The white giraffe series6/21/2023 After that, I found couldn’t stop doing it. My non-fiction project was going badly to say the least, so I set it aside for a few days to work on the giraffe story. It just came to me like I was watching a movie. The first Saturday came and I wrote the first chapter. But the giraffe story was still in my head so I made up my mind that every Saturday I’d sit down and have a tinker with it. I returned to London a month later and started working on a non-fiction project. Well, the whole time I was away I found I couldn’t stop thinking about the girl and her giraffe. By coincidence, I was about to leave cold, rainy England for a safari in my homeland, Zimbabwe, and a visit to South Africa’s Western Cape. I decided that one day when I was retired I’d turn it into a picture book. I went home and wrote down the outline of the story. I grew up in Africa where I actually had a pet giraffe, so my first thought was: Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing on earth if you could actually ride a giraffe? And right there, on the street, the whole story came into my mind, including the girl’s name: Martine. In 2004, I was walking down a bleak, wintry London street shortly before Christmas when, out of nowhere, an image of a girl on a giraffe popped into my head.
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