Oh my goodness. There are so many secrets.
We have deep, deep secrets.
We have so many secrets about our book and we have — books and we have so many secrets that we eventually put them on our website and then we put in little things that says secret. It’s a link to the secret.
Every book has a secret.
Well, The Napping House was named after the house where our son went to take a nap because he wouldn’t nap in ours and King Bidgood is a friend of mine who looks just like that and is named Bidgood and in Heckedy Peg — well I was very interested in children’s fairytales and I studied them and that — what’s the secret there? I don’t remember.
I’m the witch.
Oh, this is a funny secret.
I thought she would jump on that one.
I forgot the secret.
And I’m the witch and who is the lovely mother?
But why were you the witch?
Because I was afraid to ask anybody else to be one.
Here’s the way it happened. He had drawn the entire book in pencil, right, and leaving out on every single page the witch and I kept saying we’ve got to find a witch.
Which is an artistic error. You never ever, you know, a drawing is supposed to come up together and this was a hole in those drawings. It was very, very bad art.
Yes. So I thought and thought what can we do to find a witch. Don is not going to want to ask anyone and I can’t find anyone because when we do — when he does his books we have camera, action, makeup, costumes, I design the costumes and people, we give them scripts so it becomes more like a little play.
Well that’s what a children’s picture book is, a play.
Because he likes to sketch for the picture books, sketch in life and so it’s very interesting.
Other secrets would be Elbert’s Bad Word was created — our sole didactic effort when our son came home from a very nice preschool cussing like a sailor and let’s see Duffy Time is based on our little pug Duffy and -
Silly Sally.
Silly Sally was because Audrey liked to walk upside down as a child on her hands. She was very good at it and had fond memories of that. Every book — oh, there’s so many. There’s a secret in every one.
Yes. Many secrets.