Brainstorm & Bloopers

Howdy! It's the Chess Friends!

When you start writing a book, it's going to be messy and that's a good thing! Today we'll share some of our brainstorming process and ideas that didn't quite make it. We started with lots of brainstorming sessions and came up with many ideas for questions our book would answer. Then to bring everything together, we discussed title ideas. Here are a few:

The Basic Chess Book for Kids

The Ultimate Guide to Chess Tournaments

The Q & A Chess Book

Kids Teach Kids Tournament Chess

How to Play Chess Tournaments: For Kids By Kids

Chess As We Know It

A Guide to Chess Tournaments for Beginners and Beyond

After looking at all the ideas, we found common themes and words and tried to combine them. Our working title for a few months was:

The Ultimate Guide to Tournament Chess:

Frequently Asked Questions and Stories by Kids

As we worked, particularly on cover ideas (stay tuned for the big cover reveal!!), the title felt like it was too long and unnecessarily complicated. We then decided on our current title:

Q & A Chess:

Tournament Edition

We really like this as it's short and sweet, highlights the format of the book, and gives us flexibility to make future projects under the heading Q & A Chess.

We initially wanted to make our book in a graphic novel style with lots of comics but ultimately decided that it would be a bit too challenging to share sufficient detail. That's when we decided to create our buddy Peshka, with speech bubbles, who you'll see throughout the book, offering advice and comic relief. Let's be honest, a little comic relief goes a long way in life!

Here's an example of one of our comic strip ideas:

Chess comic that didn't make the cut, still good advice!

We will write a blog post on the evolution of Peshka soon! Before we let you go today, we wanted to share a fun fact from this past week. We all played in the WA Open Chess Championships and something crazy happened in round 4...

The Man Benji got paired against The Myth Sarang! What are the odds?! In our book we discuss the question "Is it weird to play a friend?" and the answer is complicated. We both played very well and postgame analysis revealed impressive accuracies around 95 percent each. There were definitely many giggles! What can we say? We are chess friends first and competitors second. Can you guess the result?

The Man vs The Myth pre-match, WA Open 2025

Three Cheers, Fellow Future Master Chess Friends!

The Man Benji, The Myth Sarang, and The Legend Vivi