We once shared a home with a 7-year-old book critic, and quickly came to appreciate both her literary instincts and her economy with words.

“Boooring,” went one trenchant review.

“This is stinky,” went another.

It took a pretty strong effort on the part of an author to elicit the young critic’s ultimate accolade: “Neat-o Frito!”

The tiny scholar — she is now a young woman with her own tiny critic-in-waiting — was an impatient and ambitious reader. She quickly tired of thin picture books and demanded something with more meat — stories with real characters, stories with plot and conflict, stories that weren’t “boooring.”

The grownups in her family called those kinds of books “chapter books,” because that’s what every other grownup called them. She called them “stand-up books” on the perfectly logical grounds that when you stood them on end, they didn’t fall over.

Henry Holt and Co. has just published Lunchbox and the Aliens, a children’s book by Bryan W. Fields of Denton, and we thought of our young critic as we leafed through the pages of a crisp new review copy. She would have approved of Lunchbox and the Aliens: Literally and literararily, it stands up.

The publication of a smart, funny and gracefully written new book for youngsters is always good news, and the fact that such a book has been written by a Denton author is, as our malapropish mother used to say, gravy on the cake.

The story of Bryan W. Fields, as written in Friday’s paper by Features Editor Lucinda Breeding, is something of a happy tale itself: An Air Force brat grows up enchanted by words and music but leaves them behind to enter the workaday world of grownups. He continues his music studies on the side, however, and the restless urge to write finally manifests itself in the manuscript for Lunchbox and the Aliens. Fields sends it off to Henry Holt and Co., and — wham! — it’s accepted.

It was not as easy as that, of course; it never is. Even bad books are hard to write, if only for the hours of typing they entail. Writing a good one can be sheer torture.

There are those who think of writing as an effete way to make a living, a profession not as worthy of respect as, say, a banker or an entrepreneur.

To them we say, a writer of novels is as pure an entrepreneur as we can imagine. Try this model on for size:

A man has an idea for a product — in this case, it’s a story — and he works on it for years while paying the bills with his day job. Finally, he comes up with a prototype he believes is worthy, but he lacks the means to produce and market it.

For that he needs an investor — in this case, a publisher. He pitches his product to potential investors, and one of them is willing to take a flyer on this new product.

Both parties are taking a risk: The writer won’t make any money if his book doesn’t sell, and the publisher can lose a bundle in printing, distribution and advertising costs.

It may pain both writers and business people to admit it, but the publication of a book of fiction is as pure an example of entrepreneurship as exists in the cold, hard world of commerce. A writer who embarks on that long road follows in the footsteps of King Gillette or Henry Ford as surely as he does those of William Faulkner or John Updike.

Bryan Fields has set himself upon that road, and he seems to have got up a good head of steam already. We wish him Godspeed.