In 2016 I published my first children’s novel, The Wild Robot. It’s the story of a robot named Roz and her struggle to survive on a remote, wild island. As it turns out, Roz doesn’t just survive, she adapts, and learns to communicate with the wildlife, and then she develops animal friends and even a family. Roz makes the island her home. But that wasn’t the whole story. You see, from the moment I started dreaming up The Wild Robot, I was also dreaming up the sequel. It would be another survival story, only this time Roz would have to… 

So, I wrote my first children’s novel. It wasn’t a graceful process, but I survived the stress and the solitude and the crippling self-doubt, and now my novel has entered the world. It’s called The Wild Robot. If you have a few minutes I’d like to tell you about it. Back in 2008, while working on a picture book called The Curious Garden, I spent a lot of time making sketches like this- I loved imagining scenes of nature living in surprising places. And that got me thinking about scenes of unnatural things living in surprising places, and I made…