you and your family start creating children’s books? Whose idea was it?

KO: I wanted to do comic books, but those are intense. They are way more work than children’s books… more pages, a lot more drawings on those pages. And I just didn’t have the time. I still don’t [have the time] with a full-time job. Ash suggested it because Felicity was reading a lot of these children’s books. I was like okay, that sounds good. 

I was sitting around, and we were watching a movie. I can’t remember, but it might have been a bear from Brave, maybe, from the Pixar movie. I was like, what about a polar bear because she [Felicity] loves polar bears. We started going down that track and started building the character off her. The stories are her being that bear. So, I went to the drawing board, and I would sit there and draw twenty different bears, and she would keep saying ‘no, no, no, no, not that one.’ Eventually, we narrowed it down to what it became, and I still got push back on it from Felicity. But in the long run she likes it now, so she’s always drawing the bear itself.

We can also give [copies] away if I can make enough money to pay the books off. We still have quite a few that I hand out for free to kids that need them. Occasionally, I’ll give ten copies to United Ways, which my aunt runs (and then she just hands out books). The goal is to eventually try to get this into big publishers.

SM: Because you are self-published?

KO: Yes, the first book I did through Amazon, so I didn’t have to pay any money for it. People would go on there, buy it and then they [Amazon] would print it and ship it, but it didn’t look very good in my opinion. So, the next one I went to do a Kickstarter (kind of like a fund-me thing) and got people to pay for it up front so I can get it professionally printed with really nice paper and metal ink in certain spots of the covers. And after that one I’ve made enough that I put some away for this next book that I’ll just buy them up front and then sell them as people want them.

SM: What is your family’s role in creating the book with you?

KO: Going forward it’s going to be a little different since Ash isn’t here now. But when my sister was helping me clean the house out, we found [an idea sheet] that Felicity, Ashley, and I sat down and we came up with a bunch of ideas of other books we can do down the line. […] I’ll start brainstorming ideas with her–Felicity–and narrow it down. And then I’ll go to write it. Then I get people to double check what I’m writing. Some of my coworkers are copywriters, so they look it over and make some corrections here and there. I do all the artwork in the books and the graphic design of laying the book out with all the pages. So again, that’s why I’m going to a publisher, I’m hoping one day that they can pay me enough to send the stuff that I like. I would sketch it and then fire it off to someone that would create the lines for me to color it. Just cutting back on steps so I can make more books faster. So that’s the goal down the line because like I said, Ashley and Felicity have probably fifty more titles ready to go that we are going to go through.

SM: Your books say that your works are fiction, yet the characters in your work have a remarkable resemblance to you and your family. Do you take inspiration from your own life and family?

KO: Yes,[The Little Polar Bear books are] a very cartoony world of just fun little creatures. There’s not going to be any humans except for like Santa, [The] Tooth Fairy… stuff like that, but all the characters are going to be in a Disney-like style. But yes, we draw the expression from Felicity and Ashley because there’s a mom in one of the books and there will be more down the line with the mom in there and the dad. It’s basically off our family. We do a lot with her for the story. Utilize her, but also keep in mind the stories that are created for her. They’re very kid-friendly and hopefully always will be. My goal is to always have a good message by the end of the book. Whether it starts off good or bad, by the end, there’s lessons to be learned.

SM: How do you come up with your ideas? What is your creative process?

KO: I buy a lot of kids’ books. It might look weird when I go to the store and I’m buying kids’ books, but there’s a lot of cool artwork in those books that inspire me. I might take some pages and be like I can do this or make it better with my style or whatever the case may be. The way I usually go about the process is after we pick a title, I see some of the pages I think I want to draw, like, ‘this might be cool’ and then I’ll try to work. I’m probably doing it backwards, but I tried to work on the text to fit some of the pages. I’d say that probably ten out of forty pages, of what I call hero shots where they’re the important pages. The pages I want to draw so I know that’s backwards, but again, I’m not an English person. Being an artist, I see cool art first and then I work backwards from that. That’s how I usually come up with some of these pages I’ve made and then flow the story through that. Sometimes it works, sometimes I had to readjust the drawing because the text in my head wasn’t working how I thought I would see it on paper.

SM: You illustrate all your work. Was this something that you always wanted to do, or did it just work out that way?

