Let's go for a walk... Part 6: In the Rain

I'm not a big fan of the rain. Okay, that's not exactly true. I actually like rain in-and-of itself, but I hate wet ground, and I'm not too fond of being wet unless I'm in the shower and the water is warm. Mostly, though, I just hate wet feet.

It's raining here this week. You know what that means? It means taking the dog out in the rain. Because she has to go out; although, my daughter has plans for a room inside the house with grass and trees and stuff so that we can just let the dog in there when she needs to go out. That way, the dog gets to go out while still staying inside, and no one has any mess to clean up, because it will be a nature room, and poop can be in nature. I'm not going to dissuade her.

At any rate, it hasn't rained much this year, so, although the dog has had to go out in light drizzles or misty rain, she hasn't had to go out in actual rain. Until today. She did not like it.

Of course, she doesn't understand when she's inside that it's raining outside, so she was very excited to get to go out, as she usually is. Until I opened the front door. She stood there. She looked up at me. She stood there. She never just stands there. I said, "Let's go." She looked up at me and, then, stepped slowly outside. Of course, this just put her on what passes for our front porch, so she wasn't out in the rain yet. She dashed over to the dry strip under the eaves of the garage and made her way down to the driveway. At that point, there was nothing dry left, so we ventured out into the rain.

She acted like I was punishing her. If only she could understand that I wasn't having any fun either. But we managed to slog our way over to the creek path. That was actually kind of nice. Well, not for her, but I like to watch the water, especially when it's high. I also like to take note of the various things floating in it. Today was nothing exciting, though, just a large cup from some fast food place. She didn't take long before she took care of her business, especially when compared to how long she usually takes, and we went home.

The time out in the rain, though, did make me think about weather and how it's used in story telling. How it's used to set mood, raise tension, act as metaphor. These are all good things. Except... well, except when they're not. There was a time when "it was a dark and stormy night" was not cliche, but you can't use that anymore (and you can probably blame Snoopy for that).

That may be the most difficult thing when using weather in stories. Avoiding the cliche. For instance, if I have to read one more time about a kid being lost out in a stormy night... or, you know, watch it in a TV show... I don't know. Do kids not get lost unless it's a dark and stormy night? Because that's what I'm coming to believe. "Uh oh... it's a dark and stormy night. We should go look for lost children."

The main thing is to allow the weather to be natural. I mean that in that it should fit the area your story is set in. I also mean that in that you shouldn't fill your story with sunshine and flowers until you get to the climax and, literally, out of the blue, have a horrible storm. With lost kids.

Weather can be a great tool. Rainy days can drive kids inside until they need to be rescued by and from man-sized cats in tall hats. They can also drive parents crazy until they have to send kids out to play in the "imagination room." Or lead them to discover enchanted wardrobes. It can wreck ships and snow your characters in. Just keep it believable. 

Let's go for a walk... Part 4: The Otter

A couple of weeks ago, while out walking the dog, I saw an otter. Now, this isn't the first otter I've seen, but, the first time I saw one, it was not very close, not close enough that I could tell definitively that it was an otter, in fact, and it was kind of small. It was neat but not impressive.

This last one, though... it was both neat and impressive. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me. Not that it really would have mattered, because my camera is slow and doesn't like to take pictures of things that are moving. It was swimming downstream and toward me, and it was pretty big. As it approached, it suddenly dived, and I thought, "oh, well... that was pretty cool." But it surfaced just even with me and came to the shore of the creek to eat whatever it had caught. It was, maybe, 25 feet away. Close enough that I could hear its little jaws crunching whatever it was that it was eating. When it finished, it swam back out into the flow of the water and continued on downstream, occasionally diving, but it never banked itself to eat again while I could still see it.

As I was watching it, it occurred to me that it's events like this that make reading worthwhile. It's the injection of the unexpected into a story that makes us want to keep reading. Now, it's not that I didn't already know this, but I'd never thought about it in exactly this way before. I mean, we all know that no one wants to read about everyday life if that's all there is to it.

See, I walk the creek path everyday. It's beautiful. Really. But I do it everyday. It's not that it gets old, exactly, because I like to watch the water while the dog is doing her... well, taking care of her business. Which includes digging for gophers; although, she has yet to catch one. However, it does tend to be just the same old, same old. Things like the otter, though, remind me to keep my eyes open and pay attention to my surroundings. There are often neat little things to see. Like the hawk that landed on a branch just over the heads of my son and I. It was completely framed by the other branches around it so that it stood in a patch of sky with the full moon (it was daytime, though) back behind it. You couldn't have planned a better picture (and I did have my camera with me, but, by the time I got it out, the bird flew away).

