I created the character of Ruff years ago, just a simple pencil drawing of a nice, brown dog. Nothing special, but very cute nonetheless. At the time though I couldn’t think how to use him, so he was put in a folder and left alone, as happens quite often because of the amount of new ideas my brain thinks up.

A few years later I found him out and sent him to my mom to see what she thought of him. Her immediate advice was he needed to be scruffier, so she copied the picture and added some pointy ‘v’ shapes all over his smooth fur to make him look a bit more dishevelled and I must admit, he looked great! I still didn’t know what to do with him though, so he went back in the folder again.

A few months passed and one night an idea popped into my head out of nowhere, about how he could be a travel guide for children, using Ruff’s Guide as the book title, a play on the adult Rough Guide travel books. I thought he could feature in books for children to take away on holiday with them, giving them information about their holiday destination, like the language spoken, food eaten and important places to visit.

I took this idea and ran with it, using my Flower Guard Books’ Facebook page in April 2017 to launch a competition for someone to win the first official Ruff’s Guide. The winner of the competition requested a guide to Portugal for a young relative and so it began. I was commissioned several times after this and created many different Ruff’s Guides, researching, writing, illustrating and binding the books by hand.

Other books then took over my time, with The Creature series taking off as my first self-published title and my Craft and Writing Workshops starting up I was extremely busy, so Ruff was forgotten about again for a while. Then, after seeing a Facebook post about a new app being created by East Riding Libraries and Archives I got in touch to suggest I could be involved and after a very productive meeting, I started collaborating with them on a children’s version of their What Was Here app, with Ruff as the guide. And so, Ruff made a return to the limelight, as the ‘hook’ in the app that allowed children to take a virtual tour around a town and look in to the past.

In 2018 the Tour de Yorkshire cycle race announced that it would be coming through our home-town, so the idea of a local travel brochure popped into my head. I put together a leaflet that later turned into a full-blown book, all about Hornsea and what you could do here. It was stocked in the local museum and library and a few other places that displayed tourism leaflets. It was a lot of fun to create and I was pleased to be able to use Ruff for something else.

All was going swimmingly, with Ruff being just a travel guide and then my eldest returned from school after attending her Eco Club and told us all about the extra things we could be doing to protect the environment and save animals that were in danger of disappearing. This started a little idea niggling in my brain for a while. What if I wrote a book for children about something to do with protecting the planet and it’s animal inhabitants? I thought about inventing a whole new character that could lead the book, but my mind kept returning to Ruff. He didn’t have to be just a travel guide, he could be useful elsewhere. Ruff’s Guide to Endangered Animals was born!

In August 2019 I started doing test illustrations for the animals that could be included in the book and began researching the facts and figures of those animals that were critically endangered. It was heart-breaking to read how human actions were causing pain and suffering to so many animals and then I found out that lots of the animals I was reading about could become extinct before my children were grown.

That was it, that’s when I put the plan together to pick the Top Ten endangered animals and write a book about why they were endangered, what people were already doing to help them and what we could all do in the future to save them from extinction. Ruff became so much more than a travel guide, he became the equivalent of David Attenborough, in dog form, a spokesperson that would reach the minds of primary aged children. My intention was that the book would help them understand that our world isn’t a safe place for some animals and that we are the only ones who can protect them from extinction.

I’ve spent months and months researching, writing, illustrating and editing the book. Hours and hours changing things and including new additions, like colouring pages, interesting and fun worksheets and the original images that were my inspiration when drawing the Top Ten animals. I offered the book out for some Focus Group feedback and parents and teachers responded eagerly. The feedback received was incredible, with children between the ages of 4 and 10 saying how much they’d liked the book and how Ruff had made them think about how they needed to change their lives to protect the endangered animals.

I have done a lot to help increase the interest and awareness for this book. Including contacting the WWF about endorsement, who have said that whilst they can’t endorse the book, they are very happy for me to include them and their incredible work in the book, and they appreciate the fact that I want to point readers in the direction of their website for further information. I’ve been in touch with a local, mobile zero-waste refill shop and found that they want to stock the book for their customers to buy. And, by coincidence this year’s children’s East Riding Festival of Words event is all about wildlife and preserving the planet, so I will be hosting a Ruff’s Guide to Endangered Animals Workshop this month (October), to share the book with children and help them start their research into what their generation can do to help.

Now, as I sit here typing this blog entry, the book is about to be published. I have high hopes that it will become something special, that it will make a difference. The endangered animals of this world don’t have a voice, but Ruff does and hopefully, he can shout loud enough through this book for people to hear him.

Are you read to listen?