I was fascinated by the natural world as a child and would go around and collect anything that moved, slithered, or hopped for my personal menagerie, then i would take it home, skin it, and boil the flesh off so i could study the skeleton.
I began writing properly after my career in biology fell by the wayside after academia rejected my paper on the natural world due to old-timey sexism and women and science not being compatible which included hundreds of sketches of the innards of animals which i had dissected but my characters really lived, until i killed and boiled them but they all ended up starring in the books which made me, and them, famous.
I found my niche in children's literature but after six rejections for my Tales of Peter Rabbit story, i self published and printed 250 copies which became so popular that a publisher took notice and made me an offer to write more so i used my previous pets for inspiration.
Benjamin Bouncer was my first rabbit, he ended up being chloroformed and dissected and he was replaced by Peter Piper who went the same way while Squirrel Nutkins was a squirrel i asked a gamekeeper to shoot so i could boil and dissect it, a wood mouse i caught was Mrs Tittlemouse,
and Jeremy Fisher was a frog i cut up to look at what was inside it's stomach which was flies mostly.
The books sold well, i ended up writing 36 of them but the real money was in the merchandise, i filed a patent for my characters so i could sell a line of stuffed animals and i made more cash off the merchandise than the books until i died of pneumonia.
I guess if my paper hadn't have been rejected i would never have become famous but writing for children was easy, all you need is a love of nature, a large collection of animals to draw on, a large enough pot and an oven that cooks at 180C and the knowledge that the way to a beloved pets heart is through it's chest with a scalpel.
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