You need a theme in a picture book just as much or maybe even more than you need it in a novel.
Let's see, now... in HOGFATHER there are a number of stabbings, someone's killed by a man made of knives, someone's killed by the dark, and someone just been killed by a wardrobe. It's a book about the magic of childhood. You can tell.
Let me say that I absolutely loved writing 'A Common Life,' because it was a book about love.
The book, Max on Life, is really kind of a second chance to answer these questions.
I consciously decided to make both 'Sammy's Hill' and 'Sammy's House' more of a warm satire and not go the route of writing a dark and bitter book about D.C.
Adverbs is a book about love, and I thought that was pretty cheerful, but people who are reading it now are telling me that it's actually quite dark.
I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.
'Rainwater' was particularly special because it was a complete departure from the suspense novels. It's set in the Great Depression and based on an incident that occurred when my dad was a boy.
Every one of my books is written from the viewpoint of cops, with the exception of my book Killer on the Road, which is written from the viewpoint of a serial killer.
I don't think there is anything magical about the language of flowers in real life or in my book.
