Duck for a Day Trivia

Duck for a Day: Trivia

In early drafts of this book, the duck's favourite food was Belgian chocolates. Sadly, my editor pointed out to me that chocolate is not good for ducks and can in fact kill them. This was something I was hoping to avoid. However, I was also hoping to avoid having to change my story because I liked the Belgian chocolates just the way they were. So I stubbornly decided to try and prove my editor wrong. I wrote about the results on my blog, here.

I absolutely love ducks and have written two books about them now, with another one still waiting to be written. My second duck book will be published in 2011 by Walker Books Australia, and it is called No Bears! Unfortunately, there are no longer any ducks in it. This is something I will explain later.

This story had its beginnings in an interview I saw with the cartoonist Michael Leunig, who draws lots of ducks, or possibly the same duck lots of times. In any case, he is a duck-lover and I've loved his work, and his ducks, since I was very little. In the interview (with Andrew Denton), he talked about things like the importance of having an "inner duck" and uttered the memorable line "I think a nation is in trouble that cannot accept a duck" and also participated in this brilliant, succinct exchange:

Denton: Were ducks part of your childhood?

Leunig: Of course, yes.

So I was thinking about ducks and what it would be like to accept the presence of a duck in your life as natural, and slowly a duck character began to form in my head. One day, the lines "The duck was different. The duck had demands" came to me and I knew I had the very beginnings of a story. Of course, that's where the work starts - I had no sense of where the story would be set, or who else would be in it, or what would happen. But I had the duck, and a kind of feel for his personality, and that was enough at that point for me to set off on the road to wherever I was going to end up, which turned out to be this book.
Originally, I named the duck Quackery, after an adult character in the early draft whose name was Zachary. When I wrote him out of the story, I decided to change the name and settled on something simpler - Max.

Just after I turned in the final draft of the story, my nephew in Canberra sent me photos of his new friend - a duck he had acquired through school, named Quackers.

I recently spoke at a school where one of the teachers admitted to being a duck lover, and to having had many herself at one stage, some of which did accompany her to school. I am strongly in favour of this kind of behaviour.
In 2010, I lived in Japan for 3 months on an Asialink Literature Residency. To honour the duck, I carried his namesake with me as my trusty companion and we had many interesting adventures together.