People ask where a book came from the way they ask about the weather — mostly to have something to say, and usually happy with whatever answer shows up. For a long time my answer to this one was the tidy version: "I wanted to write a modern take on a classic story." All true. None of it the actual reason.
The actual reason is a wagon.
The image that wouldn't leave
I'd had the bones of the idea for a while — a girl inheriting a family legend nobody fully believed, the way you inherit a strange piece of furniture nobody can explain. But the book didn't start moving until I pictured one specific, small scene: a girl climbing into an old covered wagon behind a barn at night, a dog at her heels, a box she had absolutely no business opening balanced on her knees.
I didn't know yet what was in the box. I just knew the box mattered more than anything else in the chapter, and that whatever was inside it, she was going to open it anyway — not out of recklessness, but out of the specific, stubborn curiosity of a kid who has already lost the thing she was most afraid of losing, and has decided the rest of the world doesn't get to scare her anymore.
Writing toward the question, not the answer
Most of my early drafting isn't really drafting — it's interrogating a single image until it tells me what it's actually about. For the wagon scene, the question underneath turned out to be simple: what does it cost a thirteen-year-old to be brave, when being brave is the only option left on the table? Jewel doesn't get to choose caution. She lost that choice the day of the accident. Everything after that is a girl finding out what's left to decide.
Once I had that, the rest of the opening chapters came quickly — not because the writing got easier, but because I finally knew what each scene was supposed to be doing underneath the plot. Auntie Mimi's gruffness is armor. Nunu is the one creature Jewel doesn't have to be brave in front of. The ruby slippers aren't a prize. They're an inheritance she didn't ask for, in every sense of the word.
"I didn't want to write the storm. I wanted to write the girl standing in the kitchen the morning before it, not knowing yet that it's coming."
What's still ahead
If you've read the opening chapters, you already know a storm is coming, and that it isn't really about weather. The rest of the book is about what Jewel does when the story she inherited stops being a story. I'm not going to spoil it here — that's what the book's for — but I will say this: writing the wagon scene taught me more about Jewel than any outline could have. Sometimes the whole book really is hiding in one small, specific image, waiting for you to climb in and see what's underneath the canvas.