OK, it’s just gone Halloween so it must be about time for another update on my, ahem, little summer holiday project of writing a childrens’ book with my two kids…

I’m not expecting that anyone will have kept up with the many twists and turns, but in short. I started by writing a story with my eldest daughter, Alba, who is very creative. We spent many hours on it, and I took great delight in explaining to her all about the theory and structure of story (almost all stolen from the various how to write a novel books that I’ve read recently). Eventually we were happy with a story about a half cow half dog that lived on a nuclear powered farm under the captive of a crazy scientist. To keep my youngest child Rafa quiet we also spent fifteen minutes writing a story for him.

We then spent weeks researching illustrators, and me attending counselling once I realised how much illustrators cost.

We chose an illustrator for Alba’s story, and pretended to choose an illustrator for Rafa’s story, assuming he’d forget all about it soon enough, and go and find some worms (he likes worms, in fact he enjoys eating most insects).

We were ready to commit to the illustrator, and took one last look at the two stories – and suddenly realised that the one we’d spent hours on was kind of a bit odd – especially for kids. While Rafa’s fifteen minute wonder, was actually kind of much better…

So we shelved Alba’s book (for now), and everyone began work on Rafa’s story: The Hole in Casey’s Garden. It’s about a small boy named Casey, who digs a hole in his garden and fills it with wonderful things like rollercoasters and ice cream factories and water slides…

We found another illustrator – and got really lucky this time, in getting Gill Guile interested. Gill is totally amazing and has illustrated and written over five hundred children’s books. She doesn’t normally work with total amateurs like me, but it must have been our lucky day as she agreed to work on it. We were then able to more or less stop doing anything ourselves and just wait for the sketches – and then the finished painted artwork to land in dropbox, each one more beautiful than the last. They really are quite stunning (and don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.)

So what’s left to do? Well it turns out quite a lot. Production, publishing, printing, distribution, a launch, marketing and I’m sure lots more that I haven’t thought about and will only discover when it’s too late.

I decided to cheat on the production, so I asked Rob, my cover designer and a good friend, to handle the book layout. He’s very visual, and actually trained in this sort of thing, and getting him to do it properly would allow me to focus on writing my next book (which I’m already half way through, so it was a good decision). It also allowed Rafa to start school!!! (he’s doing really well)

But we didn’t want to let the illustrators and designers have all the fun.

Enter the Endpapers. The what? you might be asking. The Endpapers – the normally blank pages at the beginning and end of books, that are there for something to do with printing, the exact reason I’ve never fully grasped. That’s not important here, what is important, is that we’d noticed how some kid’s books use these pages for random, pretty pictures or illustrations. If they can do it so can we. I decided to give these pages to the children to go totally wild with (and to help a little bit)

After some thought they decided to illustrate the endpapers by drawing a Rainbow Dinosaur World. That sounded just fine by me, so we began by getting all the paints out. First attempts though, weren’t good. The rainbows colours all merged together into brown, and the dinosaurs were unrecognisable. We switched to coloured sharpies, and things improved a little, but the paper was getting sodden with ink and falling apart. It just wasn’t working.

Then we had the – I think – genius idea of combining the kid’s terrible drawing with a little bit of 21^st century technology (Photoshop). We cut out and photographed the least awful of the dinosaurs, and stuck them all into photoshop, whereupon we could duplicate them, move them around, and do all sorts of funky things like change the colours, move their legs, make them bigger or smaller…

The end results (and we only got to the end because the computer ran out of memory) are below. They’re also, almost all the work of the children themselves, which I think is super impressive. But then I am their dad.

So when, you might be wondering, is this labour of love masterpiece actually going to be available? The answer is soon, but I’m not quite sure yet. It turns out that supplying printed children’s books is totally different to publishing ebooks, or even paperbacks for adult books. I’m currently up to my ears in print quotes from China, shipping manifests and warehouse bills of sale – none of which I even slightly understand. I did promise that it would be here for Christmas, and I’m still trying, but I don’t quite yet have my head around it all. (I promise you, it’s really complicated, at least for someone whose job these days is to sit around the house in their pyjamas making stuff up).

But those endpapers..!

🙂