Orange Pear, Apple Bear was a bit of a fluke book, sort of a one-off for me. I was at college when I wrote this book and I had been working on something completely different. So a completely different project and it really wasn’t going very well.
And I had got to Sunday night and I had to hand in this project on the Monday, and I had been reading this book, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, which is about grammar, because my grammar is really, really, really bad. And when I woke up in the next morning, which was a Sunday morning, I had the words “orange pear, apple bear” going round and round in my head.
And it was lucky it was Mother’s Day and my family said, “What do you want as your Mother’s Day treat?” And I said, “I want you to go away and leave me alone cause I want to try and finish this little project” — the one-day project. So I just sort of put them together and thought, “Well, if you move the comma, then it makes a completely different sort of set of images.” And so I did it in a sort of on a Sunday and handed it in on a Monday morning at college.