The Stories Unfold

By the Friday’s session, both Matt and Jon had taken the premise of Nick’s story concept and thought about their own. Each adapted the concept to create their own versions to ensure consistency, such that we could build a lasting brand around a character who wanted to solve some environmental problems. Think Dora the Explorer model.

Matt’s story was going to be about plastic on our beaches, where our main character of the book series would go on a journey and again meet animals affected by the problem in hand. With the resolution being that our main character and readers could all simply pick up rubbish was music to Nick's ears as a fellow litter picker himself. The idea in principle was great, but we didn’t yet know what the characters could be. So, it was time to put our thinking hats on by sinking our first beer and entering the ‘creative zone’. From images found on the internet we instantly came up with a crab who lived in a yoghurt pot, and a turtle who had a plastic T-shirt trapped over its head, and finally a seahorse who used an ear cotton bud stick as a cricket bat of course!! Jokes aside though, we did see these pictures and felt so sorry that this is happening on a global scale and is only going to get worst. There was a moment where we kind of all smiled and felt convinced that this was the right project to pursue. Well done us for taking this crazy challenge on.

In Matt's book we even had a fourth character who was a dodgy seagull selling rubbish, which was getting to the sea through some pipes, and named that character Bazza the dodgy cockney seagull. Laughing around and coming up with silly cockney rhyming slangs for the bird instantly made us think about one of our favourite tv characters; Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses. And that was that, the seagull had to be based on Del Boy. God, we laughed so much and looking back at those sessions they were the glory days of this project. If we didn’t have any ideas, we just got drunk and talked absolute nonsense, then out of nowhere some abstract silly idea would lead to something funny and great. So that was Matt’s story premise complete.

It’s worth mentioning that we did not draw that seagull and that it was in fact the image our illustrator drew 2 years later using this as a reference. She's from Eastern Europe, Georgia, and thought we were mad! She finally came round to our madness and we consider her one of team now ☺️.

On to Jon’s story... Now, our Jon has a somewhat more imaginative mind compared to both Matt and Nick and came up with what can only be described as a future bestselling story. The issue was it kind of didn’t align to the initial concepts we had for the book series where we wanted to link the positive action (plant seeds to feed the bees and to pick up plastic) to organisations, sponsors and other ways in which we could market the books. However, writing this blog now, it probably does and we will have to write this book in the future. So, Jon wanted to address food waste, which we all agreed was a serious global issue and came up with the idea of our main character finding out there is a stinky problem coming from a nearby town. Our main character would go on an adventure to find out where the stench was coming from and met a stinky dog that needed a wash, a smelly compost bin where they met a slug, and then found the king of the next town who happened to be stinking cabbage who lived in a town called Cableton. The stinky cabbage king’s town (bit of a mouthful) was ever-growing and filling up with other towns food waste which was being dumped. Our character had to re-educate her own towns people about the damaging effects of food waste to save the town of Cableton. A pretty cool story if we could pull it off. So, after hearing Jon's pitch, we obviously asked him if he was high of course, but we felt that reaction towards Jon was unjust. We just couldn’t think at the time how we could easily link the positive action the readers and children could do away from the book, thus ultimately market the book in line with the other stories in the series making up the trilogy. However crazy we thought Jon’s idea was it was kind of genius mind.

Still dwelling on Jon’s story, the ideas that he presented in his book premise made us consider some fundamental points to establish in our book series going forward. For example, did our characters always have to be an animal? Did the stories need to be linked in some way and connected via a map which he had included. This spawned the idea of connecting the back covers of each book so when kids read the series it would form a map which would be really fun. Also, could we employ a systems flow diagram in each book to really try and make the connection to let’s say plastic dropped on the floor, which gets to the drains and then gets to the sea for example. We are after all systems engineers and fundamentally the relationships between systems, whether it be a submarine, the human body or the environment is our interest. These were some good ideas and we can confirm that Jon was not high.

Skipping forward a few years though and ruining this story somewhat, we all agreed that Jon’s idea would be hard to execute and for Jon it was back to the drawing board unfortunately. However, we all agreed that if we ever made more books in the future that we would re-visit this story and write that book. Afterall, we love a challenge.

To honour Jon’s book idea, it does make a sneaky cameo appearance in our first book where our main characters mum reads the ‘Cabelton News’. Hurrah!