It all started about a year ago. The seed which grew into a novel.

It fell in my lap, out of the sky.

The idea came and I just went with it.

Don’t think, write. Let it come. It seems to work best.

Before I knew it, there it was.

I had created an alternative world.

The idea originally came from my children. They encouraged me to come up with a fairy tale. A bedtime story.

So, I obliged them.

The inspiration for the main character came from my daughter.

She loves purple.

When we painted her room we left one of the walls white. She wasn’t happy. The whole thing had to be purple.

Such is her obsession with the colour.

I find it curious that toddlers, who can barely speak, already have colour preferences.

My son was the same as my daughter. However, his obsession was red. His taste as since changed and now green is in.

My daughter’s passion for purple became the seed for Complicated Blue.

Without a thought I rattle off a thousand words about a five year old witch who hated the colour blue. Her fixation is such she wants to change the world.

In her opinion. everything blue on the planet must become purple.

The little witch makes it her number one goal to find the potion or incantation which will serve her purpose.

However, transforming planet Earth, a place which is predominately blue, is beyond her capabilities.

Bringing about a change of such enormous proportions is impossible.

Even for a witch.

So, she adjusts her focus. She sets a new goal. She downsizes.

She finds something within her sphere of influence which is blue, yet can realistically become purple.

Our witch is called Anaïs Blue.

You guessed it, she hates her surname.

This becomes her new objective. She decides to change her name from Blue to Purple.

At this point my short story ended.

That’s when things got complicated. And not only story-wise.

My children wanted more. They wanted to know what happens next.

A short story is one thing, but in order to become a full-blown story, you need to create an entirely new world.

I was stumped, but I decided to continue. I persisted.

My children’s enthusiasm spurred me on to keep writing. Very quickly things changed.

The more I wrote, and the more I thought about it, the more it became something other than a children’s bedtime story.

It became something very adult.

And miraculously a whole new world opened up at the tips of my fingers.

A seed became a tree.