It’s another Thursday. That’s a start. Might even be an opportunity to do some blogging again.
It’s nearly the end of the month – that month where I said I would come up with more ideas for picture books. The numerically astute among you will see that didn’t really happen.
At least, not at the ‘one a day’ quantity I was after.
Turns out that’s OK. It’s a stretch to put up ideas when you’re not quite sure about them – and when you’re off finding out about someone else’s ideas, easy to fill up the time and not consider developing your own ideas.
This is the usual quandry. I love finding out about things – some I act on sooner, others sit for a while. But it’s easy to be ‘busy’ doing that, and not do the thing you said you were going to do.
Anyway. There were a few more ideas that I thought I would capture here, even if they are sketches rather than more worked out ideas. So here goes:
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Mr Teeth. I’d like to write a story about Mr Teeth. If any of you have a wind up toy that looks like a large mouth with big teeth, that’s it. And if not, here’s a picture.
Junior Reader is fond of Mr Teeth. (In fact, the version we have is actually Mr Teeth 2 – the original copped it on a playdate. Junior Reader cried. Granny, the finder of Mr Teeth, managed to find a replacement. Phew.)
So at the moment, Mr Teeth is sitting on my bedside table, waiting for an adventure. I’m not sure quite what.
The easy version is that Mr Teeth gets wound up, falls off the edge of a table or something like that, gets lost for a bit, has an adventure, and then is found again.
But there are a lot of stories like that. It’s not that I don’t like lost and found stories (some can be great – Stick Man is one that springs to mind), but you need to be good to pull them off well.
I think it’s more likely that Mr Teeth scares people, because of the size of the teeth. And that he doesn’t really know it.
So he gets wound up and jumps around on the top of the table, doing his party trick, and the other toys back off because he seems a little…well. Overly aggressive. When he isn’t really.
I’d like to think that there’s a point where Mr Teeth saves the day – a bit like where Mog meows very loudly at the burglar, he’s caught, and her previous sins of sitting on the flowers in the kitchen windowbox (and a few others) are forgiven.
Maybe Mr Teeth is an encouragement to eat your tea – that the reluctant eater is prepared to eat at the same time as Mr Teeth is dancing round the table.
I’d also like to think that Mr Teeth gets into a TV studio and steals the show from the anchor man, or something of that kind. To do a one-up on someone else who is all teeth, you see.
So. That’s where Mr Teeth is up to so far. Go 50 /50. Phone a friend. Let me know what you think Mr Teeth ought to be doing, and I’ll wind him up, and we’ll see where he goes.
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The next idea I have is for Partians. Partians are an invention: they are marrowfat peas, which look a little different from regular peas. I added some to Junior Reader’s plate a while back, and was asked what they were, so I said Partians.
(Sometimes the trouble is echoes of other books. They could have been small green drops, a la Charlie and Lola. But I don’t need to work to get Junior Reader to eat, so I haven’t gone that route.)
Partians are a bit different to Martians. They are green, whereas we think Martians might be red (red planet and all that). They spend their time landing on different planets – but because they are not very astute, they are really crash landing on children’s dinner plates.
So there’s scope to describe the food in terms of a strange landscape that the Partians are exploring. They’ve traversed scrambled egg, they’ve waded through the stew swamps, and I’m sure they might try a few other things.
The complication is that if they are on the plate, they get eaten. Although the Partians, ever optimistic, might see this as an opportunity to go caving, and see what’s down at the bottom of that nice dark cave.
When I write this, I am reminded of one of our reading heroes, Traction Man. We haven’t read the first one, but Traction Man Meets Turbo Dog was an early library-borrowed success.
Traction Man does lots of exploring, such as climbing the compost heap, making his way through the garden pond on an old boot, and so on. I love this book, but it may have become a little too internalised – I don’t want the Partians to be doing exactly the same.
Junior Reader has since coloured me a person-shaped bookmark and told me it’s a Partian. This one is a mix of a pinky-purple and a deep blue. This means I now have a Partian bookmark, which not everyone has, but I am unsure about the end colour of Partians.
I suspect that the Partians are a bit like the aliens in Galaxy Quest – very serious and thus unintentionally funny at the same time.
So there is scope for them to do quite a few different outings (I’m sorry, expeditions), if I can just work out where they go and what they do while they’re there.
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Finally, pigeons. I’ve written before about the pigeon formation team that circles our house a lot. This month, I’ve particularly enjoyed seeing them, when the low light catches their bellies and they glow in the winter sunshine.
I wonder to myself why they continue to circle, and whether they might choose to move on, like migratory birds do. What would it be like if one of them choose to migrate? Where would he go? How would he learn to find his way there?
There are a good number of books out there with themes of birds migrating – picture books, and some chapter books too.
It could be interesting to look at this from an outsider’s perspective: would he be accepted? Would he learn to fly in formation with the other birds, the way geese do?
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The thing about all these themes: it’s about inspiration. Sometimes, not that much. But a feeling that a certain idea, or toy, or bird is more than just what I see on the surface.
And maybe that’s all we need. We are all more than we seem, at first appearance.
We all have the potential in us to travel, to risk, to be foolish as well as brave.
And maybe one of these characters, or a different one, will agree to set out on a word quest with me some day. I very much hope so.