The Youth Libraries Group are excited not only to feature on Thiago de Moraes's blog tour, but to be the first stop on this.  Thiago has written a compelling feature onf how 'it's easier to write for kids if you haven't stopped thinking like one.'

When I began writing A Mummy Ate my Homework I didn’t know it would end up being the first in a series of books about an 11-year old boy, neither did I deliberately aim it at an audience of kids around that age. Like a lot of authors, I started writing a story and it turned out to be the way that it is.

It was immensely fun to write, mostly because everyone involved understood the type of humour I was attempting to create. They were trusting enough to believe it would work and very generous with their effort to make it work. That sounds obvious, but not everyone in publishing would have such faith in the mind and heart of an 11 year old reader (or writer, in this particular case) to go along with all that ended up in this book.

11 is a funny age. You know enough to understand stuff, but not so much that you look at the world too objectively. Everything still has the potential to be wonderful and slightly baffling. Although I’m not a child by any valid statistic (in Middle Age Britain I’d be some sort of crumbling village elder or, more likely, a corpse), I haven’t been able to abandon the state of mind of an 11-year old since, well… since I was 11.

I am still fascinated by all sorts of things, all of the time. Creatures I can see in the grass, the way someone stands in a queue, the wingspan of the Andean condor, the ways the sausages on the left side of our oven burn quicker than the ones on the right... I regularly wake my wife up at night to tell her some random and (I am told) totally useless fact I just read but didn’t understand particularly well. Last week it was something on the domestication of horses during the late Neolithic. Lucky lady.

Looking at everything with some sense of wonder also means you’re bound to find most things funny. When writing as Henry I have tried to see the world as he sees it (which is inevitably not that far from the way I do), and the ancient Egyptian world is already full of strangeness and wonder to anyone living today. But because Henry is Henry, and not anybody else, the things he finds odd, moving, difficult or funny might not be the things most of us would.

Here’s what’s going through his mind right at the beginning of the story, while he is trying to figure out where (and when) he landed after his time travel mishap (see attached illustration!)

Some of my favourite books as a child were Asterix and Le Petit Nicolas (Little Nicholas in English), both written by Albert Goscinny. They are still some of my favourite books, and I suspect that’s because they’re not trying to be funny or interesting just for people who are a certain age, or who live in a specific place, time, etc. They just aim to be funny and interesting for everyone (and have been extraordinarily successful at that). Their universality doesn’t come from careful tailoring, but from finding the common things that all of us can enjoy in moments that might seem, superficially, to be very individual.

These common things, the stuff that really matters, don’t change whether you’re eight or eighty. Kids are intelligent, incredibly resourceful intellectually and have an amazing ability to fill the gaps when they don’t understand something immediately. They’re also quick and unforgiving when it comes to spotting things that don’t make sense or aren’t funny enough. Respecting their sensibility and abilities and not seeing their age as a limitation will always leads to better, more interesting stuff.

That’s it. I’m off to play some Minecraft now.

A huge thank you to Thiago de Moraes for the blog feature and to Scholastic for including us on the tour!