In this second book, Vanessa has cleverly pulled the horizon line up on many pages so that most of the illustration is filled with the foreground of green grass (as is well demonstrated by the two covers below). The dominance of blue in the first book is chiefly a result of the illustrations’ horizon line being pushed down so that most of the page is filled with the background of the blue night sky. I thought it would be good to give Vanessa the opportunity to give this second book a different dominant colour, so the story is set in spring time when everything is green.** Having a clear idea of what the characters and setting looked like was obviously useful, but another influence was the dominant use of the colour blue throughout the first book. One of the elements that helped to shape this second Mole story was that I had Vanessa Cabban’s illustrations for the first book in my head. I think that’s something that many people will have experienced, whether they’re choosing a new home or a new pair of shoes. In No Place Like Home Mole learns that the things he finds attractive aren’t always suited to his needs. In Bringing Down the Moon, Mole learnt that he couldn’t possess the thing that he found attractive, but he could still enjoy its beauty. So I began rewriting the story around Mole and his friends. And in the end they realised that the place best suited to them was their old hole.īefore I had finished the first draft of the story, I realised that this plot was a good fit with Mole’s impetuous, aspirational character. But while they found places that suited one or another of their requirements, there was always something else wrong with the location. The mice are not happy with their lot, so they set off on a journey around the farm in search of a new home. The story began with the mice living comfortably in a hole in the wall of a barn. One of these stories was about a family of mice living in a farmyard. None of the plots I came up with seemed to be quite right for the characters*, so in the end I decided to put the project aside to work on other stories. Bringing Down the Moon proved to be one of my most popular picture books and so its publishers, Walker Books, were keen for me to produce another story featuring Mole and his friends.
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