KO: Up until I was in high school, I wanted to do illustrations, comic books, graphic novels—just drawing in general. It kind of goes back and forth right now because when I was in high school, Pixar made the first Toy Story and at that point I wanted to do animation only (whether it be for 2D cartoon animation or 3D animation). I kind of bounce back and forth between the two and that’s probably also why I don’t get as many done as I want because I’m learning outside of work. But [in] the art field itself, there was a time when I was thinking about making the book, instead of drawings with 3D pages, the characters are made in 3D and then I would use those as the pages, like a screenshot. My wife turned that down because she wanted it to be hand drawn, so I went on the harder route. Now that AI has come out, it [have] would kind of looked along those lines and people probably think it’s AI. So, I’m glad I didn’t go that route.

SM: How do you decide on the themes or the messages in your books?

KO: We would sit around with all the downtime with Ash not being able to leave the house (being sick). We would watch movies, and Felicity would be playing while Ashley and I would go back and forth with this idea, and she would just write it all down. I didn’t know she was writing it all down until we went through and cleaned things out and saw them. I was kind of worried that I wouldn’t remember everything. It helps jumpstart that route and then when you pick a book title, we would think about what Felicity would do at this point because she is a good kid. What would we want to see in books that we would buy for her, as far as the message would come down to? That’s how we went about coming up with the messages. We always kept her in mind because other kids her age would be reading it too, so keep it nonpolitical, family-friendly… just good life lessons that a lot of kids should hopefully want to know or will learn from the books we will make going forward as well.

SM: How did you choose names for your characters? Puddles, for instance?

KO: That was an accident. In comic books they always do things like Peter Parker, they use alliteration. So, we just started with Puddles the Polar Bear, Manny the Moose, and they just seem to work. We had six or seven different names for that one and then Felicity loved that name. I was good with it. I don’t know why we loved it, it just happened that way, so it worked out.

SM: Well, she knew [what] she was talking about.

KO: Yes, like I said, everything was all started and built for her. We wanted her to heavily influence books and I still do. If she doesn’t like it, the kids are not going to like it either, so I try to keep that in mind, too. She hasn’t done the pages yet, but eventually one day I want her to do it. A book or two here and there. In this next one, she’s going to be drawing a lot of different tooth fairies. They’re going to be going back and forth arguing about whether it is a nice or bad tooth fairy. And she’s going to be drawing a lot of those pages. So, I’m trying to start fitting her into the book itself.

SM: What made you choose a polar bear as the main character? Was that something Felicity helped you with?

KO: Yes, because I didn’t want a bear, I wanted the moose. My freelance business was called Blue Moose Creative Studios. It still is, but I don’t really advertise anymore. I don’t try to find work, because this stuff keeps me busy enough. So, I wanted it to be a moose. They [Ashley and Felicity] both wanted it to be a girl, and not a moose. I jammed my character into their book because I wanted to and it ended up working. They love having those two as the main characters in every book, and then there’ll always be a third one, whether it’s a penguin or a fox in different stories coming up.

There will be different characters, but those are the two main ones. Puddles was there because those two wanted something cute and whatnot. But like I said, now they love that the moose is in our books. Eventually, I want to drift off and do Manny’s Adventures, and it’ll be more boy-themed, like a spin off. […] I guess what they call it now is a universe, but it’ll be like he’s going off and doing more boy stuff where right now it’s more family-focused. Me, being the guy drawing the book, I want young kids to play outside more instead of being on their phone. Girls can get it too, but he’ll [Manny] be doing more boy things in those books. That’s the goal… to keep building these characters out and building out more and more books. Whether that happens tonight or at all comes down to time and money.

SM: Can you share a particularly difficult or surprising moment from the writing or publishing process?

KO: Again, [I’m] not a writer, so I would sit there and quickly come up with a whole story fairly quickly, while they [Ashley and Felicity] were watching a movie. During that movie, I would go into the bedroom with their title and just start writing. It’s only a two-sentence rhyme, which I like doing. I could brainstorm the whole book out quickly with keywords and then I just start messing with text over on the side paper. I’m trying to make rhymes work, but sometimes I was jamming them in there. Then I’d have to go back and tweak them, but that’s how it always started and that is not my strong suit. I would have people come back from editing, like my sister, and they would change several words, and it made me mad, but it actually rhymed better. Having them and a little input from other people seeing the work from a different eye-set [Point of View] always helps because I’m stuck on one thing, where they might look at it at a bigger picture and idea. So, they might throw me ideas and then I would go in there and start trying to rhyme those and I might add like two or three pages just because I loved their idea. Now, how can I work this into the book? That’s where another challenge will come. It would be a thirty-two page book and it needs to be – for how much we charge – it needs to be forty. I would try to jam in a few more pages and that always became tricky because you’re just trying to hit that forty-page limit with a couple sentences per page, it can be tough.

