At last, at the risk of regretting my words, I’ve put together enough poems for my first collection. It’s not that I didn’t already have a decent number of rhymes, limericks and verses, but on researching the market for illustrated poetry books, I saw that it’s not enough to chuck everything into a single manuscript and draw up some colourful pictures. Definitely not. Firstly, there are the publishers’ defined age ranges to consider: pre-school, 5 – 7, 8 – 12, and 12 +, followed by YA and adult. Each age range has its language level, maximum length and font size for ease of reading. Secondly, there’s the issue of subject matter. Unless you can guarantee that your poetry is all uproariously funny (a book of humorous verse for instance), it needs to have a common theme – for instance poems about the weather, the countryside or the sea. And after checking that there weren’t half a dozen poetry books on my chosen subject, I made a start.

Eventually this resulted in 25 poems (more might be added if the muse strikes) on one subject, aimed children (and bigger people) over the age of 10. They’re now waiting to be illustrated, which presents further stumbling blocks. It’s that age range thing again: full-colour, full page illustrations are for young children, certainly no older than 8. The amount of page covered with pictures reduces as the target age increases, until we poor adults might only get a paltry black and white pencil sketch every couple of pages. The more words – the less pictures. I feel rather sad about that, however I’m honing my best cartoon style to add plenty of amusing flourishes to the planned book.

The next step is to make rough page layouts with text only, to give myself an idea of how much space to allot to the illustrations. Where possible I’ll try to include a few full-page drawings, which I can really have fun with. For the longer poems I’ll stretch them over two or three spreads – four to six pages, so they can be as well illustrated as the shorter poems.

This should result in a respectable sized book.

After that will come the rough sketches, and eventually, finished illustrations. This is never a quick process.