I was a child of two worlds.
The first world was loud and complicated. Things moved quickly. Bigger people asked me lots of questions, and those questions had implied answers. Often I didn’t know what those answers were. I knew enough to understand that the world was a complex social system. My task was to try to navigate it while having little impact on it. I didn’t always like that world.
The second world was mine. I made it. As an only child until I was six, that world was my comfort. In my inner world, nothing happened that I didn’t decide could happen. There were no unspoken expectations and no misunderstandings. Time operated on a different plane. No one was waiting for me. My imagination was mine and no one ever came in.
Recently I’ve found myself wondering what would have happened for me as quiet kid if those two worlds had ever come together. What if one had invaded the other somehow? What would I have done if all the odd characters from my favourite books and games and TV shows – and the ones from the dreams and drawings that populated my second world – turned up in the real world?
This is the story of The Odds. Kip is a quiet kid in a loud city. I’ve created her from the pages of my own journals. I’ve found myself loving her with a tenderness that I can only compare to what I feel for my own young children. She has come from me.
And the Odds have come from her. There’s a dragon-hunting rabbit, a farming rooster and the greatest soccer player of all time. There’s an alien, an old man, and a unicorn with a missing bottom. They bring with them the slapstick absurdity and humour of a child’s imagination. They’re going to change everything for Kip.
It isn’t lost on me that the work I do now – creating stories for children using words and pictures – allows me to dance between those two worlds. I’ve found Kip and the Odds somewhere deep in that second world. Now it’s time for them to invade this one. And, like Kip, we’ll see what happens from here.
