Should We All Celebrate? by Chitra Soundar

We All Celebrate, don’t we? Autumn is here and that means across the world, many communities are celebrating different festivals through the next few months as skies darken and the air turns cold and traditionally was the harvest season in the Northern Hemisphere. 

Last week marks the start of Dussera or Navarathri for me as a Hindu from India.  Hindus across the world mark nine days of Dussera celebrations in different ways. And then it leads up to Deepavali or Diwali, one of the largest Hindu festivals. Did you know the same day is marked as a festival by Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs too? 

As a writer of picture books and writing in the UK, I always wondered why there weren’t that many picture books about Deepavali (or Dussera for that matter) and why the lead up to Christmas, booksellers didn’t highlight this wonderful festival of lights?

So, when Albert Whitman from the US asked me to write a Deepavali book, I was absolutely elated. 

Illustrated by Charlene Chua

In some ways, the US had caught the wave a little sooner. These books were published both by indie and big publishing houses and very popular among South Asian families and western families in the US.

But my original complaint remained – why aren’t UK publishers not interested in other religious and cultural celebrations? 

Do we need another Christmas book? Actually, do we need another Santa Claus / Father Christmas book? Even if we do, can they feature different communities celebrating Christmas in diverse ways? 

Will the children that are not celebrating Christmas be missing out on their own celebrations?

To counter this dearth of books, I wrote a Diwali counting book (which will come out soon! Shh!). 

Then I wanted to address the above question. Can I highlight celebrations that are not so well-known? So I pitched this book (We All Celebrate) to Tiny Owl and they loved it. With Jenny Bloomfield's glorious illustrations, this book will be out this autumn, right in time for the festival season. 

Illustrated by Jenny Bloomfield and published by Tiny Owl Books

But back to Deepavali (or Diwali as many call it) books in the UK... I went looking for books that celebrate this festival, written by authors and illustrators from the culture the festivals belonged to. 

So, if you don’t see Peppa Pig or Mr Men Celebrating Diwali in this list, that’s why. 

Here are two that came out decades ago.

And here are two just out this year, right in time for this year's festival. What are you waiting for? Go and grab these! 

That is it. Two new books in decades. 

While I have to scroll through a long list of Christmas books, books about Diwali, I can count on one hand - published across four decades. 

We need more books about all the little and big celebrations everyone is celebrating across our country – because we all celebrate and so, let’s celebrate together. 

Here is a call to action!

Are you a picture book writer? Do you celebrate a festival that we are not familiar with? Do you have unique traditions of celebrating a well-known festival? Then why don't you try writing a picture book about it? 

Writing about a festival need not be dry or didactic. It can be full of wonder and storytelling, it can be filled with activities and hands-on fun and it can be joyous inviting others to join in. 

Have a go! Write something different about Christmas or pick another festival from your own heritage and tell us a story that resonates universally! 

'Little Red Reading Hood'- a 'Q and A' with illustrator Ben Mantle, by Lucy Rowland.

For the last post of 2017, the Picture Book Den team put together a joint blog titled 'Our picture books, our favourites' where authors and illustrators shared their favourite self-penned or self-drawn picture books.  You can find the link here:     http://picturebookden.blogspot.co.uk/2017/ 

I chose 'Little Red Reading Hood', mine and Ben Mantle's upcoming picture book with Macmillan.  For me, 'Little Red Reading Hood' is a celebration of libraries, reading, story and the power of imagination.  I believed in the text from the start but it's the illustrations that have really brought it to life with such magic!





The incredibly talented Ben Mantle has a background in animation as well as children's book illustration and he has kindly agreed to take time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions about his work and artistic process.  Thank you, Ben!

1)      You are now a very well established illustrator, with self-penned picture books as well as books that you have collaborated on with other authors. Which projects do you generally prefer to work on?

     This will seem like a cop-out, but it is absolutely true, I really enjoy both to be honest and couldn’t pick between them. Working on your own authored book is special because its your baby, and you get to birth it and see it grow. It’s a lot of hard work figuring it out and writing doesn’t come naturally to me. But, when you get it right, it feels great! However, I love being sent a brilliant story and being able to jump straight in. To read it through and enjoy it like the reader will. Plus, I love adding something new to the story, to my own spin on a book. Both are really team efforts and I really enjoy the variety and the different challenges that come with them. 

