A critical teacher-skill is welcoming students as they enter your class each day. According to instructional leaders and classroom-management experts, you should stand in the doorway, greet them with a big idiot’s grin on your face, call them by name, if you can, and shake their hands if you can, pulling them into your classroom as if they are certainly doomed to be there even if they accidentally walked into the wrong classroom. I realize now that I am retired, how much I miss that ritual.
“Good morning, Sasha. How nice to see you this wonderful day.”
“Hi, Mr. B. Are we going to learn anything today?”
“Of course we are! Wonderful things! You are going to learn the most important lesson of your life today.”
“What lesson is that?”
“That we need to learn something each and every day.”
“Oh, great… yeah.”
“Ola, El Gongie, kay-paw-so, my dude!”
“Ay, vato… remember, you gotta address me like the OG I am. If I gotta respect you, you gotta show proper respect for me and my reputation, dude.”
“Oh, sorry. I thought that’s what I was doing. What did I get wrong?”
“Nothing, my dude. I am jes messin’ wit you. Gotta remind you to do it right.”
“Marissa, good morning! So nice to see you and your smiling face.”
“Don’t talk to me, Beyer. I’m mad at you right now.”
“Oh? What did I do now?”
“You didn’t do anything, but I’m not talking to you today.”
“So, you’ll yell at me about something later?”
“Yeah. But I won’t yell. I just need to talk to you… later.”
“Okay, right after class, just stay put when the bell rings.”
“In front of your next class?”
“No, they can wait outside the door for a minute or two.”
“Ruben! Good morning!”
“Hello, Mr. B. I read that book you lended me yesterday.”
“All in one evening?”
“It was only 200 pages. I read five times that in a week.”
“Well, that’s good. What did you think?”
“It was awful. No way it shoulda ended the way it did. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and then I reached the last ten pages, and I almost threw it out the window. Except I still had to read the last nine pages.”
“So, you didn’t like the book?”
“I loved it. It’s now my new favorite book!”
Now that I am retired and can’t even substitute teach anynore, I don’t have that excitement of greeting them and never knowing what I’m going to get in return. But i am saying hello to everyone I meet on the walking path. And sometimes I get an answer.
“Hey, I like your beard! You really need to be wearing a red hat this time of year.”
“Oh, I know… I get confused with him all the time around Christmas. And I don’t even own any flying reindeer.”
Catch a Falling Star 
Finding My Voice
As Big MacIntosh welcomes more little ponies into my insanely large doll collection, I have been reading my published novel Snow Babies. The novel is written in third person viewpoint with a single focus character for each scene. But because the story is about a whole community surviving a blizzard with multiple story lines criss-crossing and converging only to diverge and dance away from each other again, the focus character varies from scene to scene.
Big MacIntosh finds himself to be the leader of a new group of My Little Ponies.
In Canto Two, Valerie Clarke, the central main character of the story, is the focus character. Any and all thoughts suggested by the narrative occur only in Valerie’s pretty little head. Canto Three is focused through the mind of Trailways bus driver Ed Grosland. Canto Four focuses on Sheriff’s Deputy Cliff Baily. And so, on it goes through a multitude of different heads, some heroic, some wise, some idiotic, and some mildly insane. Because it is a comedy about orphans freezing to death, some of the focus characters are even thinking at the reader through frozen brains.
The ponies decide to visit Minnie Mouse’s recycled Barbie Dreamhouse where Olaf the Snowman is the acting butler.
That kind of fractured character focus threatens to turn me schizophrenic. I enjoy thinking like varied characters and changing it up, but the more I write, the more the characters become like me, and the more I become them. How exactly do you manage a humorous narrative voice when you are constantly becoming someone else and morphing the way you talk to fit different people? Especially when some of your characters are stupid people with limited vocabularies and limited understanding?
The ponies are invited to live upstairs with the evil rabbit, Pokemon, and Minions.
I did an entire novel, Superchicken, in third person viewpoint with one focus character, Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken himself. That is considerably less schizophrenic than the other book. But it is still telling a story in my voice with my penchant for big words, metaphors, and exaggerations.
The novel I am working on in rough draft manuscript form right now, The Baby Werewolf, is done entirely in first person point of view. That is even more of an exercise of losing yourself inside the head of a character who is not you. One of the first person narrators is a girl, and one is a werewolf. So, I have really had to stretch my writing ability to make myself into someone else multiple times.
I assure you, I am working hard to find a proper voice with which to share my personal wit and wisdom with the world. But if the men in white coats come to lock me away in a loony bin somewhere, it won’t be because I am playing a lot with My Little Ponies.
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Tagged as My Little Pony, Snow Babies