I work until about 7pm when my daughter gets home from school. I will try and pretend my day has been really tough so she doesn’t think I have been dancing around my desk thinking up ideas all day. Then I will cook dinner, we will have a natter, watch TV or possibly play backgammon.
But those are just two types of days I might have and one of the great things about this job is you can have all kinds of days… popping here and there to meetings, zooming about the country (or world) to visit schools, libraries and festivals, swanning about lovely publishing ‘dos’ packed full of my children’s book heroes (Lauren Child, Allan Ahlberg, and Marc Boutavant to name a few), whizzing to the library, zoo, museum or some other wonderous place to do some research. I really love that no two days are ever really the same. Even if I am working in my studio I could be writing about a grumpy panda, a polar bear looking for a home, or a wise brown bear who is good at making paper hats or anything else (possibly involving a bear). Or maybe I might be writing a rhyming book about how super-duper it is to be you, but I couldn’t possibly comment on that!