SM: What is your life like when you are not working on your books or illustrations?

KO: So, if I’m not doing that, it’s full-time-Felicity, coaching soccer two days a week, and then taking her [to] dance, doing homework all those nights. That’s usually my weekdays and it’s just going to be that way for a long time. That’s why it also has slowed down big time on the books. I didn’t realize how much one person has to do when there’s not a second one helping you with all that. […] All time is focusing fully on her–Felicity–doing things for her, keeping her happy and busy and trying to keep her creative herself by just we do other things like her crafts and I’ll just sit down and do crafts with her.

SM: You haven’t published anything since your wife unfortunately passed away. Do you plan on creating more books or are you working on one?

KO: The one we’re doing right now; I haven’t finished the whole book yet. Since I’m not a technical writer, I sent it off to someone on Fiverr that professionally writes children’s books and what I wanted them to do is make sure it’s an art in itself. To make it flow page-by-page to make the kid interested and keep them engaged. What goes on this page? You don’t want it to be too busy. You want breaks with space in the art and the text. I hate someone to just go through and just take my words and rework them in a different way. And they sent that back. And now I’ve sketched all the pages out of this tooth fairy book that we’re working on. I probably have about ten or fifteen pages out of forty finished, so I would think. I’m hoping by November this book will be done. It’s about a tooth fairy and it’s called Don’t Trust the Tooth Fairy.

Puddles is running to Manny’s house. We’re trying to get out of the Arctic. I’m sick of drawing everything blue. So now we’re going to use mountains and trees, and, in this book, she [Puddles] loses her tooth. I won’t say how. She goes to his [Manny’s] house to show it off because she’s super happy and he’s terrified because he’s heard that it’s [a tooth fairy] scary and mean and she’s like no, it’s sweet, she’s sweet and whatnot. And then they argue back and forth by drawing what they think the tooth fairy will look like. And halfway through the book, they decide they want to try to trap it–the tooth fairy–to make sure they know what it looks like. So, they stay up and they end up falling asleep. She comes through, does her thing and the message of the book will be something along the lines of, ‘she is sweet and we should try to catch her and well, we will try to catch her next year.’ We’ll try to do a better job of catching her.

So, the book is, I would say, probably halfway done. Again, I’m hoping to have it done by November. My goal was one a year. I’d be lucky to get one a year since Ash. I was just taking a big break from making a book, jumped into it late and then now it’s just trying to finish it to get back on track.

SM: Do you know when your website will launch or is it on the back burner?

KO: I had a website, and I had to switch hosting plans. Again, doing my freelance business, I had a hosting platform through GoDaddy and it was getting very expensive. So, I took my clients and whatnot to a different hosting platform, and the page is on a ‘coming soon’ screen. Right now, I’m rebuilding it. I had one before, it basically had information about my family, about the books and that it has like a link to where to buy them and that’ll all be coming back before I launch this next one. That was my least pressing issue just because I didn’t really have anything to sell yet until I get this one done, then I’ll have a bundle of three.

SM: What advice would you give to someone who wants to write children’s books?

KO: You have to like it. Because it’s not hard.  If you don’t like it, you’re not going to have a good story. It’s not going to come out well […]It’s going to come from the first one I wrote; I wasn’t really into it. Like I told you, my wife wanted me to do it. She said no, you have to go back to the drawing board and then I started looking at other books. I was like, you know what, this can be fun. This, I can do my art in a kids’ style even though I don’t do kids’ style art. But I can separate it. I thought about it that way so I can make some cool art here, but I need the story to be good, too. 

My advice would be like to do it if it’s for a children’s book. If you don’t like it, the stories didn’t come off that you don’t like it. You have to love what you do, and I am starting to like writing them more. Every time I do one, I’m like, I could try this now. I could try this stuff I didn’t think of before that I think could help better the book. But that only came because I actually doing it now, where before it was like it felt like a chore and then Ash got sick and I was, you know what, this would be a good family project for us to bond together more and that’s when I started taking it seriously and having fun with it and that’s when the story started becoming more kid-fun because it has to be that whimsical fun. 

These kids are crazy and wild. Their imaginations are nuts! What happened to that? We’re trying to get more imaginative as we go into this world. It’ll help keep the books fun. That is fun to me, which then shows them the writing, too. So, I guess that would be my advice. If you don’t like it, then write a different type of book. This is just so different than comic books or graphic novels or even a novel, it’s just a whole different ball game.