Well, when I started Nuts to You, my original thought was in terms of the format that the left page would tell the story in comic book format and the right page would tell the story in words and I just, I think I was thinking of reluctant readers and how that would encourage kids like, because they would be able to tell what was going on and then they could read the story and find their way through it.
And it’s not so much that I decided not to do that but it just kind of evolved into not being so rigid like left side, right side. I still did lots of drawings. But that’s where I started with it. And I also, so I was kind of interested also, I didn’t want to draw, I was thinking of it as not a picture book, I didn’t want them to be animals with outfits on.
So I was trying to think how do I differentiate one squirrel from another because they, you know to an outsider they look a lot alike. And so I was playing with the drawings and different head shapes and maybe, so it’s the one character has a mole on her cheek and she’s sort of more beautiful than the male characters.
And then I decided that one character could have an acorn beret and I cut this picture out of a field guide and it was a squirrel peeking around the corner and I painted a little acorn hat on him and I thought wow, he looks so familiar. And I looked at him, I realized he looks just like Che Guevara. So for a while I was writing this story and I was calling him Che.
And I thought I don’t really want this element in my story, this political element. But what that got me thinking about was maybe their names should sound like, sounds that squirrels actually make so I changed his name to Chai, and the character whose name is Tutsa, because that sounds like something, and if you do it the squirrel way it’s more like [noise]. So that was the fun part of the story then was coming up with squirrel names.
