Hopes and Dreams

The hopes and dreams of the last thirty years came to pass earlier this year. In my late teens, as a writer and illustrator, I started working on a series of children’s stories. Sadly, these never went into print. But I never gave up the ambition to write and illustrate children’s stories. Last year I did a story for Reader’s Eden. I illustrated a story called “Zap”, a lovely little story about a young boy and his cat. I very much enjoyed working on that but it was only ever going to be an e-book. I showed my friend and editor, Laurie Sanders, the book, she loved the pictures and felt as I did that it was a pity it was not going into print. We batted some ideas around until late last year when Laurie and myself started working on “A Very Special Place to Poop”. The humour of the book, title and subject matter hit us from the start. I found myself laughing out loud while drawing the pictures, if I could draw your attention to the page where bears go for a poop, there is a squirrel in the tree and a rather startled looking snail below. It is one of my personal highlights. The humour went all the way through the book, like a stick of Blackpool rock, from the expressions on the animal character’s faces to our E-mails. “Our poopbook”, “More poop ideas”, “Here is another poop picture” were commonplace titles and were the source of many laughs during the book process.

We love the book and we hope adults reading it will find it as funny as the kids. You can find the book “A Very Special Place to Poop” here at Amazon. I very much hope this is the first of many children’s books Laurie and I will do together.

This book broke a lot of new ground for me, not only my first children’s book in print but also the first where I was designer of the book from start to finish. It was a daunting prospect being responsible for each element of the book but, as a bit of a control freak, I do like the control element. Subsequently, I have produced a second book and my current design project is a book on the subject of beauty. I have mentioned it in a previous blog and I hope this book will be out early next year.