📯 The new book bugle parps 📯
When Tree Became A Tree is out now! Available wherever you get your books.
This is the third in a series that I have been calling the When series. Which is a catchy title for a series, don’t you think? It follows on from When Cloud and When Moon. If the first two were set in the sky, this one is about rooting down.
If you haven’t seen the others, they follow the main character from their formation and throughout their life, sharing insights, meeting friends, and enduring the many transformations that happen to them. These books are basically like biographies of natural phenomena, and like us, go through a lot of changes in their lives. A reviewer called them neo-non-fiction, which I think makes them sound very cool indeed.
This one covers a lot of ground (nice), from seeds, to saplings, to photosynthesis and fruit. We meet talking mushrooms and bees having a pollen party. And, like the other two, this one comes in at a whopping 64 pages.
Research is a big part of writing a non-fiction series, and that means not just throwing myself back into primary school science, but reading the latest findings around these topics. For When Tree, that meant figuring out how to explain photosynthesis in just two pages and also how to bring in more recent ideas about mycelia. I learnt a lot!
Each book in the When series has a different art technique to match its subject. For When Cloud, it was wispy looking ink. For When Moon, it was using paper cutouts for the shapes, and ink and salt to make a crater effect.
For When Tree, I made stamps.
That meant I could cut a lot of them out and they’d all be individual, and there’s something that lends itself to cutting out stamps that feels a lot like a branch system. Anyhow. Lotta stamps. Here’s a video I made of some of the process bits and bobs that went into making the art and some of the drafts of the many, many manuscripts.
I like trees. I liked the moon a lot when I was doing that book, too. Same with clouds. There’s something about spending a lot of time thinking about one thing that kind of makes you crazy about that thing.
I remember when I was doing Moon, I’d be writing all day and then I’d go for a run and I’d see the real moon and be like….. I'VE JUST BEEN THINKING ABOUT YOU.
See: crazy.
Same with trees. I was very aware of the changing seasons when I was writing this one, and now that the book is out and Spring is doing its thing here… there’s just a bigger connection to that now for me.
And that’s kind of what I hope these books do. That was kind of my goal with the tone of them. Of having the characters be (hopefully) lovable. If you care about the characters, might you care more in real life? About real trees? Maybe that’s a strange concept? But also, maybe it isn’t. I stopped eating meat 14 years ago when I got my two cats. Why? Because suddenly I cared about animals. I gave a damn about all animals because of my relationship to my two cats. I don’t know what that phenomenon is called, but that’s what I’m going for with these books. And also more broadly in all my work that is ecology related.
Okay! When Tree Became A Tree is out now in all good bookshops. I really hope you like it. I’m proud of it. I’m proud of all three. We’re putting a pin in the series for a minute while everybody catches their breath. A trilogy, for now.
But don’t worry, we’re working on something different right now that is VERY COOL AND FUN.
Over and out!
