The Night I Almost Lost My Mind Over a Birthday Gift

Let me tell you something.

It was 11:47 PM on a Tuesday night. My twins' birthday was six days away. And I was sitting at my kitchen table, staring at my laptop screen, slowly losing my mind.

See, I had this idea. A simple idea. The kind of idea that should take about fifteen minutes to execute.

I wanted to give my kids a storybook where they were the main characters. Their names. Their faces. Their little personalities woven into every page. A book they'd flip through and say, “Dad! That's ME!”

That's it. That's all I wanted.

Sounds easy, right?

Wrong.

I spent the next three hours going down the most frustrating rabbit hole of my life.

Every “personalized book” site I found was the same thing — a cookie-cutter template where they just swapped in your kid's name. Like a form letter from your dentist, but with cartoon animals.

“Once upon a time, [CHILD_NAME] went on an adventure...”

Seriously?

My daughter is obsessed with space and wants to be an astronaut. My son thinks he's a dinosaur paleontologist (his word, not mine — he's five). They have curly brown hair and the biggest brown eyes you've ever seen.

And the best these sites could do was paste their names into a generic story about a bear who learns to share?

No.

I tried six different sites. Six. Some charged $40+ for what was essentially a mail merge with clip art. One had illustrations that looked like they were drawn during an earthquake. Another took 2–3 weeks to ship.

By 2 AM, I closed my laptop, defeated.

But here's the thing about me. When something should exist and doesn't — I build it.

So that's exactly what I did.

I'm a builder. It's what I do. And I knew that AI had gotten good enough — really good enough — to write stories that weren't just personalized, but genuinely beautiful. Stories with real narrative arcs. Characters with depth. Plot twists that make a five-year-old gasp.

And the illustrations? The latest AI image models could generate the kind of whimsical, watercolor-style art that belongs in a real bookstore. Not clip art. Not stock photos with your kid's face awkwardly Photoshopped in. Actual storybook illustrations where your child's appearance — their hair, their eyes, their smile — is woven into every single page.

So I built it.

Night after night. Tweaking prompts. Perfecting the art style. Making sure the stories actually landed — that they had the kind of magic that makes a kid whisper “read it again, Dad” before you've even finished the last page.

I called it InkFawn.

The “Ink” for the story. The “Fawn” for the little ones it's made for.

And then came the moment that made it all worth it.

Birthday morning. Wrapping paper everywhere. Cake crumbs on the floor. My twins tore open the package and pulled out their books.

My daughter opened hers and saw herself — herself — floating through a galaxy in a spacesuit, discovering a new planet she got to name. Her jaw dropped. She looked at me with those big brown eyes and said:

“Daddy, is this REAL? Am I really in a book?”

My son? He found the page where his character digs up a T-Rex skeleton. He screamed — screamed — with joy. Then he ran to his room, grabbed his toy dinosaurs, and started acting out the whole story on the living room floor.

They made us read those books four times that day. Four. Times.

My wife looked at me and said, “Other parents need this.”

She was right.

That's why InkFawn exists.

Not because I wanted to start a business. Not because I saw a “market opportunity.” But because I was a dad who wanted to give his kids something magical — and when he couldn't find it, he made it.

Every book on InkFawn is written from scratch by AI. Not a template. Not a form letter. A completely unique story based on your child — their name, their look, their passions, their personality.

The illustrations are generated to match your child's appearance on every single page. Curly hair? It's there. Glasses? You bet. That mischievous little grin they do? The AI captures it.

And it takes minutes, not weeks.

You fill out a quick form. Our AI writes the story, illustrates every page, and delivers a stunning 12-page PDF that's ready to read on screen or print at home.

No waiting. No generic templates. No overpriced mail-merge garbage.

Just a real storybook where your child is the hero.

Look — I know there are a thousand things competing for your attention right now. A thousand tabs open. A thousand things on your to-do list.

But if you've got a kid in your life — your own child, a niece, a nephew, a grandchild, your best friend's little one — I promise you this:

The look on their face when they see themselves in a storybook is something you will never, ever forget.

I know because I see it on my twins' faces every single night at bedtime. Eight months later, those are still the books they reach for.

Every child deserves to be the hero of their own story.

Let's make it happen.

— Mark
Dad of twins. Builder of InkFawn.