Recently I had the crazy experience teaming up with my wife to write this book, Crankee Doodle. And we both had the idea for Crankee Doodle. Crankee Doodle is kind of like Yankee Doodle, except he’s cranky.
He doesn’t — you know, everything Yankee Doodle does, Crankee Doodle doesn’t want to do, he doesn’t want to ride to town, doesn’t want to right a pony, doesn’t understand why putting a feather in hat would be macaroni. You know, he doesn’t, he doesn’t — all that stuff just makes him angry.
So anyway, my wife and I, we had that idea together, we came up with the whole story and so then when we got home — we were in a car, we were on a car trip making the whole thing up, we got home and I wrote the story. I actually put, you know, the words down on the computer and then it was her job to draw the pictures to go with it.
And she ended up changing some of my words around, deleting some things that I had written and I had to learn to be okay with that. I knew she was going to do a great job with it. And she did, she drew amazing pictures and every once in a while I maybe had an idea to change her pictures and sometimes she listened and sometimes maybe she didn’t. But we were a team and then we had an editor that understood what we were going for and encouraged us. And so that’s been an exciting process and I think I’ve got a book that I’m so proud of and it’s not something I could have done on my own.