2)      If you are collaborating on a book, what is it about a text that makes you want to illustrate it? Was there anything in particular about Little Red Reading Hood that made you want to take it on?

      I guess there are many reasons. I can tell on the first read if it is something I want to work on. Sometimes it’s the characters or the setting that make me want to work on a book or a funny/witty text. It’s also important to me that the text has room to allow me to add something myself, rather than being told exactly what should be on every page.

      With Little Red Reading Hood it was all of those. The Big bad wolf is a character that I’ve always wanted to draw and I really loved the idea of illustrating the woods that Little Red ventures into. The text zipped along at such a pace and made me laugh out loud, which is rare! Any book with line– “What a Barbarian! Wolf had tied up Mrs Jones the Librarian!” is a book that I want to work on.

3)      You used to be an animator, how do you feel that this has influenced your illustration work?

      It has definitely had a big impact. The artists that I really look up to are mostly from the Animation world. Disney artists Mary Blair is so good with colours and mood and Gustaf Tenggren whose work on Pinocchio, I just adore. I would also put Raymond Briggs, Bill Watterson and Hayao Miyazaki in the list too. The skills you pick up working on Animation are invaluable too. Thinking about character, world building, pacing, storyboarding, not to mention the observation skills that really help with posing and composition. I generally can tell an ex-animator in publishing because of these skills.

4)      Could you tell us a bit about your typical working day as an illustrator?

      My working week changes depending on what I’m doing and how busy I am. It’s something close to 9-6 in the studio and then a few hours in the evenings sketching or planning. I’m often working on several things at a time, so you have to be good at managing your time and be able to swap projects easily. My studio in the lovely North Laines of Brighton, surrounded by lots of pubs and cafes. I share the place with a whole bunch of other ‘creatives’. In fact, there’s now 3 of us who all work in Children’s publishing in one way or another, which is very nice. I tried working at home, which I know a lot of illustrators do, but I started to go crazy. I’ll either be working on my Cintiq (think large screen that you can draw directly on to) or at my drawing board, which I use to trace my rough drawings using either paint or pastel.

5)      Fairytales and twists on fairytales have been told and re-imagined many times. Is it difficult to approach a familiar story in a new way or do you see this as an exciting challenge? 

      It is both to be honest. You have a pre-conceived idea of what that world and its characters look like, which is helpful to some degree. It’s like thousands of illustrators have built a nice foundation for you to start. So you need to follow certain conventions so that it has some link to the original, but it often means spending more time finding your own unique take on it.  But that is also the fun! You get to break the rules and surprise people. That’s why I’m known as Ben ‘rule breaker’ Mantle.

6)      If you could illustrate and re-imagine any fairy tale, which would you choose? 

      Oh, now that is tricky! I’d be tempted to go with something dark. You don’t get much chance in picture books to do that. A proper Brothers Grimm, with nothing softened. Maybe, Hansel and Gretel. When I was a kid I had a version of the Beowulf, that I genuinely found the pictures in it terrifying. But, that was what made it so good, it was the anticipation of turning the page to something that creeped me out. I’m not sure if you would class it as a fairy tale, but Alice in  Wonderland would be real fun too. It chock full of brilliant, eccentric characters and already has that gothic darkness that would appeal to me.   

7)      If you were a fairy tale character, who would you be?

  Erm…I’d choose one of them that doesn’t get cooked or murdered. Who does that leave me with?  Maybe a background character. Tim the blacksmith in Hansel and Gretel. Never heard of him? Well, that’s because I made him up, but he lives a very quiet, idyllic life and never meets a witch or wolf or a beast of any kind. Okay, at a push, and if you’ll agree that he’s a fairytale character I’d go for Peter Pan. He never grows up and has to pay bills and he can fly! And looks great in leggings!

8)      What is next on the horizon for you?

