No Bears: Trivia

Curiously, the story that became No Bears grew out of my obsession with ducks. I had been writing another book about a duck called Max and every time I sat down to work, he would pop up in my head - QUACK! - and demand attention. It got to the point where everything I wrote seemed to involve a duck.

One day, out of frustration, I typed the line THERE ARE NO DUCKS IN THIS STORY! And then I went ooh. Because that had given me an idea. It sounded like the voice of a little girl. A little girl confidently telling a story, thinking she was in charge of it and knew everything about it, but all the while in the background, there were other things going on. Things that only the reader could see. Ducks, in fact. Doing duckish things, and actually driving the story forward.

The idea evolved in fits and starts over a couple of years, and by the time I had a draft to send to my editor, the first duck book - Duck for a Day - was already scheduled for publication. I talked it over with my editor and we decided it was best not to do two books about ducks so close together, so we decided to go with bears, which work equally well for the purposes of the story. Since I know all this background, I can't help smiling to myself over the fact that in the end there really are no ducks in this story.

And of course, there are no bears either. Honestly.