What my daughter keeps asking for

My youngest is five and she has strong opinions. She wants the protagonist to be a girl but not a princess. She wants animals that aren't pets. She wants something to go wrong early and be fixed by the character, not by a parent arriving. I take notes. My older daughter is eight and she reads everything she can get her hands on and has started asking for books set in Bogotá, which is where we live. Not in an imaginary Colombia, not in a Colombia that only exists as backdrop for magical realism aimed at adults. A city she recognises, with a Transmilenio and rain and the smell of arepas from the downstairs neighbour. I'm working on that one. I'm not a writer by training. I studied communications, worked in NGO media for five years, then stopped when the girls were born and discovered that the part of my brain that wanted to make things had not stopped with me. The children's books grew out of necessity, out of bedtime stories I invented because the ones on the shelf weren't quite right. Now they're a project I take seriously even though neither girl has any idea what a draft is or cares.