      I’m working on some great projects at the moment, but I can’t really say much about them. But I am working on some new text ideas of my own, which I’m hoping to find time to work on next year.  And of course, I’ll be working on our next book together, which is another brilliant rhyming text may I say. I guess you wouldn’t call it a fairytale per se, but it definitely riffs off classic characters and settings. And, actually it’s funny that I said I would like to illustrate something gothic before, because although our next book is light in tone, the setting is darker. But that is what drew me to it, that the characters bring real colour and light to the book and I can’t wait to illustrate that contrast.

Thank you Ben! You can learn more about Ben's beautiful work on his website http://www.benmantle.co.uk/

And you can keep up with all his news by following him on twitter @BenMMantle or Instagram benmmantle 

Editors: 10 Top Tips For Getting the Best From Your Contributors

 By Moira Butterfield

I have been thinking recently about the delicate balance that exists in the relationship between an editor and freelancer. Having been both an editor and an author, I know there is a trade-off between meeting the needs of the company and its sales targets, and keeping contributors engaged and committed and generally ‘onside’. But what constitutes good and bad practice? Below is my list (in no particular order) of suggestions to smooth the relationship. If you are a freelancer, please add your own thoughts and experiences and it would be great to hear from some editors, too.

1. Don’t treat an author’s text as your own. Don’t try to re-write it wholesale. Good authors spend a lot of time choosing the right vocabulary and establishing the right rhythm. Many inexperienced editors don’t realise this and tamper with text too much. Suggest improvements by all means, but let the author convert suggestions into text.

2. Don’t ask your author to make changes without carefully explaining why. This may seem obvious but surprisingly it happens a lot. It isn’t about being above criticism. An author needs to know that the editor is clear about the direction of a project. There’s nothing worse than “Hmm. It’s not right yet,. I don’t know why….Can you sort it out?”

3. If you have a brief or some comments on work, email them over but also make sure you explain properly what you mean. Emails are notoriously bad communication tools. People take them to mean one thing when they mean another. Better to email, then phone.

4. Constant phoning with thoughts and requests isn’t great, either. Not only is it time-consuming, but the freelancer is going to feel that the editor doesn’t quite know what they are doing.

5. I have been to lots of sales conferences in the past, and salespeople often suggest useful improvements to proposed new projects but they have occasionally been known to spout ill thought-out nonsense, too. Good editors can sort the wheat from the chaff and gently but firmly head off the less considered comments. Don’t pass on all comments wholesale to the author and expect them to act on all of them. If there are consequences – a change of schedule or a lot of rewriting – it needs pointing out in-house.

6. If there are changes to be made, is it a rebrief on your part? Did you ask for one type of text and now you’re asking for another? Don’t pretend it’s not a rebrief when it is. If it is, you should allow for more time, and if appropriate, some recompense.

7. Freelancers are not employees. They need to be properly paid for their time and expertise, and treated with respect. See Point 6 above.

8. Keep your contributors in the loop about what’s going on in-house – If there’s been a delay or a postponement, for example. Silence is the worst option.

9. It takes surprisingly little to make a freelancer love you forever. ‘Thank you’ is good. Thank a freelancer immediately for work sent, even though you may not have had time to read it yet.

10. Tell your authors and illustrators what kind of projects your company is looking for, perhaps in the light of bookfair or sales team feedback. Your contributors are creative thinkers and, given the chance, they are likely to produce the goods.

Keeping the balance right is a difficult skill, requiring fine judgment and good people-handling skills. The payback for a good editor is in creating a good pool of creative talented people who are always keen to work for you.

One other thing. Get out of the office once in a while. Come and have a chinwag, a cuppa and a bun. Then you really will have your freelancer eating out of your hand!

PS: It would great to post a similar list from an editor regarding contributors. Do get in touch, editors.

Some thoughts on rhythm in picture books - Moira Butterfield

When I first started to think about this blog I was going to relay the good news that rhythm, offered to small children in the form of songs, poetry and picture books, helps to develop the brain. Now, thanks to the BBC, I’ve discovered that rhythm is even more important than that. Turns out it’s vital to humankind!

