I wrote the first version of this story when my son, Max, was still a toddler. Like many small boys* he had a fascination with steam trains, which led inevitably to the Thomas the Tank Engine books. The Thomas books have been so successful that they dominate the market in train stories and there are surprisingly few alternatives. Rabbit’s Day Off is an attempt to help remedy that.
The first draft of the story was very similar to the published version, except that the main character was a hedgehog rather than a rabbit. I’d originally envisaged the story as one of a series, all set on the Great Woodland Railway. With this in mind, I spent a lot of time coming up with appropriate names for the various trains (The Acorn Express, The Flying Filbert, The Redwood Rocket), stations and other locations (Sycamore Station, Tangleroot Tunnel and Juniper Junction to name but a few) and even went so far as drawing up crew lists for each engine and each station. In the end, the only name that survived to the final edit was Sycamore Station**.
The first few publishers that I showed the story to turned it down, so I reworked it extensively in response to their comments and suggestions. One of the suggestions was that I should drop the birthday party ending, which was considered too predictable.
The reworked version of the story was called Shrew Sorts it Out. It had a slightly different plot and was centred on a different character, Shrew, a train-mad amateur who was desperate to get a job on the railway. This reworked version ended with Shrew being appointed as the railway’s chief engineer after saving the day by fixing a broken-down engine.
When I showed this version to the UK publisher Gullane, they were interested but felt that there was still something missing. In particular, they felt that the ending was not sufficiently satisfying and suggested that “a birthday party” would make a stronger ending. So I showed them the original draft, which they accepted.
Since this was intended as a “train book”, I felt that the way the train was illustrated was as important (if not more important) as the appearance of the characters. And this was one of the reasons that Thomas Taylor was eventually chosen as the illustrator. Thomas’s picture books, such as The Loudest Roar and The Chocolate Biscuit Tree, demonstrate his flair for animals characters while his famous cover art for the first Harry Potter novel (featuring the Hogwarts Express) hinted at his ability to draw steam engines.
* And many big boys too!
** There’s a lesson there for aspiring writers about not getting bogged down at an early stage with too much detail.
I wrote the first version of this story when my son, Max, was still a toddler. Like many small boys* he had a fascination with steam trains, which led inevitably to the Thomas the Tank Engine books. The Thomas books have been so successful that they dominate the market in train stories and there are surprisingly few alternatives. Rabbit’s Day Off is an attempt to help remedy that.
UK
US