{ my history of pirate stories }

i have always enjoyed making origami - the act of creating a beautiful model out of a simple piece of paper is attractive to people of all ages. as an occasional teacher, i use origami as an extra "lesson" to add something different and fun to the day.

i discovered traditional model of "the pirate's shirt" around 2004 and it quickly became a favourite model with the surprise ending. as i continued making origami with different classes, i found myself having to make more and more models as students would often "not know" or "forget" the steps. i began to think that a story would be a great format to introduce people to the model and possibly link the folds to important parts of the story.

in Dec 2005, i wrote an early draft of the "Storyboat" to teach beginning steps of the "pirate's shirt." over the next couple of years, i revised with hundreds (if not thousands) of re-tellings to people of all ages (even in australia and singapore!), finally submitting a draft to Kids Can Press and coming to the current draft.

:: pirate dream ::

Have you ever had an amazing idea in your dream? Only to wake up and have it quickly slip away? I do and I seldom remember these flashes of brilliance. Fortunately that wasn't the case this morning...

The excitement of this pirate book project has me thinking about our story all the time! All day. All night. And now, even in my sleep!

Peyton and I were brainstorming yesterday about what type of creatures and plants should be included in our book. We came up with many ideas like monkeys, parrots, toucans, hawks, dodo birds, mountain goats, bears, bats, giant spiders, mice, flamingos, fancy fish, whales, dolphins, sea monsters, giant squid and sharks.

So! In my dream, I continued to brainstorm... when the brilliant idea struck! I can use my hundreds of Hawaii vacation photos for reference. I took a ridiculous amount of photographs of exotic fruits, vegetation, flowers, animals, landscapes and even tikis.

Love it! Going to stop talking about it and continue drawing...

:: hello world ::

This blog belongs to two brothers, Peyton & Hilary Leung. It was created to help document our publishing journey of "The Legendary Pirate Shirt". We hope you enjoy our story.