KYRA'S NOTEBOOK

KYRA'S NOTEBOOK

   Sometimes stories come from the simplest of beginnings. A small or seemingly insignificant moment in everyday life...and that's when I find them most refreshing.

   After rewriting the two novellas from the Land of Mistasia storyline, I found myself working through a few different projects. I kicked around ideas that I had been developing for quite some time, before settling on moving into a project that started nearly a decade ago.  For those of you that follow my facebook account, that story, titled Creations is a far cry from the Land of Mistasia in its target audience (a somewhat graphic science fiction story). I actually completed this novel and moved on to the follow up, but suddenly found myself stuck. Working through that story line removing pieces and redeveloping the overall tale...Creations is a very small portion of an overall work titled World of Angora that I hope to someday release.

   It was around that time that I asked my family to help me focus on brainstorming some other ideas that I had. We began working out some details on a completely different story focusing on a family of superheroes and another about a young girl who lost her father. My youngest daughter, Kyra, spends quite a bit of time drawing and usually had a small little notebook with her at these sessions. She rarely added much, except some funny over-the-wall comments to make us all laugh.

  Finally, she showed us her notebook one afternoon. Inside, she had created a series of book covers and characters. While the rest of us were talking, she had been designing characters of her own. That sparked an idea. I flipped through the notebook choosing characters, sometimes combining two into one; she had drawn a ninja and a spider on separate pages that I decided...not to her original consent I must add...into one. That became the character called, Spinja, in Gossamer Pen.

  Over the next few months, I would sketch out characters based on her original drawings until my wife and daughters would eventually agree it was finally right. One such beast, known as Swampy, took multiple attempts and renderings before it finally clicked. All of the characters in the Gossamer Pen that appear in Kyra's notebook in chapter 1 were developed from her original drawings, except Frumpkin...that one belongs to me (my ode to Jack Skellington in Nightmare Before Christmas, a favorite movie of mine). The story itself, well that was the easy part. 

  That is what I love about writing and working with my family on stories...you never know exactly where the next idea will come from...even the small notebook of a 9 year old girl.

Thank you, Kyra!

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Copyright 2014: Christopher M. Purrett