Let me explain a few things about what happens when a story is shared.

First of all, it goes to an editor, and in one particular case, the editor and the publisher wanted to change the amount of letters in a certain seagull’s name. Instead of it being “AARGH”, which was his original name, it became AAAARGH, which was quite a bit longer.

Then, of course, it went to the illustrator, who had come from a different part of the world entirely, and the illustrator put their own little twist on Ambrosia and Aargh, and all the other creatures added to the story.

You see, when I first wrote about Ambrosia and Aargh, Ambrosia was a ladybug, not a ladybird, and Aargh, as you can see, had far fewer letters to his name.

But, unless we can share really carefully well thought out “why’s” to explain to other people, we do not always get what we want. Sometimes, we just have to go with the flow.

You see, Ambrosia was difficult to sell to my publisher, even though we were friends, because Ambrosia seemed a little too “common”. This is why I made Ambrosia into a Transverse ladybird, because that made her a little more Australian (who could also travel a little further if she needed to). Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, this argument for Ambrosia’s survival in the story industry was not passed on to the artist/illustrator, who made a perfectly good and beautiful ladybug/ladybird that everyone could see.

Aargh also nearly got left out of the story. Who’d have thunk it! Being “just a seagull” made Aargh a little common too, you see, so we made sure to make him an Australian Silver Gull (which he actually was).

Unfortunately, this little piece of information may not have been picked up by the illustrator either, being a Canadian, and the illustrator may have very well put her own twist as to what Aargh looked like.

Despite it looking like a dastardly plan to go international, it actually wasn’t. It was simply a conglomeration of several minds hard at work with their own ideas, which resulted in the final, slightly mixed up version of the original story of Ambrosia Honeybun Polka Dot. 

I’ll tell you a secret, too. One of the pages of writing in the book is not quite in the right place. It’s actually also a little bit mixed up, and that had nothing to do with me. In fact, quite a lot of the final story was not much like the original story at all, which was quite a bit shorter.

In saying this, and also looking at other editing mistakes in another book I wrote, even though it annoyed the bejeebers out of me at the time, I let it go. You see, it was already printed, copyrighted and all the other wonderful things that go with creating a story, and sometimes, just sometimes, there’s not much one can do about it at all except collect the royalties.

And sometimes, the royalties for writing books are not very much at all.

(I’ll give you a round number of what I receive for those two books over a quarterly period. It’s around $200 AU every three months. That’s not very much at all, is it. Not for someone who is fifty five years old and doesn’t get any other income. I’ll leave that with you to think about.)

Kate Capewell