Ten Sorry Tales: Writing the book

Whilst researching his second novel, 'Five Boys', the author read various collections of 'cautionary' tales, Dr Hoffman's 'Shock-headed Peter' and other quite gory infant literature, and now wonders if this didn't plant the seed for what would grow into Ten Sorry Tales.

The original idea was to write a sequence of longish poems for children with rather strange and even quite sinister subject matter, but the author found that he was spending too much time trying to find words which rhymed, so eventually had a go at writing them as short stories instead.

The first to be completed was 'The boy who fell asleep', an idea (along with 'The Pearce sisters') that he'd been carrying around with him for quite some time. He's always been very fond of quite eccentric characters and situations. The only difference here was that he planned to write the stories in a tone which was something like a folk tale and to have them illustrated in a quite gothic fashion.

The author naively imagined that if he wrote five stories and found somebody else to pack them out with plenty of illustrations that might be enough for a small collection, so when he'd written the first batch (The boy who fell asleep, Crossing the river, A row-boat in the cellar, The Pearce sisters and Neither hide nor hair) he showed them to his editor at Faber and Faber. His editor said that they were fine and made other vaguely positive comments (which is essentially what editors do in such situations) but pointed out that as things stood it would be a pretty thin book and told Mick to go away and write another five.

Faber eventually accepted the book for publication and proposed David Roberts as the book's illustrator. Mick was familiar with David's work from the covers of Philip Ardagh's Eddie Dickens series and was pleased to discover that he and David shared a love of the work of Edward Gorey.

Jackson has been known to say that writing Ten Sorry Tales was about the most enjoyable creative experience he's had - which, of course, is very nice for him but is no guarantee that the reader is going to have an equally good time.

It was only when the book was in the process of being published that doubts were raised about whether it really was a 'children's book'. The author has always insisted that he wrote the stories with younger readers in mind - most of the protagonists are children, the stories don't spend endless pages describing landscapes, etc. But in the end it was agreed that the book should be considered a 'curiosity'. The fact that there are illustrations on the cover and at the start of every story should hopefully alert the reader to the fact that this is not your ordinary short story collection.