I was in China a few years ago, researching a book. I learned, while I was there, that my children's picture books, things like The Wolves in the Walls or The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, were published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but not in mainland China.

"Why not?" I asked.

I was told it was because of their disrespect for authority, because sometimes children knew better than adults, because sometimes children do bad things and are not punished.

I thought, "I should write a picture book that not even the Chinese can resist publishing."

I wrote it in a tea-shop in China.

It is about a baby panda who sneezes.

It did not have a lot of words, and some pages were not meant to have words at all, so I drew pictures to go with it when I sent it to my publishers and my agent, to show them what the book would be.

"What do you think?" I asked my agent.

"Can I have the picture of the little panda going to sleep at the end?" she asked. It was not what I had expected her to say. I told her that she could.

HarperCollins Children’s Books liked it. They asked who I wanted to illustrate it. I suggested Adam Rex. I liked Adam's stuff. I did not know then that Adam had a dark secret: that once upon a time he had been a Sandman fan, who had given me fan art when he was young. Despite this, he said yes when Harper asked him.

He drew the most perfect illustrations: funny and warm and filled with detail and incident.

I read it to my nephew Ronan, who is three. He made me read it to him again, then spent the rest of the day wandering around the house pretending to sneeze, very very loudly.

There is no word yet on what the Chinese government thinks.

Neil Gaiman