A Whaleyville woman started imagining what it would be like for her beloved dog Tuffy to be in a kennel during Christmas, and that led to her first book.

Jolene Clemmons has lived in the heart of Whaleyville since 1997, when she moved here due to her status as a Navy wife. She raised her three sons in Whaleyville, and one of those sons later married a woman central to the book’s completion.

Clemmons’ dog Tuffy “was just the love of my life,” Clemmons said. She was planning to return to New York one Christmas and didn’t know what she’d do with him.

“I thought I’d have to put him in the kennel,” she said. “My imagination just started running away.”

The story is about Tug, a dog who is caught by the dogcatcher and put in the kennel on Christmas Eve. He meets a variety of characters, each one modeled after people Clemmons knows.

The twin Siamese cats, Ling and Lang, are modeled after Clemmons and her younger sister, who are polar opposites.

“She’s the one who tried to sneak makeup into school, and I was more into sports,” Clemmons said. “I’m Lang.”

There are three “bad guys” — Fang, Rip and Digger — who try to spoil the Christmas spirit.

The superhero of the book is a pigeon named DJ, named after Donald F. Pulley Jr., who was killed in the course of his security guard work at a Virginia Beach nightclub in 2003. Clemmons said she had met Pulley a couple of times but didn’t know him well, but that his mother had been excited at the idea of the pigeon superhero being named after him.

“You’ve got to have some kind of a superhero,” Clemmons said. “DJ became the superhero in my book.”

But after all the characters were developed and the first draft was finished, the book sat around for years for lack of an illustrator, Clemmons said.

“I pitched it to a lot of people, and I couldn’t get anybody to do it,” she said. “With a kids’ book, you need to have something for them to look at.”

But a couple of years ago, one of her sons married a woman who turned out to be an artist.

“She made my book complete,” Clemmons said of her daughter-in-law, Elise Iannacito. “She saved the day.”

“Christmas in the Kennel” has traveled far and wide, Clemmons said. She sent two copies to Brazil, and a friend of hers recently gave one to a woman she met on an airplane. Locally, she’s read it at the Blackwater Regional Library and hopes to be invited back to read the sequel once it’s completed.

Clemmons said the book is “all about finding the spirit of Christmas and love and peace and hope and togetherness. Whoever surrounds you, you make it a family.”

Clemmons said her husband, Ed Ward, has been supportive of her efforts.

The book is available on Amazon by searching “Christmas in the Kennel” in the books section.