I have just finished a novel project that I worked on for a year, from Spring of 2016 to Spring of 2017. And part of my personal project procedure involves using drawings to help me visualize the characters in the story and begin to view them as real people, even when they most certainly aren’t real. I even have this derfy Mickian idea that Paffoonies (those picture ideas that are inseparably fused to words) are essential to Mickian fiction. (Mickian fiction= another frighteningly goofy idea that needs to go unexplained.)
The book, Recipes for Gingerbread Children is about an old woman, a German immigrant and Holocaust survivor, who comes to a small Iowa town with a gift for story-telling and a gift for baking things, especially gingerbread cookies.
Grandma Gretel Stein, seen in the Paffooney on the left, is the main character of the story. She tells stories, mostly fairy tales, that have lessons about being true and faithful even in the face of great evil. The fairy in her hand is General Tuffaney Swift, an immortal Storybook fairy who leads the army of the local fairy kingdom called Tellosia. Gretel believes he is real Honestly, she gets so into story-telling that her fairy friends seem absolutely real to her. And who is to say that there aren’t little magical people living in a hidden kingdom among the cornfields in Iowa? Gretel convinced me that they were real. She even has a hand in making new fairies by the baking of gingerbread. She gets a magical recipe from the fairy Erlking, a wise and magical being, and uses it to create living gingerbread boys and gingerbread girls.
The gingerbread girl on the right is Anneliese, named after Gretel’s own daughter and decorated with frosting, food coloring, and gumdrops by the favorite story listener who constantly listens to Gretel’s stories and helps bake Gretel’s gingerbread, Sherry Cobble.
Sherry is a beautiful young eighth grade girl who reminds Gretel of her long-lost daughter. Sherry has a twin sister named Shelly and they are identical twins, but Sherry not only looks like Anneliese once did, she acts like her with the same confidence and enthusiasm for life that Anneliese once had before the war.
Sherry and Shelly are both part of the Cobble family, who have a reputation locally as wacky-pants loonies because they believe firmly in being nudists and engaging in nature completely naked while not actually wearing any wacky pants. I haven’t done any actual pictures of Sherry in the nude, but if you look carefully at the first picture of her above and see clothing, then you are seeing things that are not there. Yep, the girl bakes and decorates gingerbread men in the buff, wearing her pale pink birthday suit, even when the weather outside in Iowa makes that nonsensical.
So by now you can probably draw several conclusions about me as both a novelist and an illustrator. #1, There is definitely something a little bit off about me. #2, I haven’t said anything yet about this book having dead Nazis and a werewolf in it, even though I rarely talk about this book without throwing those things in somewhere. #3, Number 2 is actually taken care of in a backhanded way if you are reading this whole list carefully. #4, This story is probably about things that really aren’t just gingerbread recipes. #5, You should congratulate yourself if you read this far in this post. You have unusual amounts of patience and curiosity, and an extremely high tolerance for levels of goofy that put actual Goofy to shame.
Lynn Johnston’s For Better or Worse is also an old friend. I used to read it in the newspaper practically every day. I watched those kids grow up and have adventures almost as if they were members of my own family. So the mashed potatoes part of the meal is easy to digest too.
Catch a Falling Star 
…In the Eye of the Beholder
Meet Xandu, the Beholder… I can’t say he’s a bad guy, but only because he’s a giant floating head full of eyes, and doesn’t have the proper parts to be considered a guy.
Those of us who were nutty about playing Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980’s hear the phrase, “Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder” and we’re automatically thinking weird thoughts about Xandu, and maybe even questioning, “Which eye do you mean?”
Beholders have one big eye, and a lot of little ones equipped with death lasers, gazes of perpetual sleep, nausea looks, and fear-eyes that make you run away in terror. With that kind of surreal right-brain crapola going on in my stupid old dungeon master’s head, it’s no wonder I might go into this discussion of the Beholder with monsters on the brain when I really intended to talk all along about this particular beholder;
Tomi Lahren is the darling of the right wing media, broadcasting her loud, angry racist-Barbie rants for Glen Beck’s lovely fear and hate smorgasbord known as The Blaze. You can tell just by looking that she is a genetically German/Norwegian Midwesterner who could be an Iowegian if only she had had the good sense to be born in Iowa instead of the big bowl of blah that is Rapid City, South Dakota. I know that may sound like some kind of reverse racism to say I can tell those things “just by looking”, but it isn’t, because I meant you can just look those things up on Wikipedia like I did. To hear her shout her opinions on immigration in her closing segment called “Final Thoughts” you could swear she was channeling Donald Trump and lulling you into a stupor with her gaze of perpetual sleep power. She is also known for giving San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick the nausea look for silently protesting racism and social injustice by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem. And she reserves both the fear eye and the laser death eye for Black Lives Matter activists, calling them the equivalent of the KKK because… Well, I can’t read minds, especially hard little white power minds that say “all lives matter” because they really want to say “black lives DON’T matter”.
But, honestly, I don’t dislike this blond beholder who is more than just a floating head full of evil eyes. She was cute on The Daily Show talking to Trevor Noah. And she used her indoor voice even when saying slightly racist things. The two of them seemed almost friendly, though ideologically they are worlds apart.
And this is what we really need to see more of, the two sides of an issue actually being able to talk about issues acknowledging that each side has a right and a reason for the views they personally hold, and you can’t get the bugs out of the batter before you bake the cake if you don’t work together. Lahren was even willing to be brave and appear on the liberal comedy talk show Real Time with Bill Maher where conservatives are often chewed up and spit out in front of a distinctly liberal audience.
But she is still a beholder. She views the world through one big eye, one point of view, with little room for opposing viewpoints. You will definitely have to decide for yourself as you enter the next dungeon room and come face to face with the beholder, which one is worth the roll of the dice to defeat, and which one you should run away from screaming like a little liberal snowflake girl.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, Dungeons and Dragons, goofy thoughts, Liberal ideas, politics
Tagged as humor, liberals and conservatives, political humor, Tomi Lahren