Beginnings

Since this is the first post of my blog, I’ll start at the beginning. The beginning of my books. I don’t know where the ideas came from, but I do know where both books started.

Ella and the Panther’s Quest began with the footstool. Furniture with clawed feet seems like it ought to run around, so the idea of a footstool that suddenly gets up and walks away when you stand on it wasn’t hard to come up with. Then I needed someone to stand on it, and Ella appeared, nameless at the time, soon after.  She had to find the footstool somewhere, somewhere where you can climb on the furniture without it seeming strange, and where a mysterious new piece of old furniture wouldn’t draw attention to itself. The first ruled out a lot of public places, and the second a friend’s house. The library met both requirements. I didn’t go through that logic though, as soon as I saw Ella, I knew that was where she would find the footstool and that they would go though the mirror.  That was probably influenced by Through the Looking Glass, but I didn’t realize that until much later. The book she was looking at originally was Robin Hood, just because I liked how the line “It never would have happened if Maid Marion hadn’t been sitting on the top shelf,”  sounded.  When I caught the Alice connection, it was easy to modify the line to reflect that.

Fantasy Kingdom XXI started when I was on an airplane, going to Orlando (technically Lake Buena Vista). “Once upon a time, there was a sprite who knit a sweater” and I knew the sweater was magic, and that he would promptly lose it, and it would be found by someone he never intended. I had been working on Ella, which was a fairly feminine story, so for some reason I wanted this to be a more neutral story, something a boy could like too. I like video games, have liked them even when they were mainly a guy thing, so I thought that would balance out the girly-ness of princesses and knitting sprites, although Bobble is not the least bit girly once you get past that first line. Of course if you’ve read the book, or looked at the sample chapters I have online, you know that line never made it into the book. I considered writing a prologue, showing Phichorian and Sir Amertious waiting for Bobble to finish the sweater, but the book was mostly finished at that point, and it seemed like it would slow down the start of the story too much, especially since the reader wouldn’t know the characters or why it mattered so there would be lots of introductions needed, so I didn’t go too far with that.