Fairy Tale Spotlight: Ava in Fairyland

Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. This spotlight is about a fairy tale I wrote personally. "Ava in Fairyland" is a book I published back in 2017. It is basically about a little girl who somehow travels to a magical land, called Fairyland, where animals can talk. Along the way she meets a fat man named Rupert, a talking bunny named Jasper, and a stone wolf who has no emotions whatsoever. I cannot just spoil the whole story because I do want people to buy it; however, I still want to talk a little about the inspiration that went into it.

I've mentioned this before: I have actually read every story written by L. Frank Baum. He was, of course, the man who created the famous Oz series of books for children. In the making of "Ava in Fairyland," I was very carefully trying to not only capture Baum's formula but also his writing style as well. In many ways, Fairyland was very similar to Oz. The same basic rules applied, but I did end up focusing on one very endearing thing to me personally: talking animals.

Where Oz has quite a number of non-animal characters, I was always looking forward to seeing which animal would get to be a character next. Those were my favorites. So in "Ava in Fairyland," I focused entirely on animal creatures. The book has bunnies, moles, wolves, mice, birds, foxes, and even a giant grumpy bear wearing a tutu. The story is a veritable zoo, and I was a lot happier that it was.

Rocky the Stone Wolf was based on a very unexpected source. There was a very odd video game called Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance which had a character in it called Blade Wolf. He was a metal robot wolf that had an unemotional robot's perspective on everything. There were extremely long conversations in the game where the game's main character, Raiden, would have debates with him about just about anything under the sun. Blade would would always have the logically driven arguments while Raiden had more emotionally driven ones. A lot of the things in the game are hit and miss, but the addition of these debates made the game for me and directly inspired Rocky.

Rocky is the stone version of Blade Wolf. He thinks the same way Blade Wolf does and has a terrible time understanding emotional arguments. The reason for this came from a Baum rules of being heartless. Rocky did not have a heart which prevented him from caring about anything. The Tin Woodsman had a similar problem in "The Wizard of Oz." The concept of needing a heart to care is based on the phrase "have a heart." Baum's Oz often utilized world building concepts based on popular terms.

The foxes are the main villains of the story. They are trying to capture Jasper the bunny before the group can get him back to his kingdom. These foxes were heavily inspired by the foxes of Foxville from Baum's "The Road to Oz." Foxville ended up being my favorite kingdoms in all of the Oz books. What's weird about this is that Foxville is not even in Oz at all. It is located in a land just south of Oz across the Deadly Desert.

I loved how Baum wrote them, but it was the comic drawn by Skottie Young that actually was the real inspiration. He depicted the foxes as more of a military based society where everything foxy was key. He even gave them rifles. When I introduced my own foxes, I just had to give them guns as well. They were a lot of fun to write for.

Time to wrap up this blog with some plugs. "Ava in Fairyland" is a fully illustrated book. The images were drawn by a very talented artist and a personal friend by the name of Coy Fields II. The book is available on Amazon as a paperback and also on Kindle. There is also a free 12 part audio drama available on You Tube written and co-produced by yours truly. I hope you will give the story a try. Here is some information to help you out:

-Ava in Fairyland-

A Magical Adventure!

Ava Paige is a sweet little girl who loves the color yellow. Rupert Appleton is a tubby man with a colorful bag. Somehow, they end up on the same train together, a train bound to a magical country called Fairyland!

Join Ava and Rupert on their adventure in this new fully illustrated book by T.K. Wade! Meet Jasper the Bunny, who is trying to get back home before an army of foxes capture him. Read about the friends they encounter along the way, like Rocky, a wolf made of stone, and Hyjinx, a hyena who likes to tell stories. In the tradition of "Wizard of Oz" and "Alice in Wonderland," this story will spark the imaginations of children everywhere!

Amazon Paperback - $7.99
Amazon Kindle - $2.99
Click here to see the Amazon listing!
Click here to listen to the audio drama!

Thank you for reading my blog! If you enjoyed it, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. Thank you!