The Giant Counting Robots story
From American fighting man to children's book author?
After hanging up my helmet as a U.S. Marine, I went back to school to earn a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing with a minor in Theatre. Some time later, to the surprise of no one but myself, I became a children’s book author.
How did this happen? How did this august moment in children’s literature come about? Well, let me tell you of the days of high adventure!
Raconteur Press held a staff retreat last summer where the pitches and planning were wild and out of control. We had previously published Giant Freakin’ Robots (which features a story by yours truly btw) and planned to produce Giant Stompin’ Robots (which ended up having a story by me in it btw), as well as Giant Squeeing Robots (no, no I did not. Just no).
We had transitioned to discussing the possibility of publishing children’s books in the future. I immediately blurted out, “Giant Counting Robots!” This generated the laugh I had intended it to, but then…
“Giant Robots are stomping!
We have to flee!”
Oh, no.
“I see one robot,
Two robots,
Look, there are three!”
What have I done?
“How come these robots keep stepping on me?”
My notepad erupted with scribbled lines of text as my inner Shel Silverstein burst out onto the page. I could feel the spirit of Maurice Sendak over my shoulder, nodding with approval.
“Three robots are wrecking,
But here come some more!
Giant robots are smashing!
Now there are four!”
Gah!
A rough draft of Giant Counting Robots stomped its way onto the page that day. But how would it end? I realized saving the day with artillery and tanks might not be the way to go in a children’s book. How would the story be resolved? Would my child narrators remain stranded in a post-apocalyptic world oppressed by their robotic overlords?
I figured at some point the kids may try to communicate with the robots, but how? How does any big brained nerd communicate with a machine? Binary code!
Portions of the story ended being written in binary numbers as the children attempt to resolve their conflict with the robots.
01001001 01110100 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01101100 01111001 00100000 01100001 01110111 01100101 01110011 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100001
The ever clever Cedar Sanderson realized the potential for this to become a fun learning opportunity for young readers and added some items to help parents and teachers use the book. We even came up with the idea of adding an ASCII code to the back of the book so readers could translate those messages. Of course, this only forced me to add a few more bits written in binary.
And there you have it. The first Raconteur Press children’s book!
Though I doubt I’ll join the ranks of great children’s book authors, this was a lot of fun to create and I think it shows in the final product.
I gave it to my cousin's young son (4 years old) for Christmas last year. His parents both thought he'd love it (Dad's an engineer, so he probably loves it too!)