Let’s see, Nuts to You. This book, so I was sitting at my desk, I was actually working on Seed by Seed, the drawings for Seed by Seed and I have no idea where this phrase came from but the phrase the squirrel who cried wolf popped into my head and it just made me laugh out loud. And so I wrote it down and you know didn’t think about it very much.
But then it was sitting on this little piece of paper on my desk and I would think about it now and then and then one morning while I was doing the morning coffee thing with my notebook, I started thinking of other little phrases that could go in there like where the squirrels are, the squirrel who fell to earth you know and just different little titles that I could put in.
And it really started out as just a lark and it pretty much stayed a lark. I think I just wanted to do something that was fun for me and fun for readers and it’s you know not that hard to get into the head of a squirrel. It’s not that hard to imagine, but it was really fun and it would lead to some unexpected things for example there’s a part where I tried to imagine what it would be like for a squirrel to see a hunter in camouflage.
And it seemed to me like you would just see these floating heads moving along in the landscape. And so I had the one squirrel you know hanging onto the tree because it made him dizzy, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing but then once you figure it out it’s kind of cheesy and yeah it was really, it was really just kind of fun and then you know, so it took me a while. I was writing this little squirrel story and I didn’t sort of know what genre it was going to go into.
And then I realized there’s this whole genre of rodent adventure stories which I don’t know why there are so many of them but there really are, like there are more, there are mice stories and rat stories and way more than you know there’s maybe here and there a bear story or an elephant story but rodents are really well represented. And I don’t know why that is, I wonder if it’s because they’re really in our world.
And they look back at us and so we feel this presence and so we maybe feel we can identify with them or have empathy with them or something.
