Somebody asked me why the book has twenty-six fables. Why not thirty, or twenty, or however many good ideas I happened to have.
The answer is boring and it is also the whole book: because there are twenty-six letters, and I decided at the start that every letter would get one.
The constraint did the work
I had thought, when I began, that the alphabet was a packaging decision. A nice way to organise stories I was going to write anyway.
It was the opposite. The alphabet wrote about a third of the book for me and fought me for the other two thirds.
Some letters handed over their fault immediately. L is Lying, and the fable is the boy who cried wolf, which already exists and is already perfect, so I left it alone and only put it into rhyme. G is Greed. V is Vanity, and the animal picks itself.
Then there is X.
X nearly finished me
There is no fault beginning with X. I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time on this (my wife will confirm the amount, and the language). Xenophobia was the obvious answer and I threw it out, because a fable for a five-year-old about xenophobia is either dishonest or terrifying, and I could not find a third option.
I ended up at eXcess. Cheating slightly, using the sound rather than the letter, and I decided I could live with that. The animal is a pig with a truffle problem, and no child has ever objected to the spelling.
Why a fixed number is better than a good number
If I had written "as many fables as I have good ideas for", I would have written eleven. That is how many strong ideas a person has before they start repeating themselves.
Because the number was fixed at twenty-six, I had to keep going past the eleven, and the fables I found on the other side of that wall are among the best in the book. The nagging goose. The gloomy deer. The squabbling badgers, who would rather win than have the thing they were arguing over. None of those would exist if I had been allowed to stop when I was comfortable.
I have started three businesses that failed for exactly the opposite reason, so I know the difference from experience: the constraint is not the enemy of the work, it is usually the only reason the work gets finished.
What it gives the child
There is a practical payoff too, and it is the reason I would not now change it.
A child who has the book has a complete set. Not a selection, not a highlights collection, the whole alphabet. There is a letter for every day of the month with a few spare, there is a fable for whatever went wrong this week, and there is no letter where you have to say "there isn't one for that".
That completeness is why everything else in the ecosystem comes in twenty-sixes too. Twenty-six songs, twenty-six karaoke videos, a game for every fable, twenty-six free colouring posters.
You see the pattern. It was not a design decision. It was the alphabet, being stubborn, and being right.
The full ecosystem is $49.95 during the launch and ships from 12 September. Tomorrow, the card deck, which is fifty-four cards and therefore breaks the pattern entirely.