Absolutely Speechless

There's no words for this book. It came out of nowhere and was illustrated within six weeks.

Where did the text go?

I specifically love the storytelling in this book and the layers it has. In one view it's about losing your voice and the ways you can treat it. Drinking tea, gargling with salt water, not talking, etc. Then there is the second layer about being a story of science. That Lemon Juice can be used as invisible ink. On top of that it's all visual storytelling. All of it is depicted through the illustrations. This book is not only really fun but quite educational.

For a number of years I've wanted to create a book without any words. In fact Tattered, Edit Away and possibly Colorless Rainbow were the first mental trial runs for this concept. (Although all have text and designed to have text from the beginning it did cross my mind for a moment to have it pulled. The reason I didn't is because I knew it wasn't the right story to attempt such an idea.) I'll say it was tough to find the specific ideas that built this concept and proper direction.

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Rough draft of Speechless

The idea came together very quickly. Starting off the idea of invisible ink making text vanish then speech bubbles came to mind, from there it went right to different ways of trying to bring their voice back. In no time the application was laid out with nothing more than scenes to be drawn out. Struggling to set the foundation of this story the first pages were meant to have text. One of the last details that Pascha came up with was having a lemonade stand on the title page.

If you look at my attempt to write the story you'll also see that this is the first time our characters don't have a name. A very conscience decision I wanted with this book.

Something you may have noticed is that on the cover my name cannot be found. When you look at Story Stumped is the first book apart from The Silent Reality to not include Pascha Hansen on the cover. Not because she didn't do a ton of work but mainly because it was the writers book. Since it's release I've been planning/wanting to take another book and reverse that instance. What better time than with a book with mimical text?

We had a blast working on this book. Half of it was figured out at Great North Cookie Co. in Stoney Plain and the second half was set up at Cruizy Smoothie in Barrhead. What we did was sit down and talk over every pages layout. It took no time to mapping it out and your will see that there is some inspiration to past books such as the minimal illustrative design and the speech bubbles of Edit Away. Also Pascha had a lot of fun creating and experimenting with speech bubble shapes in this book just look at the front cover.

I think Speechless is the perfect way to complete the first 25 books in our collection. A collection of books and stories learning, growing and experimenting in the authoring field. I hope you you enjoy this brand new picture book and that it leaves you speechless in the best possible way.

Author Picture for Speechless

Thank you for your time!

Chance Hansen

Keep Smiling!