Here Be Monsters

Although the pop-up book was never accepted by a publisher, it impressed literary agent Gina Pollinger enough for her to take me on as a client and shortly after she set me up with my first publishing deal.

A decade later, I was trying to write a picture book story for Poly Bernatene to illustrate. Poly and I had already done two picture books together and this would be our third. Looking through Poly’s back catalogue, I noticed that, although he’d done a couple of pirate books, he hadn’t illustrated a pirate picture book, so this seemed like a promising idea. There were already plenty of pirate picture books on the market and Poly suggested that we needed to add another element into the mix to make our book stand out. A few months earlier Poly had mentioned to me that he liked illustrating monsters, so I decided that pirates and monsters would be a good combination.

The sort of monsters you’d expect pirates to encounter were sea monsters. As soon as I started thinking about these, the phrase “Here be Monsters” popped back into my head and I was reminded of my first, unpublished pop-up book. So I took the core idea — the map with “Here be Monsters” written on it and a character who was oblivious to their existence — but wrote a new story about a pirate captain instead of a little girl.

In the first draft, the captain was a foolish, but not unlikable, character and the first two verses went like this:

Captain Cutlass was a pirate, and a proper pirate too!
He had a proper pirate ship and a proper pirate crew.
And though he did not need one, as both his eyes could see,
He always wore an eyepatch to look proper piratey.

So everything to port (that’s on the left to me and you),
The Captain could see clearly and was easily in view.
But everything to starboard (that means on the right),
Was covered by his eyepatch and was hidden from his sight.

In this draft the monsters always appeared on the starboard side of the ship where the captain couldn’t see them! As I got towards the end of the draft I realised there was a problem. The story has a deadly, darkly comical twist at the end and having made the Captain a relatively sympathetic character, I felt readers wouldn’t want to see him come to harm. For this reason I rewrote the story with the Captain as an utterly villainous character who deserves to meet a sticky end. Although humorous, the story is a lot darker than most picture books, so I’m grateful to editor Emily Ford and publisher Macmillan for accepting it.

When Emily sent me Poly’s first character designs I got a bit of a surprise. I’d imagined the pirates to be humans, but Poly had decided to use animal characters instead. Captain Cut-Throat was a cunning old fox and his crew a motley assortment of other creatures. I had mixed feelings about this to start with, but the characters looked so appealing that I was easily won over.