I wrote a picture book called Chu’s Day about a baby panda who sneezes. It may be the simplest book I’ve ever written. It’s the only time I’ve ever imagined myself writing a book that I intended to be read to children who could not yet read.

It exists because none of my children’s picture books have ever been published in mainland China. They have been published in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, but there has never been a Neil Gaiman–written picture book in China because, I was told, in my books the children do not respect their parents enough, and they do bad things without getting properly punished, and there is anarchy and destruction and insufficient respect for authority. So it became a goal of mine to create a picture book that would contain all of these things and also be published in mainland China.

I wrote it, and I drew pictures for it, to show an artist what happened, and I gave it to my publisher, who gave it to Adam Rex, who painted much better pictures for it, and I am still waiting to find out if it will be published in China.

Still, a baby panda who sneezes.

It’s a children’s book which I wrote, peculiarly, with an adult audience in mind. I wrote it because I wanted a picture book of mine to be read in China. I wrote it to make children imagine and dream and exult and pretend to be pandas and pretend to sneeze, so I wrote a book that I hoped adults would enjoy reading to children, and, more importantly, enjoy reading the tenth time that week or the third time that night.

It contains a simple world, in which a small child is not listened to, but should have been, with disastrous consequences for everyone except the child. The pictures are beautiful and filled with detail.

And as I made it, I looked at it with two sets of eyes: was I making a book I would have liked as a very small boy? Was I making a book that I would enjoy reading as a parent—soon, perhaps, as a grandparent, for life goes so quickly?

That was the first book.

I wrote another book, almost definitely for children. It was called Fortunately, the Milk. It was intended, when I began it, to be as short as The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, to which it was a thematic sequel. That was a book that contained a father physically present but so absent that children were able to swap him for other things, like a gorilla mask, or an electric guitar, or a white rabbit, or a goldfish, while he simply read the newspaper. I thought I should redress the balance. I would write about a father who would have incredibly exciting adventures, or at least, claim to have had them, while going to get milk for his children’s breakfast cereal.

The book grew until it was entirely too long to be a children’s picture book, then ran out of words before it was long enough to be a novel.