Here are some AKIAK facts:
The dog Akiak is actually named after a village in Alaska. I drew it on the map below. My homesteader friend lives in Healy. The Iditarod race runs from Anchorage to Nome- over 1,000 miles!

       When I first started working on Akiak the story was quite different. Mick was going to be named Dusty. I was going to tell the story from the point of view of the musher. But once I got around all those wonderful dogs, I knew this had to be a DOG story.

       It takes me about eight months to make a book. Sometimes things change from the time you begin a story to the day you complete it. At one point, my publisher wanted me to make the title of this book PAWMUT. Pawmut!! Yikes!! Not MY hero! It took me a long time to convince them that AKIAK was a good title. They said, "But nobody is going to know what an Akiak is!" I said, "They will!"
Also, sometimes the idea for a page will change. Here is the way I originally planned to do the artwork for the page on which Akiak escapes from the musher's cabin. I decided it was a bit too slapstick.

       The title page was different, too.

       When I first started writing the story, I wasn't sure if Mick should be a woman or a man. Here's how Mick would have looked if the musher was a man.

       Of course, the ending would have been different, too. Here's a look at another version of the ending.