While it’s not unusual for kids to write their own short stories, there is something rather special about a young child who submits their masterpiece to a book publisher in hope of becoming a fully-fledged author.
That’s exactly what five-year-old Lucy did with her book, written on sticky notes, about Ruby the rabbit who goes on an adventure to save his friend, the dog.
Catherine Milne, head of fiction at Harper Collins, received the tiny, yellow manuscript on Monday, complete with a handwritten letter signed by the young author.
Milne tweeted about the special delivery, saying that the contents “melted” her heart.
“One of the joys of working in publishing is that you never quite know what you’re going to receive in your email inbox every morning,” Milne told HuffPost UK.
But in yesterday’s post she received something quite different: “A book made out of five yellow Post-It notes laboriously sticky taped together, telling the story, in the wonkiest of five-year-old writing, about a rabbit, named Ruby, who saves his friend the dog from a volcano. With a smudge of something that looks suspiciously like chocolate or perhaps Vegemite toast on the ‘cover’.”
Not only is Lucy environmentally-conscious, opting to reduce paper waste by writing on sticky notes, but, for Milne, the five-year-old is doing what all those in publishing want to achieve: “That is, tell great stories, make them into great books, and then release them into the world and give joy to readers. She is, at heart, one of us: a writer, a creator.”
We’re looking forward to reading Lucy’s next masterpiece.
Spoiler alert: the dog doesn’t fall into the volcano.