ONE LITTLE DUCK is a book idea that I submitted to SCBWI’s 2021 Picture Book Illustrator Award. It’s an idea that I’d been working on with fellow Adelaide author Katrina Germein. Our submission only made it as far as the short list, but it did catch the eye of Lisa Berryman from HarperCollins, who was one of the judges, and has now been contracted for release in 2023.
The idea for the book originally came about while working my other job as a swimming teacher. I teach preschool aged children and sometimes I sing to them the first few lines of Five Little Ducks, but substitute quack for another animal sound like moo or woof. So, it becomes Mother Duck says, Moo Moo Moo. It’s a good distraction tool when kids get upset, and usually gets a laugh.
I’d always thought it was a good idea for a book but didn’t know how to expand it. I mentioned it in conversation one day with Katrina (we were actually in Melbourne for the 2019 Speech Pathology Awards for which our book, Let’s Go Strolling, was a winner). Katrina worked on the idea for a couple of months and when she showed me the first few verses I was thrilled.
We decided to flesh it out further with some storyboards, and hoped to submit it to some publishers down the track. It’s around this time that the SCBWI Picture Book Illustrator Awards were announced, offering a cash prize to help develop a book project or idea. I decided to submit ONE LITTLE DUCK, and as they say, the rest is history.
