People accused of doing magical thinking are basically being accused of doing something awful. Like Republicans telling us that if we cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, working class and middle class citizens will prosper because of it. Of course, they actually know better. So, it isn’t really magical thinking. It is really evil magical thinking.
But when I am actually guilty of magical thinking, it is more along the lines of me pinning my hopes on an intuition brought about by calculations in my overcrowded imagination that are probably horribly miscalculated but that I need to turn out to be accurate and miraculously pull me out of my current difficulty. And then, because I intuit really, really hard… it turns out all right.
Magic is after all, merely what we call science and situations where something amazing is created, but we have no idea at all how and why.
Our movies nowadays are really quite chock full of magical thinking. Wish-fulfillment, fantasy, and violence-laden revenge stories are what fill the cinema with seekers of escapism and relaxation. That is magical thinking of an epic sort. Go see the Black Panther movie and “Wakanda forever” solves racism.
So, what is the point of this little essay? What am I actually thinking about the subject of magical thinking? Well, I needed a topic today to keep my every-day-in-April posting goal alive. And magically…
In the background of several of my novels, there lurk little people with magic powers. In this modern age of science they still exist, but are reduced in size to about three inches tall for the adults. As I am now working on a book set in their world, I am therefore using today’s post to elucidate what they are and categorize them a bit.
Butterfly Children is a nickname for the winged fairies. And most fairies not only have wings, but don’t wear clothing because, not only do shirts, jackets, jerkins, and such interfere with wings, but they, like me, prefer to be nude if possible.
The Butterfly Children are not really made of flesh and blood, but rather coherent magical energy. That is the reason they rarely become spellcasters themselves, but can lend their energies to the spell-casting Sylphs; witches, wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, liches, and some Storybooks.
They refer to us as “the Slow Ones” because we are easily fooled into not seeing them for what they are. They use concealing glammers to convince us that we are seeing a bug or a bird or a glare of sunlight instead of what they actually are. They also have the ability to allow slow ones to see them if they choose to voice the necessary spells. Some rare slow ones are able to see through their glammers and view them in spite of their wishes.
Sylphs and Elves : The Man-shaped Fey
Once, long ago, the Fey Children who looked human could pass themselves off as slow ones. The Elves, of course, had pointed ears to hide. But they looked like what we would call “regular people” because they were our size. But human science developed things that stop magical energies like brass or drain magical energies like iron and copper. The Fey became smaller and smaller. Things like discarded nails and lost pennies decreased the places where they could live and build homes.
Eli Tragedy (in the middle above) is an example of both an Elf (with pointed ears) and a magic-using Sorcerer. His apprentices, Bob and Mickey, are both Sylphs. Like Butterfly Children, many Sylphs would rather not wear clothes. Magic-using Sylphs and Elves learn to wear clothes because garments can be invested with protective spells.
Mickey is different than other Sylphs in that he has been bitten by a wererat and has been infected by lycanthropy. Since he is now an uncontrolled wererat, he constantly looks like a boy with a mouse head and tail, a fur-covered boy’s body, and paws instead of feet.
Sylphs can occur in many different non-manlike forms. The Mouse from Cornucopia is a Sylph in the form of an anthropomorphic mouse. Radasha, also seen to the left, is a Faun. Pixies, Nixies, Boggarts, Gremlins, Centaurs, Minotaurs, and other magical creatures have gotten far smaller since ancient times when human beings added greatly to the magical energy loose in the world through their imaginations, faiths, fears, nightmares, and dreams.
All of those magical creatures have odd and sometimes horrific shapes. You can see that in the insect-like Pixie to the right.
Storybooks : Immortals Amongst the Fey
The other Fey Children that need a special mention are the Storybooks like Silkie pictured in the acorn beret and leaf dress to the right. These lucky Sylphs, Elves, or other Fey Children who’ve been singled out by slow ones in their slow-ones’ books and literature are made magically immortal by the power of stories told by humans, especially those preserved by print. They no longer die. They can no longer be killed or grievously wounded.
General Tuffaney Swift is another good example of a Storybook. He exists as an immortal because some of his early adventures, were overheard and written down in stories about Tom Thumb. He was instrumental in bringing Grandma Gretel and her daughter, Anneliese, into the Fey World. She is responsible through her magical baking skills for the entire races of Gingerbread Children and Cookie Monsters.
So, there’s a brief overview of the Kingdom of Tellosia and the World of the Fey Children.
