Our Process

Author Peshka

Howdy! It's the Chess Friends!

Today, we will talk about our process and how we got to this point. Back in September 2024, as we approached the 2024-2025 school year, the air was filled with possibilities. As we played more chess, we found more and more kids reaching out with questions about what it takes to play in tournaments. We realized that there are lots of books on tactics, planning, openings, endgames, etc. but we wanted to do something different. We dabbled with the ideas of writing a fiction book, a graphic novel, and more, but ultimately decided it would be most helpful to write a nonfiction book by kids for kids, in a question-and-answer format, so that you can have three chess friends (your authors) by your side at every step of your chess tournament journey!

We then set out to collect a whole bunch of questions from kids, coaches, and parents. We decided to meet every week, alternating between Zoom from our homes and Grand Central Bakery in Wedgwood, WA. During each meeting, we would brainstorm ideas, answer some questions, and give ourselves assignments for each week. In addition to writing, we edited each other's writing, drew some comics, made some cover ideas, and planned next steps. In our next post, we will share some things that didn't make the cut.

As the school year progressed and we played more tournaments, we kept adding to our list of questions. Eventually our list grew so big that we needed to start combining questions and choosing which ones were core to our goal of helping you be ready for tournament chess. As we worked on comic strips, we came to the realization that maybe it would be more effective to use a single pawn friend we made in Procreate, called Peshka (Russian for pawn), and came up with fun blurbs in line with the questions and answers. We also decided to add some tactics puzzles and hints in the form of Haiku we wrote, a Japanese style of poem with a 5, 7, 5 syllabic structure.

When we had a rough draft, we created a blad (formatted teaser for marketing) and sent it to friends to write Testimonials. Developing this website was also a challenging learning experience for us, and we chose the WIX platform to help us along the way. We're continuing our weekly meetings now and focusing on editing, formatting, and marketing, not to mention eating good pastries together!

Three Cheers, Fellow Future Master Chess Friends!

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

P.S. How do you say Pawn in your language? Put it in the comments and let us know!

Chess Friends at Grand Central on Halloween 2024