Every book begins with a great idea. Authors have many different ways of coming up with ideas.

Tim Wynne-Jones gets lots of ideas and he keeps them all in a shoebox. He gets so many, he can't use them all for his stories. Tim got the idea for the Zoom books from his cat. His cat was named Montezuma (pronounced MON-TIH-ZOOM-AH), Zoom for short.

Tim's family pet, Montezuma, the inspiration for the Zoom books. Copyright/Source

The Zoom books started with the first book, Zoom at Sea. Tim was watching his cat play with water droplets.

"I was sitting in the kitchen and it was very early, about five – I like to write then, and I was watching Montezuma sitting on the counter batting drips of water back at the tap. … So I wrote down: 'Zoom loved water. Not to drink. He liked cream to drink. Zoom loved water to play with.' And I thought that sounded like a nice start to a story, so I started writing about a cat who loved water." (The Observer, Feb. 1987, p. 42-43)

Montezuma's love of water led to Zoom's adventure at sea.

Two years later, Tim wrote the second book, Zoom Away. In this story, Zoom searches for his Uncle Captain Roy in the High Arctic. The third book, and the last Zoom story, is Zoom Upstream.

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Zoom Upstream is dedicated to the author's cat, the real-life Zoom, who died at age 11 (that's 77 years in cat years!): "For Montezuma – Zoom himself 1975-1986."

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