Little Adventures

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The Authors

I was nearly 40 years old when our only son, Pete, was born, and I seem to be having my second childhood as he has his first. From a very early age, Pete has enjoyed drawing. I have gone out of my way to stimulate this interest as I think that drawing encourages observation, promotes fine motor skills, and is not stressed enough in school. As Pete grew and became better and better at drawing, I could see that he would soon be better than me, if I didn't start practicing, so I began making some pictures of my own.

Late one night in 1990, I was doing some practice drawings of mountains and trees, and in the foreground of my picture I drew a lumpy, six-legged creature with an immense nose. I left the finished sketch on the table for Pete to see, and the next day he wanted to know more about this strange creature. I told him that it was just a made-up thing, but still he wanted to know more about it, so I invented a story to matched the picture. I called the animal a herumph, and claimed that it had not started life with that very large nose but rather had earned it by becoming friends with a basgag. Pete then started drawing a series of herumph pictures of his own, and, not to be outdone, I drew some more myself. Weeks later, we laid all of our pictures on the floor and had a great time weaving a story around them. It was then we decided to make a book out of our pictures and our story, and to give this book as a Christmas present to our friends and relatives.

Using a scanner, I imported the pictures into WordPerfect on my computer and then began writing How Herbert Got His Nose. Night after night I labored to write a story for children. For many years, I had written computer manuals, but this was something completely different. Where formerly I was interested only in getting facts onto paper in an understandable form, I was now striving to write a book in which the facts were nonsense and the important thing was to write an enjoyable story in an enjoyable fashion. I quickly made the discovery that, when I was writing, it was as though I had actually had this strange adventure in the land of the herumphs. I also learned that making the sentences that told the adventure was hard work.

Eventually, I did finish the writing and had 100 copies of the thirty-six page book printed. Pete and I were both pleased with the result, and our book was a hit at Christmas. It was also written up in the local newspaper and went on sale at our local bookstore, where we sold a grand total of twelve copies.

In 1990, we took Pete to England for his first vacation abroad. We went to lots of places that Pam and I had seen before, but seeing them again through the eyes of our son was like seeing them for the first time. At the end of each day, as Pete lay near to sleep in his bed, I would tell him a story about a white mouse named White Guy, who had accidentally been locked into one of our suitcases. White Guy went the same places that we did in England, but he had many an extraordinary adventure along the way. I taped these tales as I told them, and Pete was fond of listening to them over and over again in the back seat of our rental car as we tooled around the British countryside. By the time we returned home, we had accumulated over six hours of these spoken stories, and as Christmas once again approached, Pete and I set ourselves to reworking some of these into our second book - White Knight. Once again, we each did some of the drawing. I did the writing and the book was printed in time for the holidays. This time Pete was older, and we both knew better what we were doing, and this helped our second book to be better than our first.

Pete takes great pride in having co-authored these books, and now that he is starting to write on his own, it will be interesting to see what he comes up with. For my part, I am just pleased that in my second childhood I am learning things that I didn't think to try in my first.