Now that we have joined forces with a literary agent, Robbi and I have been thinking hard about how to make books that might be more readily marketable than is our standard Idiots’Books fare, about which there is not much that can be described as “standard,” I suppose. For the most parts, our books lack such traditional literary elements as plot, character development, description, place setting, and narrative arc, which proves problematic to some, if not most, readers. In general we’re interested in ideas, contradictions, and human folly and explore these themes with provocative, incomplete, and unexpected language and visceral, messy, and highly editorial illustration. Our books aren’t stories as much as they are studies, musings, examinations.

But generally this sort of thing doesn’t fly off the shelves at Barnes and Noble.

So the trick is coming up with a way to come up with writing and illustration that is both pleasing to us and appealing to a wider audience. So we decided to point our noses in a different direction.

For the past few months, I have been spending long hours imagining the lives and adventures of an 8-year-old witch named Gramangela and her friend Collins, a 184 lb monkey with golden bones. The book is about 150 pages long, has 21 chapters, and is, as far as I understand it, a “middle grades” book, meaning a step beyond picture books but not quite “young adult” literature.

I find the things I enjoy about writing–surprise, strangeness, and non-sequitur–work fairly well in the realm of children’s literature. Instead of feeling like we’re “selling out” or “compromising our principles,” we’re having a ball applying our styles and sensibilities to an entirely new realm. I haven’t had this much fun writing something in a long time. And last night, around 1:00 in the morning, I finished my first complete draft.

Robbi and I have already spent a lot of time talking about how the illustrations might work in this book, and she has done a handful of studies to see what the characters might look like, but now it’s time for her to dig down and explore my text and how she wants to interpret it. In imagining Collins, she found that she was having trouble figuring out what he was supposed to look like, and so she took out her sculpey and made a model. Here is Collins:

As is so often the case when Robbi sits down to create, the character she came up with looked exactly how I thought it should when writing the text. She has an eerie knack for completing my thought in visual form. It’s why we work well together, I think. She’s the other half of the circuit begun in my brain when I make something up. It’s why my work is always incomplete without her. It’s why we so enjoy living together in this barn of ours, and why I hope we get to keep making books together for a long, long time.