The book below is free in ebook form from Friday through Tuesday starting this weekend.
I am, however, an expert on how NOT to write a good poem.
A truly terrible poem might begin with an over-extended metaphor.
It might begin by saying, “A poem is like a fairy tale, filmed in black and white on 35 mm film stock, with Orson Wells as the director.”
And for the meat of the poem, you use details about the fairy acrobats having an accident on the trapeze, and the circus train derails and has a terrible accident, and the clown never takes his makeup off because he’s on the run from the police… and you totally forget that the movie “The Greatest Show on Earth” was directed by Cecil B. DeMille and filmed in color.
And you have a tendency to “squinch” the rhymes, rhyming “good” with “food” and “dud” with “odd,” and at the same time you put trochaic warts all over the iambic pentameter because as a poet you are not William Shakespeare, and you are not even Buddy Rich because the rhythm sounds more like banging trashcan lids than drumbeats.
In the middle of the poem somewhere it suddenly becomes free verse without a rhyme scheme or reason for the change. And the theme circles back on itself and does a pretzel twist with no logic to salt it with.
And you are a terrible poet like Mickey because, when you write a poem you don’t realize;
the gemstone at the center of your poem must go from your mind, to pen, to paper, to eye of the reader, to mind… and finally to heart…
And the blaze of its beauty must be strong enough to resonate…
and be able to SHAKE THE BONES OF THE UNIVERSE.
And you can’t do it because you don’t even get the irony of that rule.
I gave you a list of places where my ideas for fiction come from, and in the end, I failed to explain the thing about the bottle imp. Yes, I do get ideas from the bottle imp. He’s an angry blue boggart with limited spell powers. But he’s also more than 700 years old and has only been trapped in the bottle since 1805. So, he has about 500 years of magical life experience to draw from and answer my idea questions. Admittedly it would be more helpful if he were a smarter imp. His name is Bruce, and his IQ in human terms would only be about 75. But, then, I don’t have to worry about misfired magic. If I asked him to, “Make me a hamburger,” he wouldn’t immediately change me into a fried, ground-beef patty because he is not smart enough to do that high of a level of magic spell.
But he is just barely intelligent enough to tell me a truthful answer if I asked him a question like, “What would happen if I put an alligator’s egg in a robin’s nest as a joke, and the robin family decided it was their own weird-looking egg and then tried to hatch it?” The answer would be truthful according to his vast knowledge of swamp pranks. And it would also be funny because he’s too dumb to know better. In fact, he told me about a mother robin who worked so diligently at hatching an alligator egg that a baby alligator was hatched. She convinced it that it was actually a bird. And when it came time for the baby birds to learn to fly, the baby alligator couldn’t do it… until she talked it into flapping madly with all four legs. Then, a mother’s love and faith in her child got an alligator airborne.
Yeah, that hasn’t proved to be a very useful story idea. I put it into a story I was writing during my seven years in high school, and then lost the manuscript. (I was a teacher, not a hard-to-graduate student.) But it was proof that you can get your writing ideas from a bottle imp.
So, if you decide to use bottle imps as an idea source for fiction, the next step is to find and acquire the right sort of bottle imp. I got mine from Smellbone, the rat-faced necromancer. I bought it for an American quarter and three Canadian loonies more than a dozen years ago. I found it at his Arcana and Horse-Radish Burger Emporium in Montreal. But I am not sure how that information helps you. Smellbone died in a firey magical-transformation accident involving an angry Wall-Street financier and a dill pickle. The whole Emporium went to cinders in an hour.
If you are going to try to capture the bottle imp yourself, which I strongly do not recommend, you are going to need a magical spell-resistant butterfly net, a solid glass jar, bottle, or brass urn. A garlic-soaked cork to fit the bottle. A spell scroll ready to cast containing at least one fairy-shrink spell. And an extremely limited amount of time to actually think about what you are doing.
Now I have told you how I get writing ideas from a bottle imp. Aren’t you glad I did not include this idea in the post about where ideas come from? After all, I am a fiction writer. I get my jollies from telling lies in story form. And bottle imps, especially angry blue bottle imps named Bruce, or Charlie, or Bill, are more trouble than they are worth. They can curse you with magical spells of infinite silliness and undercut your serious nature for a lifetime.
This is the pen and ink start of an illustration of the novel I am working on, Recipes for Gingerbread Children.
