Picture Book Ideas Month: collecting

This is one I ‘read to myself in my head’ on the way to school pick up. Interestingly, it developed from more regular collecting of things to collecting that was a polite way of saying less friendly habits.

I decided it needed a slightly more positive ending – and looked for some good habits to counteract the others.

Some of these belong to people I know – and others came in the musing.

—

Billy collects bottle tops. He’s not fussy: in the recycling box, out of the hedge, scooped up out of the gutter.

He likes the pictures on top – and the sound of them jingling in his pocket.

Sarah collects pebbles. She’s always on the lookout: on the cycle path, off the drive, out of walls of houses (if she can winkle them out with her nails).

She likes picking them up, one by one, and turning them over in her fingers.

Navid collects jokes. Books, TV programmes, sometimes his own inventions.

He’ll store them up for train journeys, boring queues, and the middle of Mum’s conversation with someone else.

Kaylee collects pop stars. The posters, the facts, the clips on YouTube (when Dad’s left his laptop about).

(The stars collect as well: adoring looks, and kisses too, sometimes. They’re pinned to the wall – they might as well.)

Greg collects bruises. Sometimes cuts.

Mostly he finds them after he’s come off walls, before he’s looked (but after he’s leapt), and during football games before the school bell rings.

Tamsin collects habits. She’ll try on someone else’s laugh, another’s way of showing she’s annoyed.

Mostly she tries them on at the bus stop, on the way home. Sometimes people think she’s trying to be funny.

Duncan likes collecting food. Usually other people’s. At breaktime. For someone who eats a lot, he sure moves fast.

I tuck my snack into my coat sleeve, so he can’t see it. It gets a bit sticky after a while.

Samantha likes collecting friends. Sometimes she collects other people’s friends and takes them off somewhere else.

Sometimes she collects my friends and I don’t see them again, all lunchtime. I don’t like it.

Marcin collects people’s names. The boy on the bus, the girl who arrives at the same time, the cool kid three classes higher up.

He’s generous with them too: he’ll call out as many as he can, if he sees you in the morning before school.

Juliette collects games. Tag, hopscotch, shoot the hoop, act out the show.

She’ll have one for you if your toes are touching the wire fences at the side of the playground, unsure where to stand.

Mary collects words. New ones, old ones, ones held together in the middle with little bars.

She pours them all down on the page, and moves them around with her finger, working out which one comes first.

 

Picture Book Ideas Month: garden helpers

Next idea up: garden helpers.

I realised that some of what I’ve written about on the blog before might be turned into a story – from a child’s perspective.

This one happened to me. It was everyday and exciting, all rolled into one, and I’d like to hope that my garden helpers’ experiences were a little like how I imagine it in my head.

—

Two girls are playing in the garden. It is autumn, and a bit chilly out. One girl has her new waistcoat on – the fluffy one she talked her mum into buying.

They are playing with Barbies and pretend food items. They are in that in-between stage: they think of themselves as big girls, but they still like to get their earlier toys out again.

As they lay everything out on the table, make the Barbies talk, they see a woman in the garden next door. She is scooping, moving things with her hands.

They are bored now. They lean over the fence and ask the woman what she is doing.

The woman has seen them playing. She kept doing her thing, they did theirs. Now she shows them what she has in her hands: what looks like a big black binliner that is starting to fall apart.

Inside, she says, is something special. The girls lean in for a closer look – and pull back, fanning their noses from the smell. It doesn’t smell like the plastic toys they’ve been handling. It’s a rich, rotting smell, a bit too much, and good at the same time.

‘This is for the flower beds,’ she says. ‘It keeps the weeds down. It’s called mulch. It’s really just old leaves that have got wet and started to rot. It’s good for the soil, too.’

The girls are intrigued. This is messy, smelly, everything that Barbies are not. In a moment they are round, looking at the stuff in the bags, still put off by the smell. Still intrigued.

The woman goes to the shed, and hunts around for some gardening gloves. They are too big for the girls, really, but the girls are insistent – they want to try.

They all put the mulch into a wheelbarrow and bring it up to the flowerbed. They fork some of it out onto the bed. But the girls are already diving in, using their hands in the too-big gloves, ignoring the soil and muck that are flying up around the new waistcoat.

They put the mulch around the flowers. There’s not much to see. The woman explains that she should have done this earlier in the autumn, but still, it might help the plants now.

The girls get bored of the mulch after a bit. They start to find other things – snail shells that birds have dropped and discarded. Baby slugs hiding in the bottom of a plant pot. They ‘ugh’ and ‘uh’ and see how they can use the edge of a hand-fork to move them out the way.

