Fish Fun

There is an actual tank in our living room, and Goldie, Zoey, Lulu and Stella are actual fish. Stella really did arrive one day in a plastic bag. After school, after days out, before bed, Isabelle and I would look at the tank and tell each other stories about what the fish had been up to — flying to the moon, going to university, riding a haunted hotel elevator, arguing over one slice of pizza.

Isabelle drew every one of those stories herself. Every idea, every composition, every wobbly line and speech bubble in this book began as her pencil on paper — more than a hundred drawings over one drawing-mad year of being six. None of it was generated by a machine: the adventures are hers, told in her words and drawn by her hand.

My job came after: I scanned her originals, wrote her stories down exactly as she told them, and used AI strictly as a colouring and production assistant — finishing her own linework so it could survive premium-colour printing, never redrawing her ideas. The rule of the whole project, written down on day one: when technical perfection conflicts with the authenticity of a six-year-old's imagination, always choose authenticity.

The book is organised the way the tank actually happened: part one is life as three fish; part two begins the day Stella arrives in her bag. In between run the recurring sagas — Lulu at Work, University, the Haunted Hotel, Game Time, the Water Park. The pages were typeset into print masters, proofed with a physical copy, and published as a 400-page hardcover.

Premium-colour hardcovers of this size are expensive to print, and this one was never built to be a bestseller. It was built to exist — so that the family can order copies, and so that the tank, the stories, and the drawings of being six are bound, on paper, forever.