But the writing process began five years ago, when Kinsman was training with a children's theatre company in Chicago. Her passion for and experience with teaching acting to children led her to create a world where her young proteges could lose themselves. But the trek took the 27-year-old Sunnyvale resident for a trip herself.

Kinsman grew up in Portland, Ore., where she knew from a young age that she wanted to do something with acting for a career. "I was very, very shy. I used acting to try to disappear," she says. "I would write plays and produce them with my friends, but I figured out in high school that what I really like is working with children."

She took off to Seattle Pacific University, where she considered majoring in education before going for a theatre degree. "It's more fun to work with kids outside of the classroom," Kinsman says.

Currently, she works with students both inside and outside school--Kinsman goes into classrooms in Walnut Creek through the city's Civic Arts Education program to incorporate theatre into language and literature lessons. "I'll do things like a script reading in class, which helps with reading comprehension skills," she says. "Everything is based on the California state standards."

Outside of local classrooms, Kinsman is the artistic director of Portola Valley Children's Theatre Conservatory, teaching 12 classes to children from 3-years-old to middle school age.

She received training in this kind of education with various companies, including Piven Theatre Workshop in Chicago, where she moved after graduating from college. "I got there on Sept. 9, 2001, and no one was hiring for a while after that," Kinsman says. "I decided to start writing." Kinsman counts children's fantasy authors like Madeline L'Engel and C.S. Lewis among her favorites and decided to place her story in a similar kind of fantasy world.

"The idea of fantasy is really interesting--there's this magical land where the rules don't apply. The book has a really good message for kids because it shows that when people like them are put in extraordinary situations, they can do good things," she says. "A lot of writers deal with issues like these in very dark ways, but with fantasy, it doesn't become depressing."

In Luconeth, two young girls are thrust into this unfamiliar world in the clouds and have to figure out where they are and why they're there. The story has roots not only in Kinsman's own interactions with children--her experiences with teaching children on the South Side of Chicago play a big part--but strange situations that have happened to her as well.

"One time, I was driving and I saw this rainbow," she says. "It had to have been an optical illusion, but it looked like the rainbow was starting right there in the car, like I was driving through it. I was looking for a way for the characters to get from the real world to the fantasy world, and this was it."

While in Chicago, Kinsman met her now-fiancé, and followed him to the Bay Area when his job shifted locales. It was here where she finished the book and decided to publish it herself, with a print-on-demand company called AuthorHouse. "I worked on it for so long that I just wanted it to go out the way I wrote it," she says.

Her connections in the area helped along the way. The mother of one of her students provided the cover and inside illustrations. The Starbucks at the corner of Mary and Washington avenues that Kinsman frequents will host a book signing on Feb. 26. And some of the teachers she works with in Walnut Creek are already reading the book to their students. "I walked into the classroom, the kids were just looking at their teacher reading, fascinated," she says. "If the books sell, that's good. But I just want people to read it."

The conservatory in Portola Valley is helping as well, by hosting its own book signing on Earth Day to honor the book's environmental message. Some of Kinsman's students have also put together skits inspired by the book and will perform at her appearances around the area.

"Naomi is an incredibly gifted young woman. She knows how to draw children out and take them into a world of fantasy and imagination," says Cheryl Goodman-Morris, director of the conservatory and the pastor at Kinsman's church, Valley Presbyterian Church in Portola Valley.

Kinsman says she already has ideas for her next book, which will likely be set in the same land she has spent so much effort constructing.

Kinsman will sign copies of Luconeth on Feb. 26 at 2 p.m. at Starbucks, located at the corner of Mary and Washington avenues in Sunnyvale. For more information on her book, visit www.authorhouse.com.