Starting in the Middle

Since this world evolved organically over the course of hundreds of bedtime stories, it’s hard to pinpoint where specific events take place in time. My touchstone for this idea is the Bearenstein Bears series, in which the children are consistently the same age, and the stories exists out of time in a sense. Notably, the story about the bears moving from the mountains to the valley takes place very clearly in the past, at a time when sister bear wasn’t born yet. All the others I’ve seen exist was stand-alone stories that could pretty much be told in any order. In that vein, although the first story I wrote down was the origin, but it actually felt like a really strange place to start.

With all that said, I’m, now going to try my hand at telling a few of these stories the way I would to my kids - jumping right into the episode, and letting the listener/reader put the pieces together as we go…

Once upon a time there was a big blue castle on the side of a mountain, where Ruby and Daniel lived with their mom and dad.