Good rhyme helps to anchor a text beautifully and is great fun to read, of course, but this blog is about rhythm – a pattern of beats in a sentence that makes it easy, natural and fun to read. It does a lot more than that, it seems. 

A couple of weeks ago I saw a TV programme (Science Club) in which a small baby had a little hatful of brain sensors popped on her tiny head. Experiments proved that her brain was not merely responding to rhythm but predicting what would come next. The baby had the innate ability to follow sound patterns, which would in turn help her to develop language (and possibly maths, too). This, the scientists suggested, was what separated humans from the rest of animal kind and might have helped them to start communicating in a sophisticated language when everything else was still squeaking and growling. In other words, it seems we’re hard-wired to pick up on rhythm and it helps us eventually to learn to speak.

"Hey Mum, my brain's getting smarter!"

So a tiny baby is already receptive to rhythm, and scientists studying brain development confirm that rhythm helps small children to grow their neural pathways. Very young humans grow their brains at a phenomenal rate, sparking up these neural pathways all over the place – like a tree growing branches. These brain connections help us to do things. Babies start off not doing very much, and as they grow into toddlers and beyond they make more and more neural connections and so start engaging with the world. Rhythm apparently helps to create the neural pathways and repetition helps to strengthen them.

Perhaps all this is why adults instinctively sing nursery rhymes and ‘coo’ to babies. It most definitely suggests that it’s a good idea to read and reread rhythmic text to all small growing children, even the tiny ones. It turns out that babies quickly start to look intently at lips to work out how to copy the shapes that talking makes. So repeated rhythmic sentences (rereading that seemingly simple but well-crafted picture book regularly) can only help.

Science is beginning to prove what we already innately sense. I like to think of parents in prehistory starting it off, perhaps imitating a rhythmic bird call for their babies, then trying it on a drum.


For my part, I think rhythm has an amazing power to help memory. Many’s the time I’ve marvelled at how my brain recalls great chunks of meaningless non-rhyming pop lyrics from long-forgotten songs that weren’t important to me. They just stuck in my head. I think they were glued in by the musical rhythm.

Apart from having these learning superpowers, rhythm in a sentence is vital to someone reading out loud, of course. It makes the reading smooth and natural. Bad rhythm snags the reader, like tripping over a stone.

Rhythmic sentences could be said to be a form of spoken music– the structure of a tune without the tune. In fact, a good rhythmic picture book text is easy to sing, and after countless reads of the same picture book to my sons I’ve been known to do exactly that, to vary the experience for us all.

So rhythm helps the reader to make the experience of reading a picture book an engaging one for all concerned.

To sum up, rhythmic sentences – those that have a good working beat pattern like the beats of a song line – are a powerful tool for helping children learn communication, and they are a vital aid to the reader.


"I think I'll read War and Peace next."

In my next blog I’ll do some deconstructing of the best rhythmic non-rhyming sentences in picture book examples, to discover what works best. I’ll also be examining where problems can occur. All recommended text examples welcome. 

In the meantime you can bask in the knowledge that by writing rhythmic sentences you are not only making them easier to read but you are helping to develop children’s brains.

You probably knew so, but now scientists have said so!

Writing stories fast and to order. How to avoid doing it badly.

Moira Butterfield 
www.moirabutterfield.com
@moiraworld

After last week’s detailed description of a one-off picture book’s journey to press, I thought I would write about another much faster type of picture book story-writing. I mean writing to fit a detailed brief for a book that is paper-engineered and could be described as toy-related. Some blog-readers may get the opportunity to do this, and it requires a different way of thinking.

Here’s an example. A couple of weeks ago I got an urgent email. Such projects are almost always on a short schedule and if you don’t like working fast, never take them on. Be aware that such projects are fee-based and do not carry royalties, so do not consider the work if this is an issue for you.

The project was to write stories for two carousel books. These are books with a story joined to a section that folds around to create a kind of dollshouse scene (I’ll attach a picture showing a carousel book. It’s not mine but it shows the concept).

The books I was commissioned to write already had subjects – a princess castle and a tropical fairy garden. The paper-engineered carousel part of the project was already being designed, and the story part of the book was already laid out in sections, with a rough word count. There were four spreads, and there could be no more or less.