I admit that my obsession with the benefits of gingerbread is mostly in my head. Specifically, in my sinuses. I find products with ginger in them, diet ginger ale, ginger teas, and especially gingerbread cookies, help reduce the tightness in my COPD-laced lungs, clear my sinuses, and make breathing mercifully easier. Gingerbread cookies are also seasonally wonderful in that they are slightly Christmassy and help bring my family together.
So, yesterday, a Saturday, my daughter the Princess and I executed a perfectly evil plan to commit evil acts of gingerbread and whip up some wicked little gingerbread men in a frenzy of deliciously evil bakery.
Okay, maybe not evil exactly… but I have diabetes and the Princess desperately wants to lose some weight, neither condition being one that benefits by having the temptation of wicked little gingerbread men around.
And, as with any evil plan, many things proceeded to go awry. We did not have any actual flour available to make the gingerbread dough less butter-and-egg sticky. All we had was some corn starch… which had bugs in it. After struggling to craft sticky little bodies a few times, we decided to go ahead and use the tainted corn starch. After all, a few little larvae that get overlooked and not picked out will only add a bit of extra protein, right?
And we had the added bonus that you can make just as much mess with corn starch and margarine as you can with flour and butter!
But we did get the corn-starchy little buggers baked. (And they were probably literally buggers due to the potential for having bugs in them. Oh well, it should fortify the old immune systems.)
The only decoration we had was chocolate frosting, since someone ate all the sprinkles and sugar dots we bought last year for the gingerbread house. (Don’t look at me. I have diabetes.) So we frosted them, prompting the Princess to begin calling them “little burnt souls blackened in hell”.
So then the cookie cannibals could allow the eating to begin.
Mmmm! Good cookie!
Okay, I know it looks like the Princess did all the work, and all I did was eat them. But somebody had to do the hard work of taking all the pictures, right?
Going through my old drawing portfolio, I found my children’s book project from my undergrad college years. I have no idea now looking at the illustrations what the story was even about. I lost the actual story, and I never made a cover for it. But here is a look at old hopes and dreams and a way of seeing the world that begins; Once Upon a Time…
I have no earthly idea what the heck this story is even about, but I do like the pen and ink work, and probably couldn’t repeat it if I had to.
I grew up in a small rural town in North Central Iowa. It was a place that was, according to census, home to 275 people. That apparently counted the squirrels. (And I should say, the squirrels were definitely squirrelly. They not only ate nuts, they became a nut.) It was a good place to grow up in the 60’s and 70’s. But in many ways, it was a boring place.
Yes, there were beautiful farmer’s daughters to lust after and pine for and be humiliated by. There was a gentle, supportive country culture where Roy Rogers was a hero and some of the best music came on Saturdays on Hee Haw where there was a lot of pickin’ and grinnin’ going on. There were high school football games on Friday nights, good movies at the movie theaters in Belmond and Clarion, and occasional hay rides for the 4-H Club and various school-related events like Homecoming.
I lived in a world where I was related to half the people in the county, and I knew at least half of the other half. People told stories about other people, some of them incredibly mean-spirited, some of them mildly mean, and some of them, though not many, that were actually good and actually true. I learned about telling good stories from my Grandpa Aldrich who could tell a fascinating tale of Dolly who owned the part of town called locally “Dollyville” and included the run-down vacant structure the kids all called the Ghost House.  He also told about Dolly’s husband, Shorty the dwarf, who was such a mean drunk and went on epic temper tirades that often ended only when Dolly hospitalized him with a box on the ear. (Rumor had it that there were bricks in the box.)
And I realized that through story-telling, the world became whatever you said that it was.  I could change the parts of life I didn’t love so much by lying… er, rather, by telling a good story about them. And if people heard and liked the stories enough, they began to believe and see life more the way I saw it myself. A good story could alter reality and make life better. I used this power constantly as a child.
There were invisible aliens invading Iowa constantly when I was a boy. Dragons lived in the woods at Bingham Park, and there were tiny little fairy people everywhere, in the back yard under the bushes, in the attic of the house, and building cities in the branches of neglected willow trees.
I reached out to the world around me as an artist, a cartoonist, and a story-teller and plucked details and colors and wild imaginings like apples to bake the apple pie that would much later in my life feed the novels and colored-pencil pictures that would make up my inner life. The novels I have written and the drawings I have made have all come from being a small town boy who dreamed big and lived more in stories than in the humdrum everyday world.
Catch a Falling Star 