And Now It's Time for the Main Feature...

It's been one of those days. I'm not a technophobe but it's taken me half an hour just to break into my own blog to write a new entry. It took a crow bar but I'm here.

I have also just mistakenly invited 2,000 people whom I scarcely know to join me on LinkedIn.

In the interests of reaching a wider audience with AuKids, I do need to get my head around this social networking business and information technology stuff.

I have got a big book on it which our marketing budget just about stretched to; I'm ready to get straight into it once I've figured out how to block the several million LinkedIn emails that are forming a nice back catalogue in AuKids' email account.

I'm on the computer this late because Alec thinks summer sun means night-time fun and until the moon comes up over Stockport he goes raving bonkers. Bobby, sharing his bunk bed, doesn't think much of this but unfortunately cannot play musical beds tonight because the spare bed awaits the  arrival of a friend on Friday. Bobby has taken to falling asleep in the study when Alec is going nuts (happy, wild nuts rather than nasty nuts) and then his dad somehow manages to replace him in the top bunk when everyone is asleep. Lately he's told us to inform him whilst he's being moved, as he's woken up feeling confused. I wake up feeling confused without that excuse.

Tomorrow Tori and I are with any luck going to crack on with our favourite part of AuKids, our very own feature written by us and just us.

WORK AND SMIRK: Debby and Tori, cartoon courtesy Periscope Studios Ltd

We do have a long list of ideas that we want to cover but a lot of them arise from just talking about autism, about the kids that Tori's agency supports, about my twins, about the adults we know. AuKids is the result of a passionate interest in autism, a love of looking beyond the simplistic veil of diagnosis and into the very heart of what it means to be autistic. Not just that, but knowing what it's like to live with autism, we are always looking to write something that parents will find truly meaningful.

Number one starting point is that we never talk about a 'problem' without addressing a 'solution'. I've ready plenty of magazines like that. A good old two-page whinge about how bad a situation is and just as you think you're getting to the good bit - what to do about it - it ends. So our premise is, don't start focusing on an issue if you can't arrive at some practical solutions, or at least be signposted to the next step.

Right from the start, Tori and I have always thought of our ideas in terms of visuals. This was partly because we wanted a magazine that looked exicting and appealling to read. Mostly though, it's because we're both visual thinkers. If we want to get a new idea across, we always think of it in terms of an analogy, something familiar. That way, people reading about something get a 'hook' that helps them to get their head around it. And yeh readers, you could no doubt get your heads around it anyway,  it's just that much quicker and easier to remember with an idea or image to think about.

Once we've come up with a theme, we work with the graphic designer to mould the feature around the graphics.

Of course, once you've dreamt up an image, it doesn't always work. Analogies can't always stretch as far as we'd like them to and occasionally we've been forced to admit to ourselves that we've got to ditch an idea despite the really cool cartoon because it just won't do what we want in terms of explaining something fully and clearly.

Our popular ice-cream sundae feature was the result of a chat about how autism isn't the 'spectrum' in the sense that people often believe it to be, with a low score at the bottom and a high score at the top, a line connecting the two with everyone falling between it. We felt that was entirely inadequate and that autism 'scores' could often be misread.

We started to talk about autism being more of a pick 'n' mix, with certain traits more prevalent than others depending on the individual, and traits changing over time in the same individual. From that, the ice-cream sundae feature grew. If you could 'see' the sundae in your head, you could remember the basics about autism. We had no idea when we wrote it that other people would find it so convenient, but it just seemed to make more sense to us.

There's no point in being a magazine that aims to make a very po-faced looking topic approachable without being prepared to explain things in a new way. We have loads of fun doing that, and many laugh out loud moments.

Our latest idea is to take some of our analogies and turn them into three dimensions in front of an audience.

Lots of people can talk about autism more technically than we can. Our challenge is to talk about autism more simply than anyone else. So the ice-cream sundae has become a demonstration and we have one or two more in the pipeline. Gradually we're building a following of people who want to hear us speak (or lark around, as is more often the case) and we want to show them something different. Something entertaining. Why not? Why do conferences have to be so very serious? You can learn whilst you're laughing, at least we think so.

If we didn't think so, we wouldn't have started up AuKids.