Added to this, each story had to have six characters that could be made into pressout play figures, along with scope for smaller characters and objects that could be added to the carousel scene.

Where to start?

There is a basic vital principle I always bear in mind. This kind of book is going to be played with. The child who gets it is going to use it to create imaginary stories of their own. It’s my job to help them – to prompt them into doing exactly that.

I sit in a quiet room and clear my head of everything. Then I concentrate and start to ‘see’ characters in my head and I watch them interacting and doing whatever it is they seem to want to do. This sounds quite mad, but I am effectively mentally ‘playing’ as a child would do.

A narrative emerges. It must have movement, action and speech. It must be a scenario a child will want to play.

I would approach a text the same way in something as tightly-controlled as a sound book. This type of book has to have a certain number of sounds, which are varied enough to make playing fun. The stories must work hard. They must give lots of opportunity to push the sound buttons, and I would really feel I’d done my job properly if I created characters that a child could take and use in their own imaginary stories, using the sounds in their own way. For this to happen the characters must be quite simple but have something fun about them – a name, a repeated speech phrase or a particular feature perhaps.

Ok, this type of work is not poetry or high art. But that doesn’t mean sentences should not be well-constructed, that there should be good story pace. The story must be well-formed and work if read out loud. It must always work well out loud, which means paying close attention to the rhythm of the sentences (necessarily assuming common speech patterns).

A lot of this type of work is now being done in-house by editors, and all too often it’s being done badly because it’s not just a question of ‘putting down words’ to fill a space. It’s about visualizing the child using the book before you put a single word down on paper. Then it’s about reading out loud to get the sentences right.

Just because such a text might never be up for a literary prize, and just because it takes days not years, it does not mean it should not be the best possible use of words.

Write About What You Know By Lynne Garner

When I first started writing I was advised to write about what I knew. This was why I started writing non-fiction. But I'd always wanted to write fiction, I didn't know where to start. So I found myself still writing about what I knew. For example my first picture book A Book For Bramble was based on my work rescuing hedgehogs (if interested check out my hedgehog blog: The Hedgehog Shed).

Today I still find myself writing books based on what I know. For example my latest picture eBook Captain and Nugget (Amazon UK or Amazon US) uses many of my experiences with the dogs I've been lucky enough to share my life with.

For example not wanting to go for a walk is based upon our previous dog Jodi. Who in old age would  be happy just walking around the car parked on the drive. Great when it was cold and miserable but when the sun was shining I'd often want to go a little further. But it was her walk so she was in charge.

Jodi

Jodi's passion for stealing underwear, especially socks (clean and dirty) appears in my picture book app Puppy, Why Do I Love You? 

As well as drawing on Jodi's habits for this title I also used a few habits my current canine friend, Tasha has. Including:

• Chasing things
• Taking up the entire settee
• Leaving muddy paw prints all over the place  

Tasha

My picture book Dog Did It was inspired by all my dogs and their habit of embarrassing you in front of company. When we are forced to utter those words, "sorry that wasn't me. The dog did it!"

However I'm pleased to announce I feel I may be growing as an author. Because the story I'm working on at the moment does include a dog but it doesn't draw on previous knowledge or experience. You see it features a ghost dog and I've never experienced that!

To end this post I just want to ask what experiences have you used in your books? Go on spill the beans, I'd love to know.

Stories with knobs on – Rebranding a picture book by Moira Butterfield

I don’t write every day. Sometimes I work with other people’s words. Recently I’ve been doing exactly that to a well-known picture book, and I thought you might like to hear about it because it’s a somewhat unusual area for the blog. It’s about things that happen to books long after they’re finished.

If you go to the children’s section of a bookshop, you’ll see that some picture books have been made into ‘brands’ and have their own shelving space. Their content has been taken and reshaped into new ‘formats’ – a word that basically means a book’s shape and size. The content of the picture book might be re-used - with flaps, pop-ups, gatefolds, touch and feel texture, sounds, and all manner of interesting page effects.

