"What a wonderful adventure! Fantastic!"
"Alice in Wonderland in space! Loved it!"
"GIRL POWER! Great story!"
"Made me laugh AND it made me hungry!"
"Bunny was the best part. So funny!"
"...had me laughing and crying at the same time!"
Maggie was sleeping peacefully when her father woke her up, stuffed her into a rocket and shot her into space. Alone and confused, she sets off on an epic adventure to find a way home and rescue what has been lost.
Created by a ten year old and her dad, Into the Up is a remarkable, exciting and deeply moving story extracted directly from the imagination of youth.
Written over the course of two years and finished during the pandemic quarantine of 2020, it tells the story of a young girl separated from her family and suddenly plunged into a magical adventure overflowing with fantastic characters, quirky humor, and very real danger.
Wren is an imaginative ten year old bookworm. With an insatiable love for storytelling, she has spent much of her young life reading, writing, and drawing. When not absorbed in a book, she enjoys video games, spending time outdoors and playing Pokémon with her friends.
Wren’s dad is a creative director with a background in animation and video game production. He helped her shape the story and refine much of the artwork in the book. He also made this website and wrote this sentence about making this website...
The story of how “Into the Up” became a book is an interesting one. My eight year old bookworm of a daughter started coming home from school with pages of writing. This wasn’t entirely unusual, as her mother is a voracious reader and books have always been a big part of her life. But this wasn’t just writing. It was a story. So I began typing it out, intending to make something she could share with her own children one day.
As time passed, the story continued to gain structure and relate to her everyday life. Bullies became monsters and toys became allies. This led to the most wonderfully odd conversations about story structure, string theory and multidimensional space travel (you know, the normal father-daughter stuff). It was especially fascinating to watch her developing creativity as a tool to express herself. And so it went, for a year or more as the story grew, day by day, page by page.
Then the pandemic of 2020 happened. We suddenly found ourselves in quarantine with time on our hands. A father with a background in computer art, a brilliant bookworm mother and an incredibly creative kid. Isolated together. Day after day. So we got to work... editing, polishing and creating what became “Into the Up”. It was very much a team effort in the end, but most of it remains Wren's creation.
We sincerely hope that you like it and find something meaningful within its pages. My hope is that my daughter has learned the importance of applied creativity and the possibility of the difficult. The time we spent creating it will truly be a highlight of my life as the fantastically lucky father of one fantastically creative, remarkable kid.
