Pigs Might Fly!

The idea for this book came from my son Max, who was seven at the time. As we walked home from school one day, Max told me that he had written a story about the three little pigs. In Max’s story, the pigs had a new adversary, “The Big Bad Ant”. The ant was chasing the pigs and so they climbed on a bicycle to escape. We played around with the idea as we walked and by the time we got home, the chase had developed into a cycle race in which the ant was using a rocket-powered bike to race ahead of the pigs in an attempt to ambush them.

I thought that the idea had a lot of potential, so, after reinstating the wolf as the villain, I developed it a little further. I thought that an air race with jet-planes would be more exciting than bicycles and moving the action into the sky also lent itself to a snappy title – Pigs Might Fly!

I went back to the original Three Little Pigs story for inspiration and found that there were dozens of versions in existence*.  Many recent versions include the wolf’s two catch-phrases “Let me IN, little pigs, let me IN!” and “Then I’ll HUFF and I’ll PUFF and I’ll BLOW your house in!”  When I realised that these phrases could be adapted to fit my air race plot, I knew that the story was going to work.  In my story the wolf shouts “Let me WIN, little pigs, let me WIN!” and “Then I’ll VROOM and I’ll ZOOM and I’ll SMASH your plane in!”

The text was accepted by Mandy Suhr at Puffin books and we began to discuss possible illustrators. In a vehicle-centred picture book like this the appearance of the vehicles is as critical to the book’s appeal as the appearance of the characters, so we needed an illustrator who was good at drawing technology.  Such illustrators are not that common, since artistic people tend not to be technical (and vice versa).  Having experienced this difficulty before, I had done some research and prepared a shortlist of suitable illustrators. Steve Cox’s name was on the list on the strength of an illustration of a mechanical bird (shown below) that I’d seen in his online portfolio.  The illustration demonstrated Steve’s skill for drawing complex machines, which combined with the versatility of style he displayed in his other work, made him a strong candidate.  Mandy had prepared a similar shortlist, and Steve’s name was on that too – so that settled it!