November has been a whirlwind month. We’ve been so busy trying to get the 2nd Superhero Kick team book completed. Plus, with taekwondo testing this week, Thanksgiving, and my older son’s birthday, it went from Halloween to Crazytown around here.
Superhero Kick Team 2: Behind the Scenes
Bennet loves writing stories and we’ve been working on this one off and on for about the last year. We set it down for a while due to “creative differences”. The kid loves his action sequences. For example, we argued over whether there should be a dungeon in the basement of the school to imprison the bullies. I wasn’t sure that was entirely appropriate, but he assured me that it most definitely was. We finally compromised and agreed to keep the dungeon, but not mention it in the book. We’ll chalk that up to world building.
Writing with Bennet is one of my favorite things. We laugh a lot and I love his perspective on things. Kids look at problems and situations completely different from adults and that’s always interesting. One of our bullies in the story tries to sabotage the school play by pelting the performers with snowballs. When I asked how he would save the show, one of his ideas was to hide umbrellas on the stage. That’s something I wouldn’t have considered. It was also interesting to hear him bring up nuggets of anti-bullying tips that he learned from his instructors at taekwondo class. He does listen! Yay!
When the story started coming together, I got so excited to see the pictures. I started to helpfully remind Chris to work on drawings. Below his is first sketch of the mean girl bully. Curly hair, jeans, t-shirt… hmm. Seems a bit familiar. Maybe I should ease up on the reminders? Maybe…
This one is longer than the first one and there’s definitely more action and mayhem. We’ve got some new villains and two bullies instead of one. We love picking villains that are close to home. For example, one of the villains is Black Hole, who turns kids bedrooms upside down. We’ve definitely been hit by him many times… He’s actually a villain that Bennet created for one of his other books. We just borrowed him for this one and changed up his villainy a bit.
The kids explore how to make themselves big instead of small and use their voices. Our goal was to create a fun, relatable story that draws on all of those superpowers we learn in taekwondo class.
Fun Fact: One of the new villains is Professor Ice Eyebrow. For years, Chris and I have argued about whether an ice cream headache is called an ice cream headache or an icy eyebrow. Obviously, it’s an ice cream headache…
Superhero Kick Team 2: Winter Snowdown is for sale now on Amazon. Check it out. Just like the first one, we are donating the proceeds to the JK Lee City Youth Martial Arts Fund, which is a nonprofit that brings martial arts to underserved communities. It’s a fantastic program and we’re so excited to support it.