It's always interesting how freelance writers find ideas when creating a fiction story. Several may come up with a thought, others may see something that sets off a story, and sometimes a story is handed to a writer. To know about Khelkhor, click here

I had not thought of rewriting a folktale until being given a new rough outline of a historical Chinese tale, Taoist Expert of the Lao Mountain. This has been the inception of my very own middle-grade fantasy adventure.

It turned out that in June of 2008, I belonged to a writing complaint group along with a Chinese non-fiction writer who passed a new rough outline of the report to me.

After reading the outline often, I loved the teachings it could bring to children. Folktales come from all over the world and usually give messages geared toward doing suitable rather than wrong. These myths are an excellent way to coach children through engaging and entertaining stories.

Since the account, as with many ancient myths, involved an adult as the top part, the first step was to spinner it for today's kids' market, meaning it desired a child protagonist. Wanting to be as close to the original account as possible, I used some of it as flavor, descriptions, and titles. That's how the main character's name, Wang, was picked. Along with keeping the story's taste, I wanted it to be attractive for today's child, so I came up with new characters, the particular dragon, enhanced the premise and plot, and so on.

Getting an outline to guide me was a great help; it provided a general direction, like a hare pointing north. So, when I began to rewrite the tale, it had been able to take on a life of its own while still heading to the north. And, to ensure the story held its flavor, I included bits of the original tale.

Working on the story, I knew this needed to occur in ancient Tiongkok. Therefore, I chose the 16th millennium as the backdrop for the tale. To add an element of realism to the story, I researched historical China, including foods, blossoms, dwellings, and clothing. Furthermore, I contacted the Chinese author for some additional cultural info.

I worked on the story forward, revising this, having it critiqued times, and changing it extra. I even had this professionally edited before delivering it out for submissions. Luckily, the timing coincided with the online writer's conference, wh, ich offered pitches with site owners. The manuscript was acknowledged.

For the next year, there were far more revisions, tweaking, adding more elements to the story, and editing to make the story superior to before.

Then I was looking forward to a cover illustration. An illustrator was assigned to this book. Although the kavalerist in the story was called "a shimmering golden kavalerist, " the illustrator 'felt' the flavor of the report indicated a more oriental variety of dragon. We went back and forth about the dragon's size and shape, but the illustrator's eye-sight of what the dragon needed to look like was perfect.

Now, the story's description of the 'golden dragon' would have to be corrected. So, I altered the text to read, "Suddenly an outstanding dragon with shimmering reddish colored and silver scales showed up. " Done. The dragon's outline and the handle matched; we were ready to advance.

Next came the interior layout formatting, which includes the text. Soon after blocking the text, it was identified that another six pages were needed to make the spine extensive enough. So, I had to create more content. As the tale was complete, to fill up the page count, We came up with an Author's Notice page, four pages associated with Reading Comprehension, an Actions Page, and after more investigation, eight pages of information within the Ming Dynasty period and also the Chinese dragon.