Getting started

When I was still at school, I wrote a short story called The Autumn Girl. It was hopelessly romantic, as was I (I wrote it for an unrequited love), but it was easily the best thing I'd written at the time.

In it, a young boy falls in love with a strange, wild girl, who tells him that it rains more under the trees. He says that's not true, but she insists. It turns out she's rather more than human, or at least different from human, and inhabits the world of dream as much as this world. Her rain under the trees is a metaphor for imagination – the ability to turn the normal world upside-down and make it as you wish.

The bit of the story that really stuck with me, though, was the idea of where dreams come from. In the story, the boy discovers that dreams are dispensed by a silent rag and bone man, Sleep, whose cart is loaded with a myserious muddle of junk: the stuff of dreams. The cart is drawn by a great dark horse named Night.

The idea resurfaced when I signed up for this project, and the more I thought about it the more I found I still liked and cared about that central idea. A lot of the original story is typical teenage tosh, but there was a lyricism and strangeness about it that I still find powerful.

Seeing Alex's illustrations confirmed that this was a good way to go. They combine impressively crafted representative portraiture with abstract patterns and colours. And as we talked, he mentioned 'farce' and 'darkness', two words that seemed particularly appropriate for the world of dreams.

So here we are. I have a ludicrously ambitious notion to write a children's novel. Or perhaps a novel for young people, as in early teens. And we have an initial deadline of January 24 to present some work.

Better crack on, eh Alex?