OMG! Growing up is SO hard! First the adults taunt you with their fiendish lies: "It's a coincidence that Father Christmas wears the same Bart Simpson socks as your Dad." "The tooth fairy only had 5p in her purse, she'll go to the cash point later." "No, your hamster has not been replaced by an impostor, Hop-Along just grew another leg". Hey, way to teach the kids about right and wrong, guys!
Just as you're absorbing the grubby truths about abattoirs and advertising, you get hit with the mystical delights of surging hormones, body hair and (eek!) the baffling mechanics of reproduction. Whaaa? That can't be right!
THEN, if all that wasn't torment enough, what do they do? They take the pictures out of your books! I mean, what is that all about? Just when you're starting to enjoy that reading-on-your-own malarkey and kind of get why the grown ups are always banging on about libraries and literacy and all that gubbins, they decide to suck the joy out of your world, like JK's dementors, leaving your books as dry and bland as day-old toast. Page after page of nothing but words.
Don't get me wrong. I liked words. I liked reading. No, I love reading. But I really love pictures too and I don't mind telling you that the day I discovered grown-up books didn't have pictures was shocking. I wanted my toast with butter… and marmalade.
So, I asked, what's wrong with pictures, huh? Apparently, I was told, adults don't need them. I should bloomin' well get used to the idea of dry toast and wean myself off comics and Asterix the Gaul, Tintin and Mad magazine (like that's gonna happen) otherwise I'd never be taken seriously (LOL. Who wants to be taken seriously?). Books that were just dreary pages full of words, they explained, were a badge of honour indicating to the world: "I am now a grown-up and can put away childish things".
Well, I said, ppfffttt to that!
I am an author. I write books for teenagers. It's a fact that still surprises me, because I haven't always been a writer and never really dreamt that I might become one. You know, like, an actual, published author! No way! That was never the plan. For more than two decades, I was on an entirely different track. You might have spotted the massive clue in the previous paragraph. Yep, you guessed it. I was an artist. Still am. My life has been about making pictures, first as the designer of cool clothes and fancy perfume boxes, and later, as the illustrator of drooling monsters and tomboy princesses, but always providing pictures for other people's ideas and other people's books. Until about 10 years ago, when I decided to have a go at the words too – to attempt to make the toast as well as the marmalade.
And that's when I encountered my first problem. I had no desire to write picture books about princesses or singing frogs. Well, that's not precisely true. I tried to write picture books about princesses and singing frogs but was rubbish at it. The stories in my head were not the lost-alien-who-wears-his-pants-on-his-head-and-comes-to-school-in-my-pocket stuff (funny though that is). My ideas were more thrilling, more gruesome, more intense… and more dangerous! So it had to be YA.
Trouble is, teen fiction is not usually illustrated (Duh! That's when they take your pictures away, remember?) and anything I wrote just had to have pictures. I'd also begun to suspect that 21st century teenagers, the most visually sophisticated generation to date, secretly wanted pictures, just like I had. To appeal to these teens, my illustrations would have to be fun but not childish, age-appropriate but also cool as hell. I'd be competing with YouTube, TV on demand, X-Box, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, online role-play games, 3D movies and NetFlix. Who would want to read my books when they could annihilate virtual aliens or watch an entire series of Hollyoaks on their phone instead?
So I wrote a book called Ember Fury about a 14-year-old pyromaniac that was part graphic novel, part screenplay, part confession and part blog. I sought to hook the reader on page one with bold images, font experiments and complex page designs and didn't let up the pace until The End. Roll Credits on page 232. Woohoo! I was an actual published author who'd been shortlisted for awards. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, I had been right about those visually sophisticated teens.
My fourth illustrated YA novel, Everything Is Fine (and other lies I tell myself), has just hit the bookshelves. It was made in exactly the same way as my three previous books, intricately designed pages, multiple font changes and lots and lots of pictures - toast, butter and lashings of marmalade. Eat that grown-ups!
