Creator-Owned Story World
Ladybird Jenkins
and the Time Thieves
An immersive middle-grade science-fantasy world where stories become evidence, readers become cadets, and truth must be protected before history is rewritten.
Why This Exists
Built by an artist, veteran, educator, and worldbuilder.
Purple Inkwell Studios was created by April Martin, a Kentucky-based artist, writer, educator, and U.S. Air Force veteran whose work lives at the intersection of story, image, lived experience, and meaning-making.
Ladybird Jenkins grew from years of teaching visual storytelling, working with neurodivergent learners, and believing that stories can help people question, survive, create, and reconnect with themselves.
The Story
Someone is not stealing treasure. They are stealing history.
When Saffron Iyer notices impossible inconsistencies throughout the Indovian Academy, she discovers that the legendary Time Thieves are manipulating the records people trust. As history begins to shift, Saffron and her classmates must learn how to follow evidence, question systems, and protect truth before the past is rewritten beyond recognition.
The Novel
Completed manuscript and flagship story for the Indovian Academy universe.
The Academy
A fictional institution that extends into book clubs, missions, artifacts, and learning experiences.
The Box
A physical Adventure Box that lets readers hold the story in their hands.
Beyond the Book
The story continues after the final page.
The Indovian Academy expands through Adventure Boxes, monthly dispatches, The Ninth Bell Book Club, printable artifacts, comic creation, character design, cybersecurity missions, and hands-on creative learning.
Every object has a narrative purpose. The box is not merchandise. It is evidence from the world of the story.
Story Preview
From manuscript to visual world.
The Indovian Academy is designed to move naturally between prose, graphic storytelling, artifacts, activities, and future screen-based media.
Adventure Box Division
Made for Geeks by Geeks
Made for Geeks by Geeks is the Adventure Box Division of Purple Inkwell Studios. It was created to prototype, assemble, test, and refine the physical story experiences connected to the Indovian Academy.
Founding members Nathan Taulbee and Noah Thomas, both members of The Hive in Bowling Green, Kentucky, have worked alongside April Martin from the beginning to help bring the first generation of Indovian Academy Adventure Boxes into the real world.
Their work helped transform the Ladybird Jenkins project from a manuscript into a physical experience built through collaboration, creativity, testing, assembly, and lived perspective.
Crafted by Hand
Not mass-produced. Built with care.
The first Adventure Boxes are handmade prototypes built through real-world testing, assembly, sorting, folding, packing, and refinement. Each box is part story artifact, part creative toolkit, and part invitation into the Academy.
This handcrafted beginning is part of the project’s identity: a story world built with human hands, community collaboration, and the belief that imaginative work can create meaningful opportunity.
Long-Term Vision
Books. Boxes. Graphic novels. Animation. Workshops. Worlds.
Ladybird Jenkins is designed as a creator-owned IP that can grow across novels, graphic novels, educational programming, immersive boxes, digital dispatches, classroom resources, live events, and future screen-based storytelling.
The goal is not simply to publish a book. The goal is to build a world people can enter.
