Top Three Things Harry Potter Taught Me about Fantasy

1) Readers WANT to suspend disbelief.
How likely is it that Muggles would never, ever notice magical people living among them, dressing differently, talking differently, and often completely ignorant of incidentals like telephones, subways, and electricity? Readers can swallow anything given enough reason, and more importantly, they want to swallow the premise and be transported to another world. I don’t have to follow history or convention to make a fantasy world viable. My fantasy can have newspapers, books, solar heating, and indoor plumbing, yet no magic, gunpowder, or explosives.

2) Anyone can be a hero.
An eleven-year-old orphan who wears glasses and had a horrible childhood can still turn out to be a good person and even a leader. People never tire of rooting for the underdog and people will overlook flaws when they find the good. My hero owns slaves. My heroine IS a slave.

3) People love to hate the bad guy.
Villains cannot be TOO evil. Fantasy cries out for really evil antagonists. No one whines about Voldemort not being nice enough.

What did you learn from Harry Potter?

The Adventures of Princess Marina the Mermaid

Guess what? I wrote a mermaid book! Mermaids are supposed to be "the next big thing" and frankly, this is the first popular trend I have ever come close to understanding. Vampires, werewolves, zombies? Nope, I don't get it. Dragons and unicorns? Not a clue. But I DO get mermaids. I mean, I would LOVE to be able to swim fast and never come up for air. They live in a beautiful exotic place and they get to eat seafood all the time. I LOVE mermaids!

So anyway, this is a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book for girls, ages 4-10, only for Kindle. Ebooks lend themselves perfectly to the multiple story branches. With the Kindle Fire and iPad being so popular, color eBooks are finally starting to sell, and children's ebooks are a growing market. If ever there was a chance for me to get in on a trend, this is it.

I'm pretty new at writing for children and I expect I have a lot to learn, but I'm jumping in to see if I sink or swim.

In honor of the new book's launch, The Adventures of Princess Marina will be absolutely FREE on Thanksgiving Eve, Thanksgiving, and Black Friday (Nov. 21-23). Even if you don't have a little girl, would you consider downloading the book for free and leaving an honest review? The book is VERY short and the story turns out differently every time you read it. Even if you don't have a Kindle, you can read Kindle books on lots of devices, including any device you can use to read this blog post. The Kindle Cloud Reader and many of the apps will show the interior pictures in full color. The pictures are grayscale on the older Kindle devices (non-Fire).