Leaf Trouble started life as a fourth Mole and Friends story called A Pawful of Sunset, but although I was very pleased with it, Mole’s publishers didn’t think it suited the series, so The Best Gift of All became the fourth book instead.
However I was reluctant to discard what I felt was a good plot, so I set about adapting it for a different cast of characters. This is not the first time I’ve done this and What Friends Do Best also started life as a Mole story.
Adapting a story like this is not simply a case of changing the names of the characters. If the original story was for an established series, it will have been written to fit the established characters. When I’m adapting the story, I try to start afresh and make the characters fit the story, rather than the other way around. In this case, I decided the story would work better with a smaller cast of characters, one of whom should be older and more experienced than the others. I picked a family of squirrels as they could be living in the tree, which would give them an obvious attachment to it.
The new version of the story was picked up by Elinor Bagenal at Chicken House. Elinor was the first editor I ever worked with, on a pop-up book called Scraposaurus Wrecks. Although that book was never published, the experience gave me the confidence to continue working on children’s books and this was in no small part due to Elinor’s encouragement, so it was a pleasure to be working with her again.
Elinor proposed Caroline Jayne Church to illustrate the book. Caroline had previously illustrated my pop-up books A Mouse inside the Marmalade and A Turtle in the Toilet. She uses a mix of paper collage and paint to create her illustrations and for this book she decided to add an extra dimension by modelling the illustrations in 3D. Leaf Trouble is not an easy story to illustrate; it’s set in a single location, with a cast of almost identical characters whose colouring matches their autumnal setting, so I think Caroline has done a terrific job!
Leaf Trouble started life as a fourth Mole and Friends story called A Pawful of Sunset, but although I was very pleased with it, Mole’s publishers didn’t think it suited the series, so 
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