My son came into the kitchen last night with this:
It made me laugh a lot. He knows he is neither stacked nor ripped but can laugh about it. My first thought was “how can I get this into a picture book?” before accepting that at 12 his references are now too old for a picture book audience.
When I first started having tutorials with Ness Wood from Orange Beak Studio, she told me that I should utilise my children. It’s useful to have kids around to draw, observe and listen to. These definitely don’t need to be your own kids though. If you don’t have handy children or children-of-friends or nieces and nephews around, you can find them on public transport, doctors surgeries, libraries, in cafes beaches and parks. Take your headphones out and listen to what they’re saying. I bet you’ll get a story idea.
I’m also happy that I kept some of my earliest school books. They’re a really useful reminder of what it felt like to be a little person…
There’s one page from a weekend in 1985 where me and my Dad got stuck in a traffic jam in Wiltshire because the police were trying to stop a traveller convoy from setting up a festival at Stonehenge. Here is my report:
We went to a lovly garden. I collected some lovly flars. But wen we went back to awr hows the polece clost the road because of the hippis. Some pepal took picchers, the hippis were dressing up in army pants. Wen we got home it was haf past ten and it was still ligt and I cod not have a bath because it was to late so I jumpt into my nigty and had a cwic story and went to sleep.
I really remember being in the car with my Dad (who was on the side of the hippies, though I’m sure he was keen to get home) and seeing this enormous convoy of hundreds of people with flags and children and dogs, but I like how in my story I give just as much weight to my bedtime routine. It’s really helpful to try and think about what in a story is most important to the child.
So I hold on to these scraps of childhood, which is so fleeting, and I add to the archive drawings from my kids which I find such an inspiration.
The story for my next book, Invisible Dogs, comes from a conversation I had with my daughter. She was holding out her arm, clutching something only she could see. I asked her what she was doing and she told me all about her invisible dogs. She went into a LOT of detail and I started recording the conversation on my phone. This was what I showed my editor and what got the book commissioned:
Invisible Dogs comes out in May 2024 with Rocket Bird Books
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Love this Ruby, so inspiring. And huge congrats on your next book! Xx
So good Ruby! Love the focus on the bedtime routine as much as the wild events of the day! Def a good reminder of how it is to be a child x