I don’t swim very often, but during the summer we were on holiday in Crete. It was far too hot to walk, so I swam for half an hour or so every day in the pool. Swimming is a very boring activity, I find, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep it up unless I found something absorbing to think about. So I started a  rhyme. By the end of the holiday I had the makings of several stories, all in rhyme. I considered allowing the trolls to take part, but ‘Orange Troll’ is a bit of a mouthful to fit into a line of rhyme, so I decided to use animals instead.

‘Monkey is lost’ starts like this:

Monkey felt happy, monkey felt glad, She went for a climb on a nice autumn day, She climbed up a tree and jumped from a branch Across to another tree further away.

It’s finished now and I’ll soon be publishing it on Amazon.

I’ve considered sending it to an actual publisher, but I know they won’t want my drawings, and as doing the illustrations is at least 50% of the fun of writing, I don’t want to give that part up. So I’ll do it myself.

Now I must settle down and start drawing the next verse…