Since the holiday tradition of the Beyer family gingerbread house got derailed by the pandemic last year, this year we did two. Team 1 led by my future daughter-in-law took on the gingerbread castle. Team 2, the pre-built gingerbread house was led by my daughter the Princess (and she did all the work.)
Materials were laid out. Decoration bottles and construction frosting was opened. Squeeze bags that had to be filled were filled and the nozzles were opened.
My daughter used her art talent on the house to turn it into the snowman’s house. One snowman accidentally became a pirate.
The castle was built and ready to start decorating like heck to catch up.
The pirate eye patch turned out to be the Venom symbiote.
The snowman named Ron, the home-owner made of icing, was all melty with sadness over the Venom on the roof.
But the Princess focussed on other details, vowing to fix things later.
The other side started to look better.
The castle was trying to catch up. My son’s art skills helped a bit.
Ron was definitely happier about his house. See him smiling? No? Neither do I, actually. But the Princess declared him elated.
Voila! The finished and fixed snowman house. Ron s sitting there happily in his socks and funky tie.
The castle is gloriously done also. That only left demolition and as much gingerbread-eating as we could manage. To be fair, we had two gingerbread domiciles to consume, and only six of us to do the eating, with at least four of us on diets that don’t allow that much sugar all at once.
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