‘What about planting?’ says the one with the waistcoat. Hard stuff done, yes. Now they want the good stuff.

The woman looks in the shed, and finds some smallish plantpots. She shows them some dark earth that doesn’t smell as much as the mulch. It’s in a bag. They fork it out into their pots.

Waistcoat Girl’s pot is overflowing. No room for the seed. They tip some compost out and bury the seed, then cover it over again.

The woman tells them to put something under the pot, so the soil doesn’t come out when you water it. She suggests they keep their pots on the window sill to get light and help the plant grow.

‘They are summer seeds, really,’ she say. ‘I don’t know if they will come up yet. But it’s worth a try.’

A window goes up, and the girls are called in to tea. Clutching their pots, they wave, and rush up to show what they’ve brought home.

The Barbies, the pink plastic ham and clumps of plastic peas, they stay on the table. The pots make it inside.

The woman looks up, puts away the gardening gloves, and smiles.

—–

I am a bit unsure if this can be a picture book – the girls are older than they might be in a regular picture book. But they need to be – they need the dexterity to do the work, and to be at that in-between age.

What I like about this idea is that it’s really a chance encounter. The girls might just have stayed on their side of the fence. But curiosity brings them over, and helps them try something new.

It’s not about creating lifelong gardeners. But it is about trying something new – and about the natural world having its own fascinations. Just as Barbies have theirs. (Or so I’m told.)

Picture Book Ideas Month: Wellies

Time to begin. With the rain in various degrees of excitability tonight, this idea seems like a good place to start.

Wellies. That’s the idea. A book about wellies. (Wellies, aka wellington boots, gum boots, rubber boots, call them what you will.)

Wellies are such a familiar part of childhood. When I was little, wellies were pretty much all black or possibly green. All the designs, decorations and so on that are now connected with wellies seem impossibly exciting to me.

I want to explore what might happen to you if you put on different types of wellies, different patterns. Whether different pairs might take you on different adventures.

I like the notion of wellies having a mind of their own, possibly getting you into scrapes. The way grownups look at you and think ‘How did you do that?!’ but you know full well it wasn’t you, it was the wellies.

———

Little girl gets new wellies. They are deep blue and have pictures of fish on them. Unfortunately the fish (and the wellies) want to go swimming in deep puddles. Little girl comes home with very wet feet.

Next she tries a pair with frog eyes on – and goes hopping off ahead of Mum, unable to stop. She manages to stop only by grabbing hold of the lollipop man’s pole, and hanging on until Mum catches up.

She borrows a pair that her older brother has outgrown – camouflage colour.  The boots take her under the hedge and vault her over the wall. At least they stand to attention when she and the boots get told off again.

Mum tries a different tack, and buys wellies with lots of flowers on. The flowers start to grow while she is standing in the queue in the supermarket, looking at the comics.

By the time Mum is ready to go, the tendrils have tangled round the trolley, and they are unable to move, until the manager comes out with a pair of Official Use Only scissors.

By now she and Mum are more cautious about the new pairs she tries on. Their neighbour offers to loan them a pair – but they have little spiders and webs on them. Mum and girl look at each other and shake their heads.

Even the ones in the shop window they pass, with butterflies on, make her move on. Her thought bubbles turn into butterflies as they walk away down the street.

Finally Mum finds a pair of plain black wellies. She smiles. The little girl smiles. These should be OK.

The little girl puts on the wellies. She notices that when it has rained, the wellies shine, like ink.

She dips her toe in the puddle, and begins to write.

————-

Some of these types of wellies are real – we own a pair with spiders on. Ones with frogs on are pretty commonplace. There are plenty of pretty-pretty wellies with dots and rainbows and so on, so inventing ones with flowers or butterflies seemed pretty straight forward.

I can see the wellies in my mind’s eye, perhaps a line of them on the cover, or in the end papers. I have in mind something of the jumble of wellies that you see in nursery cloakrooms on wet days.

I can also picture the final page, where the welly starts to write – the stroke would look something like one with a Chinese calligraphy pen.

Part of the attraction for me about the topic is that it’s very commonplace – but it then becomes extraordinary, as often happens in picture books. Small children have a strong liking for wellies – and their mums tend to have a strong dislike for the full-on jump in puddles.

Having boots with a mind of their own makes it possible to have an excuse for why you are soaking wet – again. Plus children can be quite territorial about wellies, so they take on personas of their own.

I am making a point of not researching during this month – at least, not picture books.
I don’t want to turn round and find out that someone has written something like this – or has even just done The Great Big Book of Wellies.

