Most of the time I am trying to write while thinking about the emotional life of a child. So, in Toys Go Out those toys have a lot of the same feelings that kids do. They are not grownup toys; they are kid toys. And they want to play with their friends and be the boss of the game. They want to be beloved by their little girl who, you know, they belong to, and they worry when she leaves them alone and they worry when she takes them out. And they are jealous of one another sometimes and they quarrel and have to make up and they’re very curious.
So, I’m always writing thinking about them as coming from my own emotional life as I remember it as a child. And I think that’s true even in my animal stories like Skunkdog. The protagonist of Skunkdog is a dog, and she has no dog friends because she can’t smell and you know how dogs like to sniff around each other.
Well, she can’t sniff around because she can’t smell and so she doesn’t really know how to talk to other dogs and she’s lonely and she ends up befriending a skunk when her family moves to the country. And she is so excited to have an animal to be friends with, but the skunk keeps spraying her when it gets cranky and she becomes this very, very disgustingly smelly dog. So, a lot of it — there’s a lot of gross-out humor. It’s my smelliest book and, you know, there’s a lot of doggy antics in it.
But at the heart of that story is a story about navigating a new friendship, about feeling lonely among people that you’re supposed to be friends with and looking for somebody a little different to be friends with and, you know, how do you work out how to be together, you know, or about disappointing your family. The family is really not happy about this dog—skunk friendship, right. What do you do?
You know, if your family wants you to stop being friends with somebody, do you obey or do you not obey? How can you tell when you should be obedient and when you should not be obedient? This is a dog problem, but it’s also a young person problem.