I have now embarked on my seventieth year of life. I have had a thirty-one-year career as a public school teacher. I have been married for thirty years. I have three grown children. I wrote and published 25 books. You would think that as my life nears completion, I would have answers to some of the big questions. I do not. I do, however, know enough to ask them.
- Is mankind and his (or her) civilization going to survive?
- Will AI computer programs destroy us rather than help us?
- Will aliens a board 3I Atlas destroy us rather than help us?
- Will the massive caldera under Yellowstone Park explode as a super volcano and wipe out life in North America?
- Why are so many of the big questions about destruction and dying?
- Why is the Pumpkinhead President not dead or in prison yet?
- Why is art important, and why is my art a defining part of me?
- What comes next if the world does end?
- Why does any of this matter?
So, let me take a stab at some answers…
- Probably not. Humanity’s civilizations have broken apart or been destroyed before.
- AI programs are still fairly stupid, though smarter than certain American voter groups. If they kill us, it will be a side effect, not a goal.
- The alien things are almost too massive to be mere hoaxes. Science fiction movies suggest it will not end well.
- Skip this one for fear of not enough relevant details.
- Because old people think a lot about dying. No passes possible on this one.
- You’ve seen the smug smirk on his orange clown face. He’s too big of a criminal to get caught in the act.
- Art comes from the soul, and it makes it possible to shape your entire life and its meanings.
- A Vogon Insterstellar Bypass will be built.
- It probably doesn’t matter, and my answers are all wrong anyway.
There we go! Solved it!
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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