Tim in his own words...

I’ve stained the whites of my eyes blue. I’ve stained my hands, face, pets, cars, and even my children. I’ve evacuated my family after explosions filled our home with thick smoke and nasty fumes. My makeshift chemistry labs have ruined every kitchen and bathroom I’ve ever owned or rented. All of this, and more, occurred in my 15-year pursuit to make the world’s first colored bubbles. And it is these real-world experiences that served as the basis for my debut book The Unusual Mind of Vincent Shadow.

Fortunately, after thousands of experiments, I finally produced the world’s first colored bubbles. I call them Zubbles. Not only do Zubbles no longer stain—the color actually disappears. My disappearing colored bubbles went on to win Popular Science’s Grand Prize for Innovation in 2005.

A deluge of interviews followed the Popular Science award. A reporter with Believer magazine asked what I would be doing with my life if I weren’t inventing toys. I didn’t hesitate. “Writing children’s books,” I said. As a child, when I wasn’t taking my mother’s sewing machine apart, I was squirreled away in my secret attic room—writing. I wrote short stories, poems, and really bad movie sequels.

Shortly after the publication of the Believer article, I received an email that would forever change my life. The email was from Brad Pitt’s production company. They’d read the Believer article and wanted to discuss my book ideas. I must have waited an entire three seconds before picking up the telephone and dialing their number. I spent the next hour talking to a brilliant movie producer named Jeremy Kleiner. We talked about my struggles with colored bubbles. We talked about movies Brad had produced (like Tim Burton’s amazing remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). It was a wonderful conversation, with one big problem—I didn’t have any story ideas. I had started writing bits and pieces over the years, but nothing I would’ve even let my mother read.

Determined to make the most of the opportunity, I decided to try and write a book. I wanted to create a story that would appeal to my kids. But where to start? I turned to the adage, “write what you know.” And I knew toys. So I pulled out all of my toy invention notebooks and made a list of my favorite inventions. I was looking for toys that were visual, novel, and easily understood. I ended up with fifty toys on my list. Toys like my windless kite that flies indoors with no wind and no moving parts. The Fib Finder pen that can detect lies as they are written. And a basketball with a built in targeting system. Now I just needed to invent a story around these toys.

I wrote down all my inventing mishaps on Post-it notes. Like the time I took my wife’s hairdryer apart to build a late-night prototype. Or all the time I spent in airport security rooms trying to convince security guards that the suspicious vials of liquid were actually just hot pink soap bubbles. I covered my lab walls with twenty years worth of stories that served as the foundation for The Unusual Mind of Vincent Shadow.

In the book, eleven-year-old Vincent Shadow dreams of being a toy inventor. He has notebooks full of ideas—bubbles that carry sound, rockets that pop into kites, and a football that would rather bite than be caught. Unfortunately, the secret attic lab where Vincent builds his prototypes had seen more disasters than triumphs. But a chance encounter with eccentric toy inventor Howard G. Whiz would force Vincent to get serious about his toy inventing.

In a case of art imitating life, it turns out that my chance encounter with Brad Pitt’s production company led me to get serious about writing. Well, at least as serious as a grown man that plays with toys all day can be!