How this is made

Just me, doing my best

I should be honest with you: Eric & Wally is just me doing my best, with a lot of help from my dad. Before retiring, he worked in the printing industry, so he is the editor and the proofreader. I have a few hours a week and he has a few hours a month. There’s no studio and no room full of illustrators, animators and narrators. So I use AI tools to help me write the stories up, picture them and read them aloud. Nothing goes out until we have checked it and changed it by hand, usually many times.

I’m still learning as I go, so there will be imperfections. A picture might not be quite right, or a page might break. If you spot something, please tell me and I’ll put it right as quickly as I can.

That’s also why membership is only £3.49 a month. It isn’t there to make anyone rich. It covers the cost of keeping the site running and making the next story. If enough families enjoy Eric and Wally, I’d love to work with a publisher one day and give them the books they deserve. Until then, thank you for coming along while I work it out.

Wally would like it known that if anything breaks, it wasn’t him.

Where the stories come from

The stories, the characters and Elmsham are ours. My dad told them to my sister and me in the 1990s, and I’ve been writing them down ever since.

Made with a machine

The pictures are generated to a locked style and then chosen, corrected and approved by hand. Nothing reaches a page without a person deciding it belongs there.

The voices are licensed synthetic voices: a narrator and a small cast, for the books that are read aloud and for the cartoons. None of them pretends to be anyone real.

The music is made with licensed tools, and every piece has a record of how.

The Spanish, French and German books are translated from the English by a machine, checked a second way by another, and read before they are published. The English is the original.

Never

A story made up by a machine. A copy of anyone’s voice without their written permission. Any child’s drawing, message or data used to train anything.

If you ask

I will tell you how any particular thing was made. Every asset has a record.

The letters

The words are set in OpenDyslexic, by Abbie Gonzalez, the face the printed books use, under the SIL Open Font License. Headings are in Fraunces.