Yesterday an inconvenient internet outage interrupted my fountain of character gushing. So let me splash a couple more on here.
Tim Kellogg
Tim is a school teacher’s son who is sorta, kinda, based on my own oldest son… and maybe a little bit on me. He’s clever, creative, a natural leader, and only slightly evil part of the time.
Tim is a main character in;
Catch a Falling Star
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius
Magical Miss Morgan
Grandma Gretel Stein
Gretel is a German survivor of the concentration camps who sees and talks to fairies on a regular basis. She also bakes magically delicious gingerbread cookies. And loves to tell stories to those who eat her cookies.
She is a main character in;
Recipes for Gingerbread Children
She is an important character in;
Superchicken
The Baby Werewolf
The Necromancer’s Apprentice
The Primary Cast of Recipes for Gingerbread Children (left to right) Grandma Gretel, the cookie baker, Todd Niland, handsome young farm boy and cookie-eater, Sherry Cobble, nudist and junior high cheerleader, and Sandy Wickham, cookie-eater and Todd Niland’s crush.
Farbick
He’s the alien Telleron pilot and good guy aboard Xiar’s spaceship who gets shot during the failed invasion of Iowa and helps save the planet in the near future. He’s a main character in;
Catch a Falling Star
Stardusters and Space Lizards
Davalon (re-named David by the couple who adopts him)
Dav is the alien boy accidentally lost on Earth in Catch a Falling Star, and leader of the young explorers in Stardusters and Space Lizards.
Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken
It is possible E-A is really me. He bears my high school nickname. He is a boy trying to cope with being the new kid in a tightly-knit little Iowa farm town.
He is the main character in;
Superchicken
I fear I am still a long way from done with referring to characters in my books. But more waits for another day.
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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