This kind of thing has happened a lot over the years with licensed TV characters, but it has recently started to occur with well-known picture books. A top seller may be deemed popular enough to extend into a brand, because parent buyers are familiar with the book. They recognize it, trust it as a good piece of work and are likely to buy others in the series.

That’s where I come in. Authors are busy people and their in-house editors tend to be very busy folk, too, so publishers occasionally ask me to come up with initial ideas for creating a new range. I’ve been asked to do this both for picture books and children’s non-fiction, too.

I start by getting a detailed brief from the publisher. Then I start thinking. 

How do people perceive this book? What does it do, exactly? Does it help to teach concepts, for example, or actions or feelings, perhaps? What can be done with it without stretching it too far and ruining the original spirit?

Then there are ‘price points’ to consider– prices that the public are used to paying for specific types of book.  It’s no use me suggesting anything too expensive. Equally, the publisher and the author won’t want anything that looks cheap and nasty.

There is safety testing to consider. There’s no point in me suggesting some clever-clever idea that is unlikely to pass the stringent safety tests for the age-group. 

I take a long hard look at the illustrations. Can they be taken out of the page to make individual ‘spot art’ – for an add-on poster, for example - or will the publisher need to get more illustrations?

I go shopping to check out what else is being made and sold, for what price, and how successful or otherwise the adapted books are. Some new versions work well, while some betray lack of thought for the end user and the spirit of the original material.

At last I’m ready to come up with a list of format ideas and some general suggestions for making the brand identity strong.

Why did I get asked to do this kind of commission? I once worked for a couple of companies who specialized in creating unusual formats, in the days before apps when the only way to make a picture move was to add some paper-engineering.  I’ve been responsible for creating in-house ranges for well-known supermarkets, who are extremely price-conscious and sensitive to the type of customers they want to attract. 

I’m also a consumer of children’s books and I hate a disappointing format that seems to have no purpose, gets damaged quickly and adds nothing to the experience of reading.

Most importantly I’m an author and editor myself, and I have spent all my professional life working with words and illustrations. That helps me to judge how successfully a new format might satisfy both the reader and the person who came up with the idea in the first place. In the case of a picture book with royalties attached, the author gets the final say about what they might or might not want for their work.

Some may consider that this type of branding devalues the spirit of picture book creation, but I say ‘the more the merrier’ because I strongly believe that very expensive one-off books tend only to reach educated families who read reviews and browse bookshops.  Expanding the range of a picture book, and sometimes bringing the price down, means it gets into the hands of more children. I’ve spent all my professional life believing that and I’m proud of it. 

It also helps the printed picture book market to survive by keeping publishers profitable, and it helps successful authors to make more from their work.

Of course, this all relies on one thing - Someone creating a wonderful book in the first place!

Secrets and Scandals Here! Moira Butterfield

Hmmm. How can I follow Julia Donaldson with sage advice on picture books? Obviously I can’t…I know! I’ll use my best diversionary tactic and tell a rude story.

Did you know that there’s an old biscuit tin that collectors will pay a great deal of money to get hold of? It was made in the 1970s by Huntley and Palmer and it shows a charming Edwardian village scene – except that its designer was so fed up with his fee he sabotaged it and hid several characters in the background doing…ahem…extremely rude things.

Inspired by this, my blog today is a blatant attempt to create a lucrative collector’s market for children’s picture books that include embarrassing mistakes. Hey, every little helps these days, and many authors will have lots of old complimentary book copies kicking around the attic. Most of these are likely to be foreign language translations, admittedly, but there might be one or two with a continuity error in them, fit for collectors of dodgy biscuit tins, wonky stamps and the like. These things happen, even in children’s books. My personal examples come from the early 1980s, before computer systems took over the publishing process, making it easier and much cheaper to catch and correct errors before the printing presses rolled.

When I got my first job as a tea-making junior editor, a publishing colleague turned out to be so fed up that he’d lost the will to function at his desk. It was down to him to create a Disney board book featuring cartoon ducks Hewey, Dewey and Lewey. Nobody checked his work, so when thousands of the books were printed there was no ending to the story, It finished on an ‘and’. The weirdest thing was that nobody ever wrote in to complain. I expect to see it on the Antiques Roadshow any time soon.

