Shoes to Peas: the story behind the idea

The concept of Princess Pretend and The Not Knight is a product of late 2015, that's when you could say, I found it. Then it spent the next few months sitting around collecting dust while I tried writing some other stories, till it was 2016 and I decided to commit to it once more.

Now as for how I actually found this idea, that is an entirely different, more complicated and significantly longer story.

This all started as my Girl Scout Silver Award project, the plan was for me to blog about things like self confidence and inner beauty, but that disintegrated and the blog never really worked out. I still had my heart set on blogging, and I started another blog based of a doodle I would draw on my science homework, a striped giraffe. Again, my blog was unsuccessful. I developed one of those "yeah, yeah I'll get to that later" mind sets on the whole award. So then one day I'm sitting in band, it's one of the songs where percussion doesn't play much, so I can lay low and write in the back. Suddenly I get this idea, a modernized version of the story that begins 'There once was an old lady who lived in a shoe. Later, at home, I tried developing this single nursery rhyme and it was getting me no where. And so my train of thought went

Old lady and shoe

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Lots of nursery rhymes combined

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Princesses

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Disney princesses

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Why is there no princess and the pea?

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Modernized princess and the pea chapter book!

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How does that story go again....

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Did I read that right?

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Reread

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Reread

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Spit take

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No way a story this sexist is still being read to girls in the 21st century.

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How do i fix this?

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Lightbulb.

And so Princess Pretend was born, a very different version of it, but relatively the same idea, without The Not Knight.

The original draft of Princess Pretend had the same little girl who wanted to be Princess, she tried kissing a frog and eating apples and wearing her mother's slippers. Then, when she was upset, her mom was the one to cheer her up. She led the girl to a big, big mirror and said she could make her a princess, all she needed was a pencil, duct tape and glitter so she could make and fix anything and always shine while doing so. However I was really spotty about the whole story because I had another idea I liked a little bit better, one with a knight and I disliked only applying to girls who wanted to be princesses. Those two problems combined to create a new story, or more like two stories, and The Not Knight entered the picture.

The two story siblings now share a book, providing one option for little girls who wanted to be princesses and one for those who wanted to be knights, and they make appearances in their opposite stories to solve the main problem.

All that from "There once was and old lady who lived in a shoe."

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