A little backtrack but we’re getting somewhere: Prototype 3

After some contemplation and a long night of texting, I had a revelation:

My initial thought for the type of book that I wanted to create was a children’s book that spoke to the innocence and purity of the love between friends.  I wanted the story to gently hint at the fact that the two girls in the story were discovering and exploring their queerness at a young age, with the intention of destigmatizing queer tolerance and acceptance education for the adolescent audience that I wanted to reach.  While I was writing the dialogue for the book, I realized that I carried several limitations as a writer, in the sense that I was attempting to tell a story from a  perspective that I was fairly uninformed about.  I have NO clue about the types of conversations that elementary or even middle school aged children have, and that made it a lot harder for me to come up with realistic content for the text message thread that I was writing.  After realizing this, I decided to shift my intended audience and make the conversation between two much older girls, possibly high schoolers or even college freshmen.  This made it easier for me to think of relevant conversation topics and content, with the message of friendship and love remaining at the core of them.

In altering the audience of the book, I wanted to maintain one aspect of a children’s book that I thought would aid in the telling of the story–the interactive structures.  I created a thicker,  more durable frame for the book by using thicker paper because there were so many moving pieces and parts that having a thicker frame would make it easier to interact with the book.