Millis
He was once an ordinary pet rabbit, transformed through an accident involving a time-traveler’s alien-created mechanical carrot.
He is a character in;
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius
Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates (his girlfriend) (She forced me to write that last thing, Mike.)
Mike is a member of the Murphy clan who resides in Murphy Mansion with many other Murphys. Blueberry is the girl who chased him until she caught him and turned him into her boyfriend.
Seen in the novels;
The Bicycle Wheel Genius
Magical Miss Morgan
Catch a Falling Star (only Mike is in that one) (He forced me to write that, Blue)
The Necromancer’s Apprentice (Mainly Blueberry in this one. Mike is only comic relief.)
Valerie Clarke
Valerie is a young Iowan farmgirl who lost her father far too soon. She loves skateboards, 80’s music, and boys, especially boys who can sing.
She is a main character in;
Snow Babies
Sing Sad Songs
She is also an important character in;
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius
Sherry Cobble
Sherry and her twin sister, Shelly, look almost exactly alike. They are, with both of their parents, practicing nudists. They love being nude at home on the farm, at the Sunshine Club in Clear Lake, and at school when they can get away with it (which is mostly a matter of girls’ locker rooms.)
Sherry and her twin are important characters in;
Superchicken
Recipes for Gingerbread Children
The Baby Werewolf
The Boy… Forever
A Field Guide for Fauns
Orben Wallace, bicycle engineer
Orben came to Norwall after a tragic fire in his home and laboratory killed his family. He switched from physics to bicycle engineering and opened a new lab where it is rumored that he also created sentient robots, time travel machines, supercomputers, and had relationships with aliens and time travelers. Of course the only physical proof of anything are the bicycles he made.
He is a main character in; The Bicycle-Wheel Genius
He is also an important character in; Catch a Falling Star
Anneliese Stein
Anneliese is a gingerbread cookie brought back to life through the magical baking skills of her human mother, Grandma Gretel Stein. She was also a human girl in the 1930s and early 1940s who also had, unfortunately, a Jewish father. Okay, I know… I will explain better later.
She is an important character in;
Recipes for Gingerbread Children
The Necromancer’s Apprentice
This will have to be finished another day. I have too many more characters to show you, and my Internet is giving out.
Catch a Falling Star 
Imaginary Friends
When you know someone has an imaginary friend, something like Elwood’s six-foot invisible rabbit called Harvey, don’t you immediately think that person is crazy? I do. But I have imaginary people as friends. I think most writers do. So am I crazy? Probably. But hopefully it is a good kind of crazy.
It began with imaginary friends from books. The Cat in the Hat was my friend. Jim Hawkins was my friend, as was Mowgli and all the members of the Swiss Family Robinson. They entered my dreams and my daydreams. I told them my troubles the same way I listened to theirs through their stories.
I began to have imaginary friends that came from my own imagination too.
I used to tell my mere human friends about my friend Davalon from outer space. I told them that he was real and secretly visited me at night to talk about being able to learn about humans on earth by walking around invisibly and watching them. I got so involved with these stories that my sixth grade class began saying, “Michael is from Mars.”
When I was a teenager, I began having conversations with a faun. His name was Radasha. He was a creature from Greek Myth, a sensual Dionysian creature who, in his child body, was both younger than me and way older than me. I didn’t realize until much later in life that he was the result of my repressed memories of a childhood sexual assault that I was the victim of. I could talk to him about my fear of nakedness. I could tell him about my blossoming interests in naked girls and their bodies. I could talk to him about all the things I was somehow too terrified to talk to my male friends about, even though none of them had the same reluctance to discuss sex. Ra was imaginary. But he helped me heal.
Then the story-telling seriously began. I used Davalon as one of the main characters in my novel Catch a Falling Star. I created Torrie Brownfield, the baby werewolf to express the feelings I had as a boy about being a monster and secretly terrible and deformed. Torrie is a normal boy with a condition called hypertrichosis. I am working on The Baby Werewolf now. And then there’s lovely Valerie Clarke. She is the main character of Snow Babies which is a finished novel, edited and proofread and ready to publish. It is I book I will have to find another way to publish since the recent death of PDMI Publishing. She is not a me-character, based on my own thoughts and feelings. She is based on former classmates and students who told me things that express the sadness and isolation of growing up female. So she is even more imaginary than my other characters.
They become real people to me. They have their own point of view. They talk to me and I learn things from them. But they are imaginary. So am I crazy? Yes… as a loon. And happy as Elwood P. Dowd to be that way.
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