Yes, this post is a shameless promotion. But this is a good book that not enough people are reading to truly appreciate that fact. When I was a boy in the 1960’s, there really was an old German lady who lived in a small tar-papered house, all ginger-brown in color, which we all called the Gingerbread House. She really did love to give out sweets and cookies and popcorn balls to the kids in our town. And she really did love to talk to people and tell them little stories.
Her name, in real life, was Marie Jacobson. She was, in fact, a survivor of the holocaust. She had a tattoo on her right forearm that I saw only one time. Our parents told us what the tattoo meant. But there were no details ever added to the story. Mrs. Jacobson doted on the local children. She regularly gave me chocolate bars just because I held the door for her after church. But she was apparently unwilling to ever talk about World War II and Germany. We were told never to press for answers. There was, however, a rumor that she lost her family in one of the camps. And I have always been the kind that fills in the details with fiction when the truth is out of reach.
I based the character of Grandma Gretel on Mrs. Jacobson. But the facts about her secret life are, of course, from my imagination, not from the truth about Mrs. Jacobson’s real life.
Marie Jacobson cooked gingerbread cookies. I know because I ate some. But she didn’t talk to fairies or use magic spells in cooking. I know because the fairies from the Hidden Kingdom in Rowan disavowed ever talking to any slow one but me. She wasn’t Jewish, since she went to our Methodist Church. She wasn’t a nudist, either. But neither were my twin cousins who the Cobble Sisters, the nude girls in the story, are fifty percent based on. A lot of details about the kids in my book come from the lives of my students in Texas. The blond nudist twins were in my class in the early eighties. And they were only part-time nudists who talked about it more than lived it.
But the story itself is not about nudists, or Nazis, or gingerbread children coming to life through magic. The story is about how telling stories can help us to allay our fears. Telling stories can help us cope with and make meaning out of the most terrible things that have happened to us in life. And it is also a way to connect with the hearts of other people and help them to see us for who we really are. And that was the whole reason for writing this book.
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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