Anyway, what I'm saying is that it's important, incredibly important, to ground your writing in the real. Or the realistic. You want it to be believable. In the midst of that, though, you want to toss in bits and bites of the unexpected. It doesn't matter how beautiful your writing is if it's just about the mundane. However, it doesn't matter how much of the unexpected you throw into your stories if they're not believable. Really, it's like adding salt to your food. Just enough to make it tasty but not so much that it ruins the flavor of whatever you're eating.

And there's your writing tip from the creek...

Let's go for a walk... Part 3: Goblin Town

[Note: Tib part 8 is up >points to the Tiberius tab above<. You should go read it and let me know what you think. Next week (I hope), look for some changes in the Tiberius tab.]

I'm waiting for the dog to eat, right now, so that we can head out on our walk. She seems more content to be taking a nap, though. You know, I think that's what that saying "a dog's life" is all about. Naps. I want one of those. But... this post is not about napping, it's about walking.

As I've mentioned, we have a troll bridge off to the right down the creek path. But, if you go to the left, there is something completely different. Goblins. Actually, the goblins are sort of everywhere, but the closer you get to the troll bridge, the scarcer the goblins become. Not that we've actually seen the goblins, but we know that they're there. "How's that?" you might ask. Well... here's how:

This is an entrance to Goblin Town. There are many of them along the path, especially if you go left out of the park. Trolls eat goblins just as readily as they eat people, so there are not so many entrances to Goblin Town if you turn right and none near the bridge where the troll lives.

The dog finds the smell of the goblins very interesting, and she always wants to explore the doors to Goblin Town, but goblins love to eat dogs (they're a delicacy), so we do our best to keep her away so that no lurking goblin can reach out and snatch her up. Of course, goblins also love to eat little children. They're so juicy and tender! They especially like to throw children into pots and cook them up in a stew. They'll eat adults, too, but it's not their preference.

This is another entrance into Goblin Town. If you look closely, you can see the warnings painted on the door. Although, goblins love to catch people, they also don't like uninvited guests, so they paint warnings on everything to keep people away.

The trail isn't safe after dark. Daytime is mostly okay, though. Goblins don't like sunlight, and they tend to stay underground during the day. I've heard that sometimes they creep out on really cloudy or rainy days, but we've never seen any. Yet.

A better view of the "keep out" warning. It's written in goblin language, though, so I'm not sure how it actually translates.

This is one of the main entrances into Goblin Town. A fortified entrance. It's like a concrete bunker. It was getting late as you can probably tell by the darkness of the picture, and I had to run before I could get a better picture as I heard the concrete lid start to slide open. Not a place you want to be when the goblins come out!

Some time ago, there was a battle between the goblins and the early human settlers in the area. Here is a picture of the place where the human's fortress once stood:

The foundation is all that's left, so, as you can see, the goblins won this great battle and drove the humans out for a while. Drove us out. But, you know, I didn't know those people, so it's kind of easier to just think of them as the "humans."

There is a new watchtower built to keep an eye on goblin activities in the area. I thought I had some pictures of it, but I'm not finding them. At any rate, it's disguised as a practice area for the local fire department, but some of us know the truth. It's a good cover for all the personnel that come and go that are busy monitoring the goblins.

Which brings us to the end of today's exploration of the path where we walk the dog. My kids enjoy learning about the "history" of the area, and my daughter, especially, asks lots of questions about the entrances to Goblin Town. She has even mentioned becoming a goblin hunter and going down to wipe them out. The boys generally just content themselves with singing that song from the animated version of The Hobbit.

"Down, down to Goblin Town..."

Let's go for a walk... Part 2: The Troll Bridge and the Dragon Crossing

I think my family is not like other families. That's my suspicion, at any rate. Of course, I have no empirical data to back this up. However, I am the frequent recipient of comments such as
1. I wish my kids were as smart as yours.
2. I could never eat the way you do (i.e. giving up sugar).
3. How do you manage to bike to school with your kids every day? I could never do that.
[Although, to be honest, there has been a biking hiatus going on since we got the dog. Not really because of the dog, not at this point (although it did start out that way). My bike just needs some work. Specifically, the brakes. Because it's not a great idea to bike when your brakes don't work. I'll get to it! Really, I will.]
Knowing all of that, though (and I have always known it and taken it for granted (because I was always different as a kid, so I'm used to that whole thing)), has never really made me think about it. Not until my daughter's big "we have a new house Halloween sleep over party" back in October. (Yes, I've been holding onto this post (in my head) for almost three months. That's just how I do things (there's always more in my head than I have time for).) As of Halloween weekend (since Halloween was on a Monday, it counts), we'd only had the dog

(remember her?)

for a week. Walking the dog was still an occasion for a (whole) family outing. Pity, that is no longer the case. But my daughter is an... issue.

