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"Lanterns Are Not Made for Shelves"
Bohdan Borutskyi had stories. He had written several of them already, small ones, the kind a father of four tells and retells. What he didn't have was a finished book.
"I had wanted to create children's books for a long time, but had repeatedly postponed the idea."
Then he stopped postponing. The Valley of Sky Lanterns is now on Amazon: 20 illustrations, one boy, one white-haired craftsman, and a line at the center of it that Bohdan wrote as much for parents as for their children.
"Lanterns are not made for shelves. They are made for heaven."
Meet Bohdan
Bohdan is originally from Ukraine. He and his family have lived in Poland for four years, and he works as a website and custom-solutions developer working with AI.
He is the kind of person who teaches himself things. Sewing children's toys, cross-stitching, repairing household appliances. Creativity, adaptability and self-learning, in his words, have always been some of his strongest qualities.
But none of that is what he's proudest of.
"My biggest achievement, however, is my family. Being a father of four has always given me a strong desire to create stories for children."
A Story Only a Parent Could Write
The Valley of Sky Lanterns is a children's story about parents and children, told through paper sky lanterns. Parents build their lanterns and raise them, giving them love, care, guidance and support. The story also asks a harder question: what happens when a lantern gets too little care, or too much? And how does a parent finally let go?
The idea came from Bohdan's own life as a father, and from noticing how hard it can be for children to talk about what they feel.
"Children can sometimes struggle to express their feelings and problems directly, so I wanted the story to communicate some of those things for them."
He hopes parents close the book seeing their own family a little differently. Raising a child, he says, is a balance: enough love and support, without holding them back from becoming independent.
The Real Obstacle Was Time
Bohdan's problem was never a lack of ideas. It was everything a book asks for on top of the idea.
"I have a big family and a busy career, so developing all the creative skills needed to make a book was difficult. Because of that, I kept postponing my ideas even though I wanted to create them."
He did try. He experimented with ChatGPT Images and with Lovart. Lovart was good enough for character ideas and backgrounds, he says, but keeping a character the same from one scene to the next was the sticking point.
For a picture book, that's not a detail. The boy standing in the workshop on page 12 has to be recognizably the same boy reaching for a lantern on page 16, and the same boy watching the sky fill with light on page 20.
From "Someday" to a Real Project
What changed for Bohdan wasn't just better pictures. It was that the whole thing finally became finishable.
"What made Neolemon different for me was that it helped me move from having an idea and a story to actually creating a finished illustrated book. Instead of my idea remaining something I kept postponing, I was able to bring the characters, backgrounds, and story together and publish the result."
Character Turbo, where characters are created, tops his list of favorite features. Right behind it are the editors: action, expression, perspective and outfit, each one changing a single thing about a character while leaving the rest alone. (If you want to try the same approach, the Expression Editor guide walks through it.)
"The most exciting part was seeing the story and characters gradually come together visually. I enjoyed experimenting with the character edit features like expression and action editing and using Neolemon to turn my written idea into something that felt like a real children's book."
Twenty Illustrations, One Finished Story
Bohdan's favorite moment wasn't a single image. It was the point where all of them stopped being separate pictures and became a book.
"Seeing all 20 illustrations come together as part of the finished story was especially rewarding."
Then he published it on Amazon.
"It was incredibly wonderful. I had wanted to create children's books for a long time, but had repeatedly postponed the idea. Seeing The Valley Of Sky Lanterns become a complete illustrated story and then actually publishing it on Amazon felt like finally turning a long-standing dream into something real."
You can find The Valley of Sky Lanterns on Amazon here: amazon.com/dp/B0H3HGJ4W2
What's Next
Finishing one book did what finishing usually does. It made him want to start the next one.
Bohdan is continuing to write children's stories, and he has already started experimenting with animating the characters he creates.
"My next huge goal is to turn illustrations into animated movies."
What Bohdan's Story Shows
Most people with a book inside them aren't short on imagination. They're short on hours, and on the dozen separate skills an illustrated book seems to demand. Bohdan's answer wasn't to find more time. It was to stop letting the illustrations be the reason the book never got made.
Or, to borrow his own metaphor: a story that stays in a notebook is a lantern left on a shelf.
Ready to Start Your Own Story?
If there's a story you've been postponing, Neolemon is a good place to finally begin. Build your characters, keep them consistent from the first page to the last, and turn the idea into a finished book.
