Making of Pearl & Her Bunch - Part One
Writing Pearl
My third authored book, Pearl and Her Bunch (Orchard Books) was published in the UK last week! It’s been two years since writing the first daft and a year since the delivery of the final artwork, but the journey of making this book was actually much longer. Let me take you to my journey with little Pearl. Let’s start from the very beginning.
When little Pearl makes the startling discovery that she's not a grape like the rest of the bunch, she begins to question EVERYTHING! Can they really be her family if she doesn't look like them? An adventure around the house might just help her find the answer she's looking for...
THE BACKGROUND
When I finished my second authored book, When the Sun Goes Home, at the end of 2019, I dived straight into writing next book. 2019? You just said you had written the fist draft two years ago, you might say. Here’s what happened; writing my third book turned out to be much harder than the first two...(also a very chaotic and surreal event called pandemic happened.) Between early 2020 and early 2022, I drafted seven different stories but none of them made my editors at Hachette scream “Brilliant! We love it!”. It was a very frustrating experience. Basically, they were looking for something US-market-friendly and not-so-seasonal for bigger sales potentials. Things went like this:
Me: I wrote a story about biscuits!
Editors: Sorry, Americans don’t have biscuits (as we know).
Me: I wrote a story about jelly!
Editors: Sorry, jelly is a different thing in the US and we can’t use “Jell-o” because it’s a brand name.
Me: I wrote a story about a pumpkin!
Editors: Sorry, we could only promote it in Halloween season.
Me: But it’s not really an Halloween story…
Editors: Sorry, as long as it has a pumpkin in it, it’d be an Halloween story.
Me: …