Rabbit and Bear: Rabbit's Bad Habits: Book 1

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Everyone I know is complicated and sometimes nice and sometimes nasty and sometimes friendly and sometimes angry and sometimes sulky and sometimes funny and sometimes stupid and sometimes clever and always interesting. But of course it took AN INCREDIBLY LONG TIME to get from our rough and scruffy bedtime story to the finished book ( Rabbit’s Bad Habits, which was finally published this year with Jim Field’s amazing pictures).

something which will get handed on to younger brothers and sisters (because it's a book for boys and girls) and probably onto the next generation.goes from strength to strength with The Pest in the Nest, in which Spring has sprung and Rabbit is out of sorts with everyone, whether they're loud and happy or sad and slow. Rabbit is confused: Bear has always been able to fix their problems in the past – but maybe this time he needs to ask for help from someone else. From novelist and playwright Julian Gough, and the winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, Jim Field, this is a tale of Mystery! At one point, a third friendly, boring animal arrived, just to give the illustrator something new to draw (she must have been getting bored too).

Jim Field: ‘Julian suggested making Bear more of a mother character, actually his description was more “a Big Mumma” so I made her bigger boned and rounded the design more than the previous bears. Jim Field: ‘I then developed this character sheet which was really useful to keep the character consistent throughout the book. You couldn’t tell any of the animals apart: they all talked the same, and acted the same, and were nice and friendly to each other, until the book ended, or the reader died of boredom, whichever came first. The sort of story that makes you want to send your children to bed early, so you can read it to them.What is the point of having bears and rabbits in your story if they aren’t WILD, and doing the crazy, surprising, and often rather rude things real bears and rabbits do? She laughed at the good bits, frowned at the bad bits, and, at one point (while I was reading her the latest version of a funny scene), burst into tears.

I had to get the story as good as I could get it, before my agent could look for a publisher, and get an award-winning, genius illustrator like Jim to bring it to life. And I wanted to do something quite hard: to combine the charm and humour and complicated, funny, interesting characters of Winnie the Pooh with the weird, different-kind-of-interesting, real-life facts of David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries.Animals wee on the carpet sometimes, and sniff each other’s bottoms ALL the time, and chew the furniture. From novelist and playwright Julian Gough, and the winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, Jim Field, this is a tale of friendship, wisdom, and how to be REALLY NOISY. Rabbit’s Bad Habits is a breath of fresh air in children’s fiction, a laugh-out-loud story of rabbit and wolf and bear, of avalanches and snowmen.