How Billy Chicken Toes Became a Book

When I was a kid I used to go to my aunt and uncle’s farm to play with my cousin. We would play in the barn, up in the hay loft. Sometimes we’d climb up on the conveyor belt to get into the hay loft. We’d walk around the pasture and I would have to watch out for the cow patties. I would side step one pile to step into another one. Being a city girl I wasn’t as sure-footed as my country cousin. I also stepped into a few small spots of quicksand. They were small and could only take a foot, not a whole body.

In the barn yard there were kittens running around. We’d try to catch them and every now and then we would catch a couple of the little furry critters. We would sit there petting and playing with them for hours.

I never wanted to go near the pig pen, funny thing was, my cousin never wanted to either. I never really cared for the chickens much, but I loved the little chicks. The chicks, when they were old enough would come out of the chicken coop and we would play with them too. There was this one chick who would always walk away from the others and we would have to go get it and put it back with the others. The second we turned our backs the little stinker would go off on it’s own again. We always had to make sure that we put the little chick back in the hen-house before we went to do something different.

I first wrote about Billy Chicken Toes a good twenty years ago. It started out as a verbal story I made up out of my head to tell my children. Day after day they would come to me and ask me to tell them the story of Billy Chicken Toes. I would change the story from time to time so they wouldn’t become bored with it. When I got my first computer I wrote the story and saved it on a floppy disk. In that story poor Billy died in the end. He died over and over as I told the story to my kids. We lived in a city and I didn’t want my children walking off to do who knows what, so I used the story to teach them that anything could happen if you just wander off.

When I decided to turn Billy into a book I figured Billy couldn’t die. How would I be able to write a series of books about Billy’s adventures if he died in the first book? So Billy doesn’t die he just wanders off and has one adventure after another.

By Jeannee` DeWolfe