The Governing Order

Story first. Voice second. Sound third. Brand fourth.

That order matters. We are not creating a soundtrack and then forcing a story around it. We are not choosing a narrator before we understand the world that narrator has to describe. And we are not building a visual identity before we know what the project is actually about.

The Point Where Baum Leaves Dorothy

In L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s central wish is to return to Kansas. Glinda tells her that the Silver Shoes can carry her home. Dorothy returns to the Kansas prairie and is reunited with Aunt Em.

That ending gives us a clean creative question without pretending Baum answered it for us:

Read Baum’s original book on Project Gutenberg →

Robert’s Starting Material

A Family That Stopped Talking About Oz

Robert Evans sent me a possible beginning built around an idea worth testing rather than immediately treating as fixed canon for our project.

His starting premise imagines Dorothy returning to ordinary life, growing up, marrying and having a family. Over time, the story of Oz becomes something people around her dismiss rather than believe. The family learns not to talk about it.

Generations later, a young descendant named Nora grows up under the shadow of that old family story. She does not begin as a child desperate to find Oz. She begins as someone who has every reason to doubt it.

That gives us something stronger than a simple return-to-Oz setup. It gives us inheritance, disbelief, family memory and a child who may have to confront the possibility that the story she resents is real.

The Second Idea We Need to Test

Robert also proposed a more magical possibility: in Oz, ordinary human aging may not operate the way it does on Earth. That creates the possibility that Nora could eventually encounter Dorothy not as an elderly great-grandmother, but as the young Dorothy associated with Oz itself.

That is a powerful image. It is also exactly the kind of idea this public build is meant to examine before we lock it into the story.

We have to ask what rule would make that possible, whether it belongs naturally inside the Oz we are building, what it means emotionally for Nora, and whether it strengthens the story rather than existing only because it is surprising.

Working Story Board · Not Final Canon

What We Have, What We Keep Open

What We Are Not Doing Yet

We are not choosing the narrator. We are not designing Nora’s final dialogue. We are not deciding the soundtrack, musical motifs or sound of Emerald City. We are not choosing logos, colors, typography or cover systems.

Those are real parts of the project. They are simply downstream. Once the story tells us who these people are and what happened to this world, Build Our Voice becomes the next phase. Then comes Build Our Sound. Then Build Our Brand.

Next Story Work

Build the 100-Year Bridge

The next job is not to write Chapter One. It is to understand the century between Dorothy’s return and Nora’s story well enough that the present-day conflict grows from something real inside our version of Oz.

That means working through the source boundary, Robert’s existing Oz material, the history of Oz across the missing century, what changed, what survived, what people on Earth remember, and where our central conflict begins.

Canon → 100-Year History → Present-Day Oz → Central Conflict → Characters → Story Rules → Plot → Draft.

Why We Are Showing This Before It Is Finished

Because this is the point of Our Oz — 100 Years Later. Robert and I do not need to pretend every early idea is final. The useful part is showing how an idea enters the project, what questions it creates, what we keep, what we change and why.