The 5 steps to a finished children's book: Step 1 - A story
Of course, one needs a story, and for that you need a good idea. How these ideas come about is different for every author. Some sit at their desks and "build" a story. For some, it just comes to them. That is how it is with me: my ideas come to me like a flash out of nowhere. Afterwards, I am driven to do nothing more than to write it down, although it might consume me for days and weeks.
The idea for Arved, King of the Fishermen, came to me while on holiday in a small red cottage in southern Sweden during the summer of 2010. Is was a beautiful old isolated farmhouse, on the banks of a lake with moose tracks in the garden and a small shed in front of the door. One day, while we were fishing on the lake, I thought about what it must have been like to live there in former times, especially in the winter. And so it began...
The last week of our holiday found me only with paper and pencil (as you can see on the picture :-) When I ran out of paper, my father drove 5 km to find me a notebook at the bakery in the closest village. :-)
Back in Germany after our holidays, both the World Cup and a college reunion took over my attentions so that a few months passed before I was able to finish writing Arved's tale. Only, he was not completed then, and it has taken time to get him to where he is today… You can learn more about the path from a completed story to a printed book soon…