On a photographic board book the same employee failed to spot a difficult feature on a photo of a young horse – a very excited young horse, shall we say. We had thick files of complaint letters on that one. By that time the editor in question had left to become a vicar, where I hope he concentrated harder.

As a newbie I was put in charge of innumerable colouring and dot-to-dot books, featuring various different licensed characters of the time. Each book had to have a legally correct imprint detailing the copyright owners – large and potentially litigious companies such as Walt Disney or DC Thompson. Printed advances went to these companies to be checked and signed off, and if anything was wrong, costly pulping of many books might follow. Imagine my panic when I accidentally got the copyright details mixed up on a couple of books and it looked as if DC Thompson owned Mickey Mouse and Disney owned Bananaman!The horror!

What to do? Luckily the young man responsible for sending out the advances could be taken into my confidence and persuaded to ‘forget’ to send them, so nobody noticed.

How much persuading? Well, it’s probably time I gave this blog a little more class and so, as they say in the very best books…Reader, I married him!

As an author you can’t control the mistakes of editors or illustrators but you can make sure you don’t start by leaving a gaping continuity hole in your work, by reading through it and getting someone else to read through it before you send it off. Then - and I know this all sounds obvious - but it really is vital to very carefully check any proofs that come back to you, just in case you’ve mentioned somebody who wears a red bowtie and he’s now wearing a blue cravat but nobody has noticed.

PS: On a non-picture book note, a company I worked for published a recipe book by a newly-celebrated young chef who went on to become a big celebrity. But somehow or other his quantities weren’t printed accurately and the book recipes were a disaster. Cue more files full of letters and a costly reprint. I’d better not point to his identity in any manner. After all, now we are all in another season… but there are two clues in this paragraph. Once you have solved it, it will be time to go and check your biscuit tins.

The Genesis of a Picture Book by Malachy Doyle

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ they always ask.

I point to my skull.

‘Imagination,’ I say. ‘Imagination and experience.’

I always said I’d never have a dog.

Everyone kept saying, ‘You like walking, Malachy. Why not get a dog?’

To which I’d reply, ‘I’m the dog. I need walkies every day or I go stark staring mad. A dog would fuss me. A dog would chase away birds and otters. I couldn’t think about stories. I’d have to think of the dog.’

But then one day, nearly a year ago, a wet bedraggled collie pup came to the back door.

‘I’m lost and I’m hungry,’ she said. 'Can I live with you?

‘I don’t want a dog, I'm afraid,’ I replied. ‘I don’t need a dog. You'd better go home, pup.’

I couldn’t concentrate on the story I was writing.

She was outside, waiting. Outside, whining.

‘I’m still lost,’ she said, when I couldn't bear it any longer. ‘Still wet,’ she said.

I found a piece of bailing twine and took her round the island. No one had ever seen her before.

I now have a dog. She’s called Juno. She’s gone from being a wet bedraggled wobbly little collie to my favourite ever pet.

We walk the beaches every day. She chases the waves, barking like a mad thing. I think she thinks they’re sheep, but watching her do it never fails to make me smile, no matter how bad the writing’s going.

She’s a wet bedraggled happy young collie. The house is full of sand.

I got myself a dog I love. I got myself a picture book out of her too, like you do, and by happy coincidence, it’s officially published on Valentine’s Day - today!

In Welsh, as Sigl-di-gwt (which means Shake-your-Tail). In English, as Collywobble. With illustrations by the wonderful Petra Brown, who keeps getting better and better. And who chose to draw a tricolour collie, without knowing a single thing about Juno.

It's about the sweetest little sheepdog you ever did see. He lives on a farm, in the Welsh highlands (where I used to live before decamping to my Donegal island), and when the first snows of winter come, his courage is tested big time.

But we all know where he's really come from - imagination and experience.

And we all know who he really is - my Juno.

My 'Too Dangerous' Picture Book by Karen King

I've had a few picture books published over the years but my most popular one, a lift-the flap book called Silly Moo! almost never got published. It looks harmless enough, doesn't it?  Yet several publishers thought the story was too dangerous for small children.