I’ve got my feet wet. Time for the next idea.

A new post a day challenge – and wimping out

So. This is what I’ve been avoiding writing about. Now I’ve limbered up a bit, it’s time to tell you about it.

I had lots of intentions to spare you all the sometimes over-hectic posting that once a day can bring. I was going to do the sensible thing – plan the posts, store them up, let them out little by little.

Then someone in one of the online groups I’m part of mentioned this: November as Picture Book Idea Month. PiBoIdMo, for those who need to know. And I realised this was the kind of challenge I was interested in.

So what did I do? I wrote several brilliant posts in my head, on the way to school pick-up, and neglected to write them down. A day went by, another day or two. It was easy to let the time build up.

Then the words came back to me for a bit, and I decided I might as well confess my wimping out, and do something about it. (Writing can be a virtuous circle: start back in, and the words will sidle up of their own accord, glad that you’ve notice they’ve been there all along.)

It doesn’t take much knowing of me, or reading this blog, to understand that I love picture books. Junior Reader may be scaling equally important heights of chapter books (or is just starting into doing that solo), but I’m grateful that there are still plenty of opportunities for picture book reading.

To be honest, there was plenty of picture book reading even before, in the twosome days. We would give each other picture books as presents. I would seek them out second-hand and scoop up the good ones.

I would indulge in 3 for 2 offers so that I could keep the (free) picture book, after giving others. And I still believe the best present you can greet new parents with is a picture book for the wee one. And in fact, for the next wee one after that. (With maybe a book to let the older one know they are still important.)

Coming back to the lovely PiBoIdMo, the extra thing you need to know here is that the focus is on ideas. Not finished books. That too felt like a good place to be – generating ideas. Not getting bogged down in what might or might not work, for now.

So why the wimping out? The difficulty began when I started to think about the publishing of picture book ideas.

1) Would others steal them, and publish first? (Not that I worry regularly about others stealing my ideas, but there was something particularly worrying about the possibility of them stealing a picture book idea.)

There is a certain arrogance to this, I realise. But I have seen enough poor quality picture books – as well as, thankfully, many magnificent ones – to know that it is not necessarily easy to write a good picture book. And I would want to write a good one, you see.

2) Would people like them? Ahh – that was the point at which I pushed the knife in further, and started to turn it. Because even putting your ideas out there can feel like a step too far, if you are afraid that others will not like what you come up with.

Fear of failure – not a new notion. But fear of failure in relation to something you love – much harder.

And yet. Here I am, writing about that possibility of failure. And still hoping that you might read those ideas. Maybe even, tell me what you think of them.

Just because you care about something doesn’t mean you avoid doing it. It’s probably an even greater reason to go ahead and do it. And of all the things I say I want to write, picture books are probably at the top of the list.

Really, what I hope as I put these posts up, little by little, is that I hang on to the excitement that is there when the ideas are still in my head. The sense of step by step, of peering round the next corner, and hoping to find something amazing there.

Children’s books are all about that. The fully everyday. The entirely unexpected. Often coexisting happily on the same page.

What if I could just enjoy the ideas? That would be worth it on its own.

V is for view

It’s only when I step back again and check, that I really see it. The door to the block of flats is open – and so is the one at the back. Instead of the usual grey stone facade, or even Victorian tile work inside, I catch sight of a patch of green.

Perhaps someone is airing the building – or moving something into the garden. But they have also trapped a patch of sunlight there, to balance on the green.

It’s easy to walk down this street – easy on the eye. There’s a curve to the run of buildings – tenements in the acceptable Edinburgh sense (rather than the derogatory meaning of tenements), flats leading off a common stair. The front gardens are mostly cared for, hedges clipped.

All is well, and proper, and I normally sail straight past on my school pick-up route. I’m checking the time, I’m juggling the afternoon snack in my pocket, making sure the bus pass is accessible.

I know that when I round the corner, I’ll see more trees, wide open space. That’s my main hit of greenery for the day. I can breath it in, listen to the wind in the trees, turn up my collar and head for the school gates.

Except this. This stops me, slows me down. I feel like I am being let in on a secret. The day is not all that warm, a bit blustery, but somehow the sun has decided to hide out in this back green.

I think a found item is not just about the artistry of an item, intentional or otherwise. I think there’s something of the unexpectedness of it. Beauty in the midst of a very everyday activity.

This is more like a gift for anyone prepared to stop – to take a second look. Five minutes later, and the sun will be chased off by drizzle. The moment is as short as that.

I carry the depth of the green and the quality of the light, inside, as the school doors open, and the small body hurtles out, towards me, smiling.