Back in the saddle

 Well, the past three months have been a bit of a rush. I finished editing and compiling Old Grandpa's Book of Practical Poems, mainly for my grandchildren, and that was going to be it, but there was an old ms, lingering on my hard disc, a novel with the working title Sheep May Safely Craze. That is now (as of this morning) locked up and being submitted.

No sooner had I got into the sheep than I attended a kid's lit function, and before I go on, I need to comment. An over-rated novelist once said in a radio interview that he might write for children, “but only if I had brain damage”. This got right up the noses of children’s writers everywhere, because those of us who write for the young know that our craft is far more challenging than writing for adults.

True, the occasional B-grade royal or C-grade celebrity may “write a book for children” (usually meaning they had it ghost-written), but the sales of “their” fulsome drivel will usually relate only to the alleged author’s notoriety.

Such works are stereotyped, devoid of intellectual commitment or literary value. No matter, we serious and devoted scriveners keep on engaging young minds, turning on the lights, although I sometimes take a break and write a book for adult readers, if there’s a story there that will feed older minds. The book I describe below is just such a case.

The trapped echidna

Still, I am best known as a writer of non-fiction for children, and it was in that role that I spoke last December at a kids’ lit function, where I described the adventutes I had while rescuing an echidna from a locked drain (the details are set out in chapter 12, but briefly, it involved kneeling on a steel grille, handling a heavy echidna that was grimly gripping a steel ladder, putting me at risk of toppling head-first into a water-filled sump).

The freed echidna

Over coffee afterwards, three friends asked me, separately, and within the space of a couple of minutes, if I was doing a book on echidnas. My answers were, respectively, “Naaah”, “Maybe” and “You betcha!”

My third interlocutor started out by assuming I would say yes, and before I could answer, she had reminded me that most children’s books about echidnas are cloying, saccharine tales of how an anthropomorphic Eddie the echidna couldn’t play with balloons. Those books aren’t about echidnas, they’re about overcoming disabilities, and while that’s socially useful, those books don’t advance understanding or inspire curiosity.

I had already decided that editing a poetry anthology for youngsters and completing a social history of science for oldsters would see me ready to hang up my pen and retire to gardening, leavened by watching noisy action movies and reading Proust, Joyce, P. D. James, Andrea Camilleri and other quality murder mysteries. Instead, I succumbed to peer pressure and launched into this

(Literary social climbers will be pleased to know that Proust and Joyce return in cameo roles in chapter 10, though this may be seen as a cunning ploy to convert certain library costs into tax deductions.)

Going home on the ferry, I started making notes, and I soon realised I would have to read a lot of technical stuff, but there was a story there, waiting to be told, and young readers would like it. Echidnas, spiny anteaters, porcupine anteaters (or Tachyglossus aculeatus if you have my sort of training), have odd quirks. My notes, my initial thoughts, included the following headings, all later went into my planning spreadsheet, and here they are:

* spiky, not at all cuddly;
* not really warm, lay eggs, suckle young:
* many scientific names;
* mainly solitary;
* good diggers (claws!);
* fossils, platypus relatives, Zaglossus;
* Sydney 2000 Olympic mascots: echidna, platypus and kookaburra;
* five-cent coin, postage stamp:
* echidna trains;
* do they drink water?

Over the next fortnight, my plan began to change, because in one week, Christine and I saw four different echidnas, and in the five days around Christmas 2020, we saw three more, and different, echidnas. Then when I started looking at the scientific literature, I realised the really good story was too complex for young readers.

My initial plan for an intellectually honest, stereotype-free, factual book for youngsters had to go on hold. Having declared to friends and family that echidnas (working title) is to be my Last Book, I may still come back to do a simpler version for youngsters, because we still don’t have all the answers, and that’s a good thing for young people (of all ages) to know.

In this book, you will find heaps of technical stuff about physiology, chromosomes, parasites, embryos, membranes, teeth and more. I promise one thing, though: as a children’s writer, I take all the facts, one at a time, and make each give a sound account of itself, but there will only be facts. There will be no flights of fantasy like one I found in Blazing Passion, the book a friend from Project Wombat passed on, complete with this blurb:

…a breathtaking romance that races from the turbulence of nineteenth-century England to the sweltering penal colonies in the Australian jungle…

The book in question was published by Playboy Books, and ‘Stephanie Blake’ is in reality two men who clearly know very little about Australia (“sweltering penal colonies in the Australian jungle”?), but, one assumes, given their publisher, know lots about erotic fantasy. Should you want a copy, Blazing Passion came out in 1978. To save your time, here’s a sample of what passes for dialogue there:

“I’ll fix you up a proper feast. Platypus eggs. Bacon. Sausage and pancakes. And real coffee …”

Actually, I do offer one flight of fantasy later on in the book, but it is clearly fanciful. Finding it is something I leave to the reader, but it’s not the bit about socks full of sea urchins. Those are totally real, and also rate a mention in Sheep.

But that's another story.

Actually, what is a whole 'nother story is that I am resuming control of my out-of-print works and republishing under the Amazon Print-on-demand system.

More on that, later...