Pictures becoming something more

There is something quietly strange about watching your book come to life. The illustrations had always existed in my head long before they existed on the page, but seeing them move, even slightly, even just as a sequence of images with a little motion and music behind them, is something else entirely.

The Brown Dog of the Green Glen now has its first proper video, and I wanted to share it here. It is a short one. A boy sets out across the Scottish Highlands on the back of a great brown dog, OUR Brown Dog, as they reach a mountain spring, Finn fills a bottle with water, and rides home again. That is the whole thing. No narration, no voiceover, just the illustrations, some music, and the landscape and that wonderful, slightly ridiculous image of a small child clinging to the back of a dog the size of a horse.

The story behind the book is older than I am, and older than anyone alive today. It comes from a fragment of Scottish folklore I came across years ago, tucked away in the kind of place where old stories tend to hide. A magical dog. A tough journey. A brave child who has to find the courage to see it through. The bones belong to Scotland, and to the tradition of oral storytelling that carried these tales from glen to glen long before anyone thought to write them down.

What the book is about, underneath the adventure and the heather and the highland scenery, is belonging. The feeling that you are heard and understood, that someone is on your side. That the world can be a big and confusing place and that is all right, because you are not facing it alone. That is what children need to hear. It is, I suspect, what most of us need to hear, at any age.

The Brown Dog of the Green Glen has found its way to families I never expected it to reach. Parents of children who process the world differently. Children who have struggled to find their place. Families who came to it looking for a bedtime story and found something they wanted to keep coming back to. That still surprises me, honestly. I wrote it because I loved the folklore and I wanted to see if I could make it work for a modern child.

If you have been meaning to pick it up, or if someone in your life might like it, you can find it on Amazon. And if you have already read it, I would love to know what you made of it.

More soon.

Ross

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTkB2V4p98g