Percy's Perch
A cute little gargoyle who is scared of heights. This makes his life pretty difficult.
Book five of 12 Books in 12 Months, and a picture book for actual children this time. Percy is a little gargoyle who is afraid of heights, which is a serious problem in his line of work. He meets a boy named Iain who is dealing with a schoolyard bully, and together they work at conquering their fears — one baby step at a time.
Percy was illustrated by Kari Lynn Smith, who captured the characters' personalities so perfectly that I was the tiniest bit jealous of her ability. Tiniest bit. The launch also came with a song, "Flying Away", written for the book by Jehan Khoorshed, which is quite possibly the coolest thing that has ever happened to one of my stories.
The book went out under my usual Creative Commons NonCommercial Sharealike licence, and did double duty as the test case for two pieces of 1889 Books infrastructure launched the same day: Babel, the collaborative translation system, and the 1889 Reader. Readers were invited to translate Percy — and the song — into as many languages as they could manage.
Percy was made as a physical book first and converted for the web afterwards, and the reading data that came back changed how I made books after it. Twenty per cent of readers went from page 11 back to page 10 before carrying on, which told me something in that transition — the story's first real time break — wasn't landing. Inline artwork instead of full-page images was the other lesson. The medium dictates the content, at least to some extent.
This page was reassembled from the archive — the book predates the last two versions of this site, and its original page is gone. The description is stitched together from what I wrote about it at the time, so it may be missing things.