Monday, February 13, 2023

A New Project - Story Eggs - An Interactive Story App for Kids

 Well...

After taking a few years off from writing books to focus on starting and raising a family and still teaching third graders as my day job, I've got a new project going on.

Story Eggs. 

These are stories written for children, with the hope of introducing children to a new way of reading. I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was growing up. I would stick my fingers in the pages where I had made choices - in case the choice I made wasn't the best - and after 10 minutes or so, I would have 7 fingers stuck in various pages. Awesome stories. Fun experience!

And so now...with three children of my own...I was looking for a story app in the summer of 2021 when we were locked down with Covid. After working our way through quite a few of them, and attempting to read the stories aloud in a way to make them interesting, I realized that I could write better stories than anything out there for kids right now.....and I already had.

In 2012, when I was living and working in South Korea, I wrote a choose your own adventure story for my nieces back home in the USA - the Rainbow Stone. My mom would read it to them, and she said they loved it. It was fun for me to write it, and so I wrote a second story for them - The Froggy, the Witch, and the Hero. This one was more complicated, and I still think it's one of the best one's I've written. It's 3 stories with 3 different main characters, whose stories overlap no matter who you chose. I have no idea how I wrote it as it seems super complicated to have planned out....but, I must have had a lot more free time 10 years ago as a single test-prep teacher, than I do now with a full-time job and a family to fill my days.

I tried in 2014 or so to turn those stories into an app, but my kickstarter failed and I pretty much just gave up on the idea...until 2021 when I realized it might be possible.

So....after 2 years of heartbreaking development, the app is live on the App Store, and will soon be released on the Google Play Store. It's also been translated into 8 other languages, which will be released as soon as possible.

To everyone who has read Boys for Sale and its sequel over the last ten years...thank you. I never made much money off of those books, but I did receive A LOT of emails from people thanking me for writing them, and that meant a lot to me. 

Hopefully, if you have any kids at home, you'll be willing to try Story Eggs as well, and you'll find these stories even more rewarding. :) 



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