Peter Bowdler

As a child, Peter Bowdler preferred to invent, design and make his own toys rather than play with gifted toys. The trees in his parent’s garden were always peppered with dozens of homemade parachutes, planes and rockets. He was always in his father’s garage, bashing away with a hammer, resulting in many black fingernails that had to be drilled and lanced. Undeterred by these painful experiences and more, Peter went on to create and invent products at University, resulting in a Design Degree. During the late 90’s, Peter launched a successful online gadget store specialising in weird and wonderful boys’ toys, which he sold in 2002.

As a father to three growing boys, Peter often found himself in the middle of a wood, making bows and arrows and telling them gripping adventure stories.

“I remember the moment I decided to start writing books. I was sitting in traffic, wondering what to do next with my life. I thought about my children and said to myself, 'I’m going to be a writer' ” said Peter. “When I started writing the first Mylo Bird novel, the most wonderful thing happened to me; all of the weird and wonderful inventions that I dreamt about as a child came back to me, such as the Tribulo Arm Cannon that can compress a lake of water into a sphere the size of a pea and the Chattastone that can interpret the words of any alien or beast if you have one of their teeth attached to it.”

The first version of Mylo Bird was a whopping 190,000 words long – way too many words for a book aimed at readers 12 years+. Whilst attending a seminar at Bloomsbury Publishing, Peter was advised to whittle it down to 80,000 words. Feeling deflated, Peter sat on the train, watching the world whiz by, wondering how he was going to chop his book in half.

“I thought to myself, I want my boys to read this book! I’m not going to be defeated! I’m going to do it! I whipped out my pen and sketched out a new timeline. Armed with my new structure, I spent the next two years rewriting. Then I set it aside, too afraid to share my work with the world. When I saw the wonderful job the NHS staff are doing during the Covid 19 crisis, I thought it’s time to publish Mylo Bird and donate my royalties to them.”

Peter is now working on the sequel to Mylo Bird. He said, “I’m so excited about this book. The story line is another wild adventure into unknown worlds and features inventions I thought of when I was just eleven years old.”

For more information about Mylo Bird, please visit www.mylobird.com