What about the parents? One of the challenges in writing Daisy Dreamer is figuring out what to do about her parents. After all, Daisy is a nine-year-old girl. If she's in Morocco, or Greece, or Italy, or India (or wherever!) her parents are probably with her.

But if you're reading the comic, are you interested in Daisy's parents? Probably not. I mean, they seem like very nice parents, but nobody reads a comic because they think the parents are nice. So I try not to write Daisy's parents into the stories too much.

Sometimes I get around this problem by having a panel that says something about the parents -- so we know they are somewhere nearby. That's not a great solution though. It takes up a panel, and we only have about 14 panels to tell a story.

So what do you do? I've spent some time talking about this with the editors at Chickadee. In the end, we decided that it's ok to not have the parents in the comics, even if Daisy and her pals are on the other side of the world. At the same time, we won't have the kids doing anything dangerous. If you have the summer issue of Chickadee, you'll see that Daisy and her friends are camping on an island together. When I first wrote the script, one of the things they did was make a fire to cook dinner and roast marshmallows. But we decided that showing kids making a fire on their own was too much. If you look at the comic, you'll see they eat sandwiches for dinner instead.

And now, I'm going away to work on a book I'm writing for older kids. See you next week!  ¶ 11:18 AM 0 comments