My 10-tonne elephant

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) I don't really own a 10-tonne elephant. I only own an imaginary one. But, since this elephant of mine figures quite prominently in the crazy kids' novel I have just finished writing, I thought it might be worthwhile telling you about it. This elephant, in fact, may even make it into the novel's title―that's if the publisher ends up using the title "The Elephant Heist" (pictured) which I hope they will.

Let me tell you the set-up for my novel, and then you might understand why I so wanted the elephant. You see, the story is about an ordinary town that wakes up one morning to find the town's bank has been robbed during the night. But I didn't want this bank heist to be ordinary. I wanted it to be dramatic and wacky, because this was a novel for kids aged around 8-12 years and I wanted the plot to be pushed to the max wherever possible. So, the two bandits in the story did a strange thing. They didn't just break into the bank with a sledgehammer in the middle of the night, or dig a tunnel underneath. No, they had one of their henchmen fly a plane at 30,000 feet over the town. Furthermore, they had nabbed (from who knows where) a huge African male elephant that very unwillingly was now forced to play a major part in the heist. Fixing a giant saddle on the elephant's back, and slipping the elephant into an enormous parachute harness, the bandits then hopped on while the huge beast was PUSHED out of the airplane. Down, down, down the elephant zoomed in the parachute. The two bandits guided the elephant by means of a massive rudder they had fixed onto the elephant's back. Then, with a large CRASH, the bull elephant smashed through the roof of the town bank. The bandits were in!

Thus the town woke up the next morning to a double emergency. Not only had the bank been robbed, with the bandits still at large (presumably) somewhere in the town, but also there was a massive and very angry African elephant inside the bank that couldn't get out.

This was the sort of set-up that gave me something wonderful to work with in the remainder of the novel. The town was in an uproar. The media was frenetic. The police were trying to track down the bandits. And four kids and a Dobermann were drawn into the middle of it all, and become, as the novel progresses, key to resolving the whole outrageous situation.

So you can see (hopefully) why my elephant was key. He turned a fairly humdrum set-up into a very wacky one, surrounded, by the very nature of things, with heaps of drama and possibility.

I'll probably tell you more about The Elephant Heist novel in some future blogs. And, if you're interested, you can follow me on Facebook at facebook.com/peterfriendwriting to hear news of where and when this novel might actually be published! It should be LOADS of fun.