Bedtime Stories.

I’ve decided to try putting up a few kids’ stories I’ve been messing about with recently. Mostly they’re just bedtime stories I’ve made up for the kids which, if I think there’s anything remotely original about them, I note down and promptly forget about. Normally that's about as far as they go, but sometimes I remember them and work them up a little before letting them sink back into the obscurity of my hard-drive. 

This seems a very inefficient process to me.

Ideally, of course, it would be my dream to have these worked up properly by a wonderful illustrator. But I have no idea whether they'd be of any interest from a commercial viewpoint and, of course, illustrators don’t work for free. Also I’m more concerned with getting the long-form stuff I’m working on into a presentable format than touting this stuff about. So, rather than let them sit around gathering cybernetic dust, I thought it would be fun to let them have a little pony about on here.

That being the case, here’s the first one, The Storm Ship.

To explain, the idea for this particular story came from worrying that kids who live in a gritty or scary part of town don’t have enough written for them. I suppose I was worrying about the escapist tendency of some kids’ literature, and wanted to find a way of assuaging the very understandable fears that growing up in a depressed urban environment might cause by reintroducing the possibility of magic into that setting.

In conceiving a boat embedded in the top of an old building, I was combining two disparate buildings in London that I’ve always liked. The first is the lighthouse opposite King’s Cross station, as seen below.

The King's Cross Lighthouse in its run-down state. There's talk of redeveloping it now, but I must confess I kind of like it this way.The second is the penthouse on top of an otherwise modern office building beside the Great West Road/M4 that I always remember passing on our way home from London. At first, I remember seeing it as a kid coming back from family visits. Then, when I was older, I associated it with driving home from nights out with my brother or now-wife, when it was lit up and splendid as an ocean-liner, and passing it meant you were almost home.