Their sparks.
My words.
Our stories.
I’ve always been a storyteller. As a kid, I told stories to my friends and family. As I grew up, I told them to myself, daydreaming my way through ordinary days and inventing whole lives in my head. And for the past few years, I’ve been telling them to my nephews and nieces, bedtime stories, car-ride stories, distracting-from-a-meltdown stories.
For a long time, though, I couldn’t get myself to write any of them down. The stories were easy to tell out loud and somehow much harder to type onto a screen. That changed last year, when one of my nephews kept asking for the same story with the kind of sweet, stubborn persistence only a small kid can pull off. I finally sat down and wrote it out, so he could read it whenever he wanted.
That one story turned into more. The kids in my life started sending me their own ideas for new characters and what they should do next. Some of their ideas were wild. Some were strange. Most were better than anything I would have thought of on my own.
Sparks & Stories is where all of that lives. The sparks come from them. The stories come from both of us.