My kind of writing isn’t really meant for picture books. It goes on too long. It follows ideas into the undergrowth and loses sight of the main path. It arrives, eventually, but it’s all about the journey.

Manuela wrestled three of Sascha Martin’s adventures into picture books, but it couldn’t go on. A fourth, Sascha Martin’s Christmas Eve, was an experiment with black and white in a new format. It’s a good-looking book, but it’s still not quite where Sascha wants to go.

My writing doesn’t fit anyone’s genre.

I write in rhyming verse, for no good reason, and rhyming verse is meant to be heard out loud. Hence the podcast - Sascha Martin’s Ripping News. No one writes narrative verse these days, not for any length of time, but for me it’s the simplest way to tell a story. The form is part of what happens, and it helps to guide the tale.

I’ve written other stories like this. One’s about a werewolf. One’s about a gorgon concerned for its legacy. One’s about a Pharaoh who’s just too busy to die. And then there’s the girl who encounters a ghost. I should publish them here perhaps, or record them, or gather them in a single volume with spot illustrations by someone funny and clever.

Yes. That’d be cool.