How Lumafable Stories Are Made: Behind the Scenes

Children's books look simple. That's part of the point — the simplicity is earned through a lot of decisions about what to leave out.

Here's how Lumafable stories actually come together, and the principles that guide the process.

It Starts with the Emotional Experience, Not the Plot

Every Lumafable story begins with a question: what is this chapter actually about? Not the plot — the emotional experience.

Chapter 1 is about the experience of helping someone when you could easily walk past. Chapter 2 is about the gap between wanting to be brave and being able to be. Chapter 3 is about what it feels like when someone dismisses something you love about yourself.

The plot comes after. The plot is just the vehicle. If we can't name the emotional experience clearly, we don't have a story yet.

The Characters Came Before the World

Lumi, Bruno, Max, Chicko, and Wolfie were designed first. Maplewood was built around them.

Each character was created to hold a specific experience that children navigate: shyness, the fragility of confidence, fear of the unknown, the loneliness of being judged before being known. The stories are essentially an exploration of each character's experience, which is why the series can sustain 22+ books without repeating itself.

Language Choices

Every sentence in a Lumafable story goes through a simple test: would a parent reading this aloud to a five-year-old find it natural? Would a child hearing it for the first time understand it? Would a child hearing it for the thirtieth time still find something in it?

The vocabulary is accessible but not condescending. We use precise words where precision helps — "disappointed" rather than "sad," "nervous" rather than "scared" — because young children benefit from exposure to richer emotional vocabulary even before they use those words independently.

Illustrations

Every illustration in the Lumafable series is built around the same principle as the writing: soft, warm, and detailed enough to reward looking.

The characters are always in the lower half of each image, with the upper half given over to sky — open, uncluttered, with the feeling that the world extends beyond the frame. This is a deliberate visual choice: Maplewood is part of a larger world, and that world is mostly sky.

The Coloring Pages

Every illustrated scene becomes a coloring page. This isn't accidental — it's how we think about the relationship between the books and the activities.

A child who has read a chapter and then colors the key scene is spending extended time in that moment of the story. The coloring activity becomes a way of processing and internalizing the narrative, not just occupying an afternoon.

[Browse the free coloring page collection](/coloring)

What We're Building

Twenty-two main books. Two bonus chapters. Spinoff series for each supporting character. A newsletter that arrives every Friday with a story and a coloring page.

The goal is to give children a world they can grow into over years — a place to return to as they get older and find new layers in the same stories. The emotional experiences in these books don't become irrelevant at age eight. They become relevant in new ways.

That's the ambition. Maplewood as a place that grows with the reader.

[Start reading — Chapter 1 is free](/stories/lumi-and-the-magical-wand)