THE THIRD BOOK'S BIRTH

This season is all about orange madam
It all started with the colour orange for some reason. I've just made the connection that I selected orange as my 'colour' on the blog. So maybe I like orange. Well I can reveal I do! Quick write it down, remember it for the £1000 question on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'. Burnt orange and olive green to be precise if you need that sort of detail for present buying. So armed with a colour my third book was born. I think it was the first line which gave me the storyline to this book. Again with a simple writing approach and simple style, it has again a repetitive rhythm to it which I think I should drop for any further books I write! The first line is: ‘Sidney is orange. Not AN orange you understand, but the colour orange. He's been orange all his life. But he didn't want to be orange any more. Not now he'd decided to become blue.’ So that was that, the first line pretty much gave me my structure for Sidney’s small journey. It’s all about colour and changing yourself and not being happy with the way you are. The ending was obvious from the start but how it actually was going to work took a few word pushings to work out. All very simple really.

It was very easy to imagine Sidney throughout writing the story. I imagined him from the start as a little scruffy squidge of paint, a brush stroke with eyes. Working out how to express emotion through a paint splodge will be difficult! So, now then, are you ready or have you done it yourself? Book one: ‘The Day the World Turned White’, book two: ‘Coolio and the Moose’, book three ‘Sidney is Orange’. Next blog I’ll give you a snippet of the start of the stories, and also my thoughts on the style of the illustrations and how I intend to work my way through them…