After getting the long overdue blog for ‘A Dream’ off my chest, as I’ve put it off for almost a year, writing the diary for the creation of ‘Theodore the Unfortunate Bear’ was so much easier. It was, after all, more recent memory.
Technically speaking, ‘Theodore’ was not my fourth, but my fifth book. The book that came between ‘A Dream’ and ‘Theodore’ was aborted just two weeks before it was meant to be published. To this day, it still remains unpublished. Let’s take a short detour to talk a little about that ‘unfortunate’ book.
As I’ve mentioned in my previous blogs, the order of tackling the foreground or the background has remained an unresolved issue for me. Three months through the production of ‘A Dream’, I had the opportunity of a two-week window in my work schedule that I could use to concentrate on producing a new book. Hence I issued myself a challenge to see if I was able to complete the skeleton of a new book within just two weeks, as the speed of producing a book was a major priority for me. I happened to be back from a holiday to a more rural country and had taken numerous pictures of houses and landscapes which I thought could serve as backgrounds for a new book. Yes, so I decided to work on the background first for this new book, unlike what I’ve done for ‘A Dream’, which was working on a mixture of foregrounds and backgrounds at the same time.

Anyway, that wasn’t the reason for the premature death of that book. Just two weeks before I was about to complete the book, with only the colouring stage left, I received a very poor review of one of my earlier books. The impact of that harsh and rather unkind review was great, and made me lose all confidence in my work. Fortunately I managed to publish ‘A Dream’ before that devastating review.
Confusing huh? Let me try again, chronologically, I was three-quarters way through ‘A Dream’ sometime in early December 2018, before I decided to shelve it and work on this ‘unpublished’ work instead, but then I paused this work again half way to return to complete ‘A Dream’, as it was near completion anyway. After ‘A Dream’ was published in January 2019, I returned once more to work on this ‘unpublished’ work until sometime in late March, when I decided to abandon it after reading the bad review. Hope this is clearer now.
So this was when ’Theodore’ came about. In fact, maybe I have that bad review to thank, as it made me stop and rethink about my entire creative process. I decided to look beyond my immediate surrounding or my existing processes for inspiration for a new story. In fact, I decided to activate my subconscious a little bit more in my creative process.
How does this work? I simply decided to look at random pictures or photos and see if they trigger any ideas in my mind. Sometimes I would also combine two or more unrelated images and force fit them together to see if a new idea emerges, very much like how the Surrealists work.
But ‘Theodore’ came about much more easily. One day, I was looking at a random picture of a blue armchair with some laundry draped carelessly over the arm-rest. Suddenly, a flash of inspiration came and the drapery was suddenly transformed into a teddy bear that was discarded and left there on its own, totally forgotten.

And the strange thing that happened after that was, the rest of the frames kept coming so easily and voluntarily, one after another. I started to imagine that this was a very high class, self-proclaimed refined individual who was of great substance, but cursed with bad luck. Bad luck caused him to end up in a middle-lower class family not befitting its status, and how he wished he was born in a better family.
Perhaps all these came from my subconscious, for I was also guilty of such thinking when I was younger, when I used to harbour feelings of envy when I see my friends having more ‘sophisticated’ and ‘educated’ parents. It wasn’t until I was older that I began to appreciate my own parents and siblings.
So, to a certain extent, Theodore is a portrait of my younger, angsty and unappreciative self. I’m sure there are many ‘Theodore’s out there- young, angsty teens who always feel that they deserved better and despise those who truly care for them. Yet, at the end of the day, it is always those who are closest- their parents, siblings, who would come to their rescue when they are in trouble, as represented by the twins and the dog.
Through this book, I was also trying to convey the idea of what it means to be a family: the fact that we are all imperfect individuals who have our ups and downs create the reason for this entity known as the ‘family’. A family is a unit comprising a few imperfect individuals bound together by blood or other connections, and they go through life together helping and supporting one another through the good and the bad times. Though individually, all the characters in the story were full of flaws, when they started to accept one another as ‘part of the family’, fully and unconditionally, everything became so wonderful and perfect. This is a truth that sadly, a lot of families do not seem to realise-families come together not because they are perfect people, but because they are imperfect individuals.

The characters in this book, too, came from my subconscious. The father was obviously a reference to myself, the mother an image of my wife during her more irritable moments. The little baby Brian resembles my younger son a lot, while his sister Annabelle was based on a very beautiful and gentle colleague of mine when I used to teach in a school.
Overall, ‘Theodore’ was the book that took me the shortest time to finish. While ‘A Dream’ took me almost four months, ‘Theodore’ took me only forty days!
The strange thing was, just two days BEFORE ‘Theodore’ was due to be released, I received yet another very negative review for another book. Fortunately, this time I didn’t give up.