Lights Out, Little Dragon! by Debra Tidball & Rae Tan
(published HarperCollins Australia)
Debra Tidball is a children’s author of award-winning picture books. The Scared Book won the SCBWI Crystal Kite Award for Australia and New Zealand, and is a CBCA Notable Book. When I See Grandma won the Caleb Award and both books have been shortlisted for the Speech Pathology Australia Book Of the Year. Anchored was listed in the London Times and The Week Magazine as being among the best books for children in summer 2023 and was a CBCA Notable Book in two categories (Picture Book and Early Childhood).
Lights Out, Little Dragon! is released in June 2024.
Guest author post by Debra Tidball about her picture book, Lights Out, Little Dragon!, for Joy in Books at PaperbarkWords blog
My little dragon is so tired, but he won’t go to sleep.
What can I do?
It’s bedtime and Little Dragon is trying every trick to stay awake.
I’m sure most parents can recognise a ‘Little Dragon’ in their life, and that long, bumpy, seemingly endless road to bedtime that gives their patience a good workout. I wonder how your children would finish the sentence: ‘At the end of the day mummy’s/daddy’s always…’?
Loving? Kind? Caring? Fair? Good?
What did mine say?
‘Grumpy!’
Okay, I admit, I didn’t always pass the patience test! My latest picture book, Lights Out, Little Dragon, is a kind of ode to long-suffering parents, and offers some sneaky opportunities for little ones to practice sleepy-time rituals, that might (no promises!) help them get to sleep. At the very least, I hope it lightens bedtime by allowing parents and children a cheeky wink of acknowledgement of these antics.
Lights Out, Little Dragon is an interactive picture book in which the child character asks the reader’s help to try and get their playful dragon friend to sleep, in a role-reversal bed-time narrative that lends itself to lots of humour as child readers and parents recognise familiar sleep-avoiding patterns at their house. It works on several levels – a simple, humorous story of someone not wanting to go to bed, but also encouraging the child reader to enact some sleep-inducing rituals (blowing away loud thoughts, yawning etc) and gain a sense of mastery at successfully helping get Little Dragon to bed.
The complexity of the book required a lot of thought and attention to detail, especially with the interactive elements that need the child reader to believe that they have an impact on Little Dragon’s behaviour, and the child narrator addressing both the reader and the dragon at different times. Having characters made it much harder to execute than having the book as the character as in my prior picture book, The Scared Book (Lothian, 2017 Illust. Kim Siew) because positioning of both character illustrations and text play a huge role in the meaning-making of the book. Part of my process is making a very rough ‘dummy book’ (with or without stick illustrations) to be able to check the page turns are working as they should.
After the success of The Scared Book and the feedback I got from parents and educators about how children loved interacting with it, I wanted to replicate this style with my sleepy-time book. One of the best loved pages in The Scared Book is when the reader traces a spiral with their finger to help the book relax. In Lights Out, Little Dragon, near the start of the book, the reader is asked to trace a way of escape for the poor, pestered sleep sheep. I wanted to tap into children’s love of puzzles and mazes, and Rae has made this a fun obstacle course! The beauty of it is that there is no right or wrong answer! Whichever way the reader decides to direct the sheep (I’m assuming they will ‘draw’ with their finger along the page) gets the same result on the next page!
Lights Out, Little Dragon is my fourth picture book, all with different publishers as not every picture book manuscript will suit the same publisher. In fact, the publishing house I started working with for this book ultimately did not take up the manuscript, and instead it found a home at HarperCollins. I am so thankful for the ‘dream team’ of publisher and illustrator for this book*, and how willing we all were to work to get it right. This has been by far the book with the most discussion and negotiation between myself, the publishers, and the illustrator. I was in awe of illustrator Rae Tan’s ability to knock it out of the park – whenever she was asked to rework something, she came back and trumped anything the rest of us could have imagined! Her ability to come up with another perspective, and one more cosy picture of warmth and connection, is amazing!
Of course, Rae wasn’t the only one who made changes. In the book there’s a toilet scene, and I initially wrote the text with the toilet action off the page and implied, but Rae provided such funny illustrations that brought it to life on the page, that we had to go with it. It meant a lot of re-thinking the text and actions and ultimately cutting and re-jigging some pages, but the end result is worth it!
I am so in love with the way Rae has imagined my child and dragon characters, reflecting her Singaporean-Australian background. The soft, cosy yet playful feel of the illustrations makes the book so visually appealing and perfect for bedtime. It’s serendipitous that I decided on a dragon, after brainstorming ideas for characters with my writer’s group, and the book is coming out in the year of the dragon!
Of course all the plotting and planning (mostly on screens) can never fully prepare you for the wonder of holding the book in your hands, and the relief in seeing that it ‘works.’ At least I think it does – you might tell me I’m dreaming! 😉
Thank you, Joy, for having me on your blog.
*not to say my other publishers and illustrators have been less fabulously collaborative and wonderful!
A zealous supporter of book creators in Australia, Debra is the Regional Director of her NSW CBCA local region. She has a bachelor degree in social work and a masters in children’s literature and lives in Sydney with her family, and a fury friend or two. Debra also has flash fiction, short stories, poems and plays published in anthologies and The School Magazine. You can find out more at www.debratidball.com
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