SOME women might have a problem working with their husband... but not children’s author Charlotte Guillain.

“We can go for a walk around the lake at Blenheim on a beautiful sunny morning and call it work,” she says with relish.

And that’s just one of the pluses.

“We know how the other person’s mind works and know it’s okay to shut down any bad ideas the other person has,” she says.

“Because we work together at home it can sometimes be hard to stop talking about work or looking at manuscripts – but in a way this can be a plus too. We get a lot done in short moments surrounded by chaos. Adam [who is also a storyteller] is out in schools a lot so it’s not like we’re working together every day – so when we can collaborate it’s really nice.”

It’s a collaboration that clearly works.

They are both children’s authors in their own right but their first picture book together – Spaghetti With The Yeti – is on the shortlist for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2013 (with £2,500 for the winner, to be announced in December).

“We are blown away to hear we are on the shortlist,” she says. “I grew up reading Roald Dahl’s books and wanted to be a writer from a very young age. So of all the prizes we could possibly have been shortlisted for, this one makes me the happiest.”

Charlotte’s childhood involved a lot of travelling. “My dad was in the RAF so had always moved a lot with his work – I grew up in Lincolnshire and then moved to Suffolk and Germany,” she says.

“Both my parents lived abroad when they were younger too and I think this gave me a taste for adventure.”

That taste led her to Zanzibar where she met Adam in 1997. The couple got married four years later in a barn near Wantage.

“We were both volunteering with VSO in Tanzania,” she recalls. “We were working on Unguja, a beautiful island with white sandy beaches, stunning sunsets and delicious tropical fruit. Adam was training primary school teachers and I was teaching English to student nurses and lab technicians.

Charlotte left Zanzibar in 1998 and moved to Oxford to do an MA in Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes.

“I stayed in Oxford after I graduated because I loved the city and got my first job in publishing at Heinemann up at Jordan Hill [now Pearson Education].

“I was an editor of secondary English books and then moved to Raintree Publishers, where I commissioned children’s non-fiction for several years.

“I didn’t really start writing as an adult until I became a freelance editor and writer after our second child, Anna, was born.

“I started out writing children’s non-fiction and gradually tried writing picture books and fiction.

“Meanwhile, Adam was writing novels for children and some educational materials.”

Now the couple work together from the Woodstock home they share with their children George, nine, and Anna, eight.

“We start out by batting ideas around – talking nonsense to each other and seeing if the other person picks up on anything and finds it funny,” says Charlotte, 41.

“We often do this on a walk – maybe walking to school with our kids – or just chatting at home. We talk about where an idea could go and then one of us – this changes from book to book – starts things off and types up a draft. When they’ve gone as far as they can with the idea, they send it to the other person who reads it, we talk about it and make changes.

“Then the idea just goes back and forth between us until we’re both happy with it. This can be a morning’s work, or it can take weeks or months.”

George and Anna act as sounding-boards for ideas and add some of their own.

“We all spend a lot of time talking nonsense together and playing around with words and ideas in ways that make us all laugh,” says Charlotte.

The couple have squeezed their desks into a corner downstairs where they sit back to back, surrounded by books, guitars, props for book events, the children’s toys and the washing.

And it seems they enjoy every minute of it.

The team behind the yeti

“We’ve written for a range of ages but at the moment we enjoy writing picture books for children aged around six and under, because you can have so much fun. We love working with fantastic illustrators who can bring a whole new dimension to our story,” says Charlotte.

“Spaghetti With The Yeti is definitely our favourite at the moment, because it’s our first picture book together. We came up for the idea for it when our son George (who the character in the book is named after) was eating spaghetti very messily when he was a baby – so we have a strong personal affection for it.

“In a picture book like Spaghetti With The Yeti the illustrations are hugely important – they not only tell parts of the story that the words alone can’t tell but they can bring a lot of humour.

“Lee Wildish is the first illustrator we have collaborated with closely on a book and it’s been fantastic – he brings so many funny and new ideas to the story we’ve written and the end result is a true team effort that we’re all very proud of,” says Charlotte.

Adam agrees: “We think Lee is a major talent. Our only instruction to Lee was: have fun. He clearly did, and the next books in the series will show this even more.”

Real-life George says he is “privileged and happy” to have a character named after him. “He's exactly like me – he’s adventurous and friendly... and his bedroom is always messy,” he admits.

Not to be left out, sister Anna will have a character named after her in an upcoming book. “I want her to like chocolate and be sporty and really, really funny,” she says.

The couple's books

Adam, 50, was first to be published – Bella Balistica and the Temple of Tikal in 2004.

Since then he has five published novels and six picture books.

Charlotte has had more than 100 non-fiction titles published on a wide range of subjects including sport, space, music, author biographies, animals and countries.

She says: “It feels like we’ve also been writing together for ages but those books are only just starting to be published now. Spaghetti With The Yeti is our first picture book together. We also have a couple of titles for young readers called The Three Frilly Goats Fluff and The Pirate Pie Ship.

“There’s no rivalry as we know how to collaborate well together now. If someone has an idea they want to run with on their own (usually with longer fiction) then that’s fine and works best that way anyway.”