Writing a Children’s Book Is Child’s Play. Apparently.

I have been writing children’s books, which sounds delightful. You imagine me sitting peacefully at a desk (or the dining room table; because the Squeeze claims the study), smiling fondly as a golden giraffe swallows a star or a sleek red fox paints the house like Picasso.

That is not what happens.

Writing the story is the easy part. You invent a giraffe called Horatio or a fox called Dionysus, give them a small behavioural problem, destroy part of a house and finish with a charming rhyme. Lovely. Then you begin the illustrations—and discover you have accidentally entered a long-term dispute over continuity.

On page one, Dionysus is a handsome red fox with white paws and a magnificent russet tail. By page six, he appears to have changed species, gained several kilos and undergone facial reconstruction. Grandma Sookey is no better. She arrives with big hair and makeup like a clown, but two pages later she has a different face, different clothes and possibly a different ethnic background. Nobody mentions it. Apparently, this family has experienced stranger things.

Then comes the text. At first, I thought it would be helpful to have the words placed neatly onto each illustration. That was before discovering the words were either too large, too small, in the wrong place or sitting directly across Grandma’s forehead. So now I want every picture without type. I’ll put the words in myself in Photoshop, where I can move them around until they behave—or until I lose the will to live.

There are also approximately nine hundred tiny decisions nobody warns you about. Is the fox bright red or russet? Are his paws white enough? Is the giraffe too yellow? Does Grandma look startled, terrified or as though she has just remembered she left the iron on? Is that the same chair from three pages ago? Why does the hallway now lead directly into the kitchen? And when did the house acquire a second staircase?

Children, of course, will notice every mistake. Adults might politely overlook a fox whose tail changes colour halfway through the book. A five-year-old will point at it immediately and demand an explanation. You cannot bluff a five-year-old. They are tiny continuity editors with no social filter.

Still, I’m enjoying it enormously. There is something wonderful about watching characters that have lived in your head finally appear on the page—even if they occasionally appear with the wrong face, an extra window and a grandmother nobody has seen before.

Soon I will have two beautifully illustrated children’s books: The Day My Giraffe Swallowed a Star and The Day My Fox Painted a Picasso. Then, I'll move on to the next one. A bunch of stories about a little kid and their outrageous pet!

Or I will have 147 pictures of unrelated foxes, six different grandmothers and a permanent twitch in my left eye.

Either way, something is getting published.