After telling many Boobela stories, I decided to write the first one down. I gave it to a friend, Corinne Gotch, who worked with books. She emailed it to Fiona Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of Orion Children's Books.

Fiona emailed back that she found the story "charming" and that she would read it again. I was disappointed. I'd wanted her to say "this is the best story I've ever read. I'll give you a million pounds!" But Corinne told me I was being silly -- this was high praise indeed.

It turned out she was right. Within a month, we were meeting with Fiona and Jon Appleton, the Senior Editor who would be working with me on Boobela.

Fiona and Jon

They talked about how much they loved the story and my writing (my favourite bit!) and all about Orion -- how they had a small team and how they only produced books they loved. All this sounded great. They explained how they wanted to publish Boobela - four stories in each book with colour pictures.

You can imagine how exciting this all was. There was one problem though... they didn't want Boobela to be a giant!

Boobela Shrunk

I didn't like this at all. I was so worried about Boobela being shrunken I couldn't sleep and so at 2 in the morning I wrote Orion a long email explaining why Boobela had to be a giant. Fortunately, they agreed.

Boobela back to normal!