The Second Bloom of Nancy Strom

Scooter and Friends Take a Vacation by Nancy Strom

NAPERVILLE, IL / ACCESS Newswire / December 15, 2025 / There are people who spend their lives collecting stories, even when they do not yet realize they are storytellers. Nancy Strom is one of them. Her life never followed the cinematic arc of a prodigy writer, nor the caffeinated urgency of someone chasing publication in their twenties. Instead, her imagination aged like an heirloom kept at the back of a drawer, waiting for the right season to return to the light.

At eighteen, she met the book that planted the seed. Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows wrapped itself around her imagination with its gentle animals, its riverbanks, and its unhurried wisdom. But she was soon on her way to UC Berkeley, stepping into a world of academics, administration, responsibility, and adulthood. The enchantment stayed with her but made no demands.

Her early career unfolded in the structured hum of university life. Nancy served in Academic Personnel at the Chancellor's Office and later at the Lawrence Hall of Science. When she eventually moved to Seattle, she transitioned into personnel and office management for a major law firm, becoming the quiet axis around which entire departments ran smoothly.

For decades, she lived in the world of people: hiring, mentoring, organizing, guiding. A life of impact, far from the whimsy of talking animals and rhyming lines. Yet nothing about that detour diminished the stories waiting inside her. It simply ripened them.

When she retired in 2002, she stepped immediately into service work, joining the Board of Directors for the Pacific Northwest USO. For eight years, she contributed to the well-being of military families, even serving on the Executive Committee. It was meaningful work. It was patriotic work. It was work that mattered.

Then life, as it sometimes does, delivered a difficult chapter. Health issues required her to step away from the board in 2014. The shift left her with both space and silence, the kind of quiet that invites old memories to surface. And from that quiet came the voices of those long-loved fictional animals she had met half a century earlier.

It wasn't nostalgia that drew her back. It was recognition. After years of serving institutions, communities, and families, it was finally time to create something of her own.

She decided to write a children's book. Not just any book, but one built on the values, emotions, and warmth that had shaped her own reading life. She created a cast of lovable animals. She let them speak in rhyme. She sketched a small adventure full of curiosity and gentle humor. And she poured into it the kind of sincerity that only comes from someone who knows what childhood magic feels like and understands how precious it is.

When the first draft was complete, she faced a second mountain: publishing. This was where many new authors would give up. Nancy did the opposite. She immersed herself in research, joined the Alliance of Independent Authors, and studied every part of the independent publishing ecosystem. Through that journey she found Ocean Reeve Publishing, a team that helped her refine her manuscript, collaborate with an illustrator, format her pages, and shape her narrative into a professional, polished picture book.