I can see your brain ticking here. What on earth did the cow get up to? Did she drive off with the farmer's tractor and crash it? Climb the tree to pick the apples? Go ice skating on the lake? 

Nope. The basic story plot is that an apple falls out of the tree onto Cow's head and she forgets where she lives so wanders around the farm trying to get into the other animals' homes. They all get fed up so decide to drop another apple onto Cow's head hoping she'll get her memory back and remember where she lives.

Still can't see the dangerous bit? Well, let me tell you the gist of my conversation with the first editor who turned it down:

Editor (on phone): We really like this story and would like to publish it.
Me (getting excited): Oh, that's great.
Editor: We need to change it a bit though.
Me (a bit wary): Really? In what way?
Editor (firmly): Well, it's far too dangerous.
Me (puzzled): Dangerous? (wracks my brains) I don't understand. What's dangerous about it?
Editor: Well, the apple falls on the cow's head. That's very dangerous to have something falling on someone's head.
Me (baffled): But apples do fall out of trees.
Editor: And later on in the story the hen drops the apple on the cow's head again.
Me: Er, yes...but it's just an apple.
Editor (sternly):What if the children copy it and go around dropping apples on each other's heads. It's very irresponsible.
Me: I'm sure they won't.
Editor (very firmly):  We can't risk it. it's far too dangerous. We need to change it.
Me: But it's vital to the story. I need the apple to drop on Cow's head so that she gets a bit fuzzy-headed and forgets where she lives.
Editor: We'll have to think of another way to for the cow to lose her memory (thinks for a moment) I know, perhaps she can be running down the hill and she falls over and rolls down to the bottom and hits her head ....

Now I think that sounds far more dangerous than an apple falling on Cow's head!

Similar versions of this conversation was repeated by several mainstream publishers over the next couple of years. I'd almost given up hope of getting Silly Moo! published when the wonderful team at Top That Publishing said that they didn't think an apple falling on Cow's head was dangerous at all, suggested making it into a lift-the-flap book and published it.

Now I know that we children's authors have to write responsibily and be aware of the young age of our readers but I honestly think that sometimes the 'gatekeepers' can be too cautious. What do you think? Have you ever had a picture book turned down because it's too dangerous, not politically-correct or 'unsuitable' in any other way?

www.karenking.net

A New Year, A New Picture Book by Malachy Doyle

New Year. Time to write something new, something fresh.

In January 1997, all fired up with thoughts of Spring, I came up with my ultimate green shoots picture book, Jody’s Beans. It was the first book I’d done with my dream publisher, Walker Books, and it’s still in print fifteen years later, in this dinky little Read and Discover edition. Around the time of publication, Judith Allibone, the illustrator, sent me a beautiful little bean bookmark, which I still use.

I’d a long gap then in terms of any picture book stories which I’d first-drafted in the month of January, coming to fruition. In January 2006, though, I wrote Albert and Sarah Jane, my first for QED, about a too-greedy dog, and a cat who decides to teach him a lesson. But what it’s really about is how lovely it is to have a great big cat-dog cuddle by the fire – very January, that.

In January 2008 I wrote Danny, the Duck with no Quack, also for QED. This one’s about a shy little duck, who wanders off in search of a tale to tell. New beginnings. Finding the courage to start again. Very January, that, too!

And in January 2010 I wrote Collywobble, which will be the first of my 2012 picture books. It’s about a wobbly little collie pup and it’s very much a winter’s tale. It’s published by Pont Books on February 14, and I’ll tell you more about it the next time I post here. Petra Brown, who I worked with on Granny Sarah and the Last Red Kite, has done the illustrations and they’re truly delightful.

So now it’s January 2012. Can I keep up my recently established record of biennial first-month picture books? I’m germinating one as we speak, working title Bob and Dog, but whether it comes to full picture-book fruition, only time will tell. There’s many a slip twixt keyboard and bookshelf, as they don’t say.

I hope that January brings you inspiration, a renewed sense of purpose, and heralds a year of happiness and fulfillment.