She's always the quickest to say, "Yeah, I want to go!" But she's also always the quickest to say, "Can we go home now?" This doesn't just apply to dog walking. She's just an on-the-go kind of girl, and she's always ready to move on to the next thing. In an effort to engage her more in the walking experience, things started coming out of me, the first of which was, "But we can't turn around... I have to take you and throw you to the trolls at the troll bridge!"

Her response was, "Why are you going to throw me to the trolls? What about them?" (them meaning the boys)

What interests me about the exchange is the automatic acceptance that there was, in fact, a troll bridge. And not just by her but by the whole family. And, of course, then, the kids wanted to see it, which they hadn't before (my wife and I have been using the path for biking for a few years, so we're familiar with a goodly portion of the trail but especially the portion near where we now live, so we already knew all about the troll bridge).

from a distance, my family approaching the troll bridge (despite the warning that the trolls would eat them up)



a troll's bed among the rocks under the bridge (along with discarded loot)

more troll nest

Then, it got dark. When it's dark, of course, you can see the flames of the dragons crossing the bridge. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get a picture of this that looks like anything other than blurry dark, but it's very impressive, the dragons racing back and forth across the bridge. My daughter wants to know what they're doing racing around like that, so I told her she should go ask them. So far, she's resisted the temptation to do that. She may not be scared of trolls eating her, but, evidently, she is scared of being eaten by dragons.

And this is where it gets complicated and the apparent difference between my family and other families becomes noticeable (which is not to say that there aren't others of you out there with families like mine):

Saturday morning of the great sleep over, after I fed all the girls and the dog, I needed to take the dog out, because that's what you have to do after feeding a dog unless you want to have to do extra cleaning in the house. My daughter asked me how far I was going, and, without thinking, I responded, "probably to the troll bridge."

The other girls immediately got all excited. "You have a troll bridge?" "We want to see it!" "Can we come?" So my daughter started boasting about the troll bridge and the dragons that cross it, and the girls wanted to see the dragons, and I had to explain that you can only see the dragons at night. At any rate, from all of the... well, for lack of a better word, conversation, I realized that the idea of a troll bridge or dragons or, well, pretty much anything fanciful of this nature was pretty foreign to the other girls. Not that they hadn't heard of these things, they just weren't part of their everyday vocabulary. It just wasn't the kind of thing they get in their homes. So... I took them with me. Against my better judgement.

It was quite the adventure, and, honestly, I'm surprised I can still hear. I'm also surprised that we didn't get complaints from the houses off the trail. Or in the next county.

I did make one mistake. Well, it was less of a mistake than failing to think the whole thing through before agreeing to bring them along. See, homeless people often sleep under the bridges at night, and we were well on our way before it dawned on me that I couldn't actually take them down to the bridge, because it was early enough that there might still be people sleeping down there (my wife and I often see them when we bike through). Not only did I not want this gaggle of incredibly loud girls to wake them up, but I didn't think the other parents would appreciate me taking their 8-year-olds to gawk at a bunch of homeless men sleeping under a bridge. I also want to say, at this point, that in no way did the troll bridge idea have anything to do with homeless people. At any rate, I had to announce to the girls that I would only take them far enough to see the troll bridge, but I couldn't take them down under it.

The oldest girl (the only one a grade ahead of my daughter (the others were from her grade)) wanted to know why, so I explained that sometimes there were people sleeping under the bridge, and I didn't want to wake anyone up. Her response was, "Oh! So you call homeless people trolls!" Wonderful. I couldn't wait for that bit of information to go home with her and whoever else may have been listening. And, you know, there's no point in trying to explain. I know, I tried. She went back to singing the "squirrel club" song (that my daughter started the night before) as soon as the words left her mouth, and I'm pretty sure she didn't hear a word I said.

In the end, we didn't actually quite make it even close enough to see the bridge. Not really. We only made it as far as Jumping Jack Flash. He was kind of scary to several of the girls, and I wasn't quite sure he wouldn't be able to jump over the fence (I'm still not completely sure he won't one day come over the fence, but, back then, I was really worried about it). You can just see where the bridge is from there, but you can't really see it. I turned them all around, and we headed home. I think they got over their disappointment at not getting to see the trolls.

Still... it was the first thing out of the mouths of several of the girls when their parents came to pick them up. (And I heard about how much I scared several of them by telling them the story "The Masque of the Red Death" before bedtime later in the week. But (mostly) in a good way. No one was mad, at any rate.) I suppose I provided a pretty scary Halloween sleep over between the two things.

But to get back to the point, not that I've really strayed from it. Much. Okay, to make the point: these kinds of things are fairly typical around my house. We have all kinds of landmarks and stories about things on the trail (more about Jumping Jack Flash later), and this is all normal to us. It doesn't seem to be normal elsewhere. I think that's kind of too bad. In some ways, everyone needs a troll bridge.

And the threat, "We're going to sell you to the gypsies..."