Despite what it looks like, this is NOT a bowl full of dog poop. It is actually gingerbread dough in the process of being mixed. I had already folded in the one large egg, and already stirred it almost to readiness for the kneading process.
You see, my daughter and I have been staying at home in Texas while my wife and son are off on a trip I couldn’t manage for health reasons. So, since the Princess and I have some bonding time, we decided to have a gingerbread cookie contest that we ended up putting off too long last December.
We decided to make just two cookies. I suggested unicorns, she wanted to do a dragon. So we each took half of the dough and started sculpting. We didn’t make the cookies mobile once cooked. The plan was to make them, decorate them, photograph them, and eat them.
The Dragon is the Princess’s entry and the unicorn mine in the fantasy critter cookie contest. In the previous pictures they are in raw dough form. In the next set of pictures they are cooked cookies.
The en-fattened cooked cookies didn’t look quite as fine as our original sculpted conceptions. We were hoping to improve their artistic merits by decorating them. I had frosting left over from the gingerbread house we did in December.
The chocolate frosting, though, had congealed in a strange, barely spreadable manner. To deal with this, had to warm it and melt it slightly to get it to spread. The Princess chose to forego using chocolate frosting. Like an idiot, I forged ahead with the tasty goo.
Unfortunately, the warm chocolate had a tendency to melt all the other decorative frosting.
So, I tried my best to be artsy creative and rescue the look of my unicorn cookie. I failed. I turned it into a fire-tailed ugly dog with a bleeding white stick stuck in its forehead.
The Princess was, however, much more successful.
And fortunately, both cookies were delicious when it came time to clean up our respective messes.
Pay tentershawn to Dingle when he schtumms, koz when he schtumms he schtumms from eggzspearie antz.
The Way Mickey’s Mind Works
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will made that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
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