The book that just came out is A Couple Of Boys Have The Best Week Ever, and it actually began as a thank you note that I wrote to my editor’s parents because my youngest son and her son spent a week at her parent’s house — my editor’s patent’s house going to this nature camp. The boys were invited to come stay at their house on the beach and attend a nature camp for a week.
My son and her son went to this beach house at this — actually it’s not their beach house. It is their house and it’s right on the sand in Malibu. It’s this beautiful place, and they went to this nature camp every day. My editor’s dad would drive the boys to nature camp in the morning and pick them up and drive them home. Then the boys would just hang out at my editor’s son’s grandparents’ house for the rest of the day.
When this week was over, I brought the boys back to my house to kind of hang out with my older sons. During that time my editor, called me and she’s like, “What would be really great is if you could write my folks a thank you note in the form of a book. Maybe do some drawings and maybe the boys can help you.” I thought, “Of course I’m gonna write her folks a thank you note, but in the form of a book? This is kind of a lot to ask.” I’m like, “Okay. Sure!”
I sat down and I wrote a very quick thank you note in the form of a book. The boys drew some pictures and we sort of slapped it all together and I sent it to her folks. They thought it was hilarious and they made a copy and sent it to my editor down in the publishing house in San Diego. She passed it around to all her colleagues and then she called me and she said, “There’s something here. This little book that you made for my folks. There’s something here that you should maybe think about doing a book.”
I thought, “How could there be something in this very specific thank you note that, you know, of a very specific week and these experiences that do not have a universal ring to them? I just can’t imagine that there’s anything here.” The back story of that is that I had been trying to write another story for probably six months and sending her these drafts and she’d say, “It’s just not in your voice.” I’d say, “Well, what’s my voice?” and she said, “Your voice is kind of
it plays straight man to your illustrations.”
When she got this thank you note, she said, “This is in your voice. This is exactly what I was talking about.” I had this little Xerox thank you note on the floor of my car from August until after Christmas. I’m driving my oldest son back to the airport to go back to college and he picks it up off the floor of the car and he’s reading it and he’s cracking up. He’s like, “What is this?” I told him and he took it in the airport and he’s checking in with his e-ticket. He’s at the security gate and he’s still reading it and I’m kind of close to tears because he’s going back to college.
He was just cracking up and he handed it back and said, “That’s hilarious! You should do something with that.” I think it was at that point I started to think about it as a real book. It went through twenty-five revisions of text and probably ten dummies of just trying to get this very particular experience of this week to work as a picture book that would be more universal. What has resulted in this book called A Couple Of Boys Have The Best Week Ever.