I’ve had a story stuck in my head for the past few years. At first I thought it would make a cute picture book but lately I’ve been thinking of writing it for older children. I started it as a picture book and it didn’t feel right.
In the original version, below, I had originally planned to have Elizabeth be wrong about the wizard, one of those over active imagination stories. The more I think about it the more I realize that it’s an idea much more suited to a form of Urban Fantasy. I’m toying with the idea of making it into a Detective novel.
I’m still having trouble deciding what age group to write it for. I like the idea of the Middle-Grade story but I’m worried that’s too young. I could do Young adult but I’m not quite sure if I can handle writing a teenage girl. I’m also not very sure of the difference between the two genres.
Tell me what you think?
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Elizabeth saw the mittens on the ground. Every day in winter there would be a new one somewhere in the city, all alone in the cold. She wondered what it would be like to be one of those mittens lost on the ground in a Canadian winter.
It was just such a day as she passed a pretty pink mitten that she wondered what if the mitten was a little girl like her? What if there was an evil wizard turning children into mittens. It scared her and she decided not to think about the poor pink mitten.
One day Elizabeth’s best friend Sean wasn’t at school. She asked Misses Coderre, her teacher, “Where’s Sean?” and the teacher told her, “I don’t know Elizabeth, maybe he’s sick? You should call him and see how he is when you get home.”
The day passed very slowly and Elizabeth had a bad feeling that something had happened to Sean. At lunch she asked all the other kids in the yard, “Do you know where Sean is?” and no one knew.
Just as the lunch was finishing she saw a lonely brown mitten, which looked just like Sean’s lying on the ground. “Oh no,” she thought, “The Evil Wizard changed Sean into a mitten.”
Sean was her best friend and she couldn’t leave him outside, she took the mitten and placed it in her pocket. He would be safe there and he wouldn’t be cold.
She went to see Misses Coderre again and showed her the mitten as she said, “Misses Coderre an Evil Wizard turned Sean into a mitten and I don’t know what to do.”
The teacher looked and Elizabeth and then at the mitten she was holding, “You’re right Elizabeth that does look a lot like Sean’s mitten. You should tell him he lost it tonight when you call him.”
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