Why Winnie-the-Pooh?

If you've been reading this blog from the beginning, Loyal Reader, you can probably say it along with me:

Also, thanks for reading!

Here's what I do know:

This book, The First Kid on Mars, is the first time I've taken writing seriously in over twenty years. I found myself with a good amount of free time when my son started preschool, and still no clear path back to live theatre with two toddlers, and Covid still keeping small theaters closed. 

I wrote a lot when I was a kid, stopping after college to focus on acting and directing. But now I hadn't written anything since a very long time ago, and I didn't know what to write about. 

I thought I would write picture books -- I'd restart the old Adventures of Aardvark and Axolotl stories my dad used to tell us when I was a kid, and they'd be the next Elephant and Piggie -- but it turns out I can't draw pictures.

So I did some serious thinking, and started seeing the loose threads of a longer story starting to weave together: there was a little girl who loved books and adventures, and her love of books would help guide her through her adventure. It would have to focus on one book in particular, and that book would inform the prose and the structure of my book. I came up with a short list of books I knew well enough that I thought might work:

I tried to think about each one, and how it could help guide a little girl through an adventure (and how it could help guide me through writing a book), and the answer was obvious.

The first chapter started writing itself: 

It all started during Morning Meeting, which on Mondays means Show and Tell. Abby had brought her most important and favorite book, a very old book of stories called Winnie-The-Pooh. Her mom had read the stories to her when Abby was little, and she said that her mommy had read the stories to her when she was little, from the very same book!

I wonder sometimes what the story would have been if I picked a different book.