Bigfoot: keeper of secrets, guardian of fairyland, protector of the people. http://instagr.am/p/KG-ekwwxYf/

I am.

Once I have completed reviewing all of the submissions I will post who the winners are. Remember, you can scan or photograph the colored page.

Click here for details. Email your final colors to m.j @ RNDM.us (remove the spaces). Contact me here for further details.

Thank you for hanging in there with us as we worked to get this second issue finished.

* New Friends is currently only available from SmashingWords. Over the next few days, you will be able to purchase New Friends from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. iTunes and others will follow later this month. We will make note of this via Facebook and twitter.

** only from SmashingWords and iTunes.

When my eldest son was around two he began to show his life-love of horses. He would fly out of his room yelling, “The horses! The horses are coming!” What would follow was a stampede of about a thousand invisible wild horses. He would grab his invisible whip, mount his invisible mustang, and then pursue the wild herd throughout the house. At night, he would hang his whip, hat, and saddle up and in the morning he would rise and put them all back on.

This was one of his first beliefs. It was a belief in the invisible, the intangible, the ineffable. He held this belief so strong that if need be I could take the whip away, hang it on a wall, and tell him he couldn’t have it until later. Later, with his eye on the whip on the wall—exactly where I had placed it, he would ask, “have my whip, Daddy?”.

This type of belief runs rampant in children. It is the imagined unimaginable. This is Faerie. It is the place of possibility.

In our home, the God of Israel’s creative life-source is Faerie. It is the tangibly intangible. It is the invisible domain of imaginatively-visible: horses, whips, dragons, Bigfeet, hobbits, and so much more. But to enter Faerie, we must enter as a child does—with pure belief. With belief so raw that we can experience its removal and long for its restoration.

Children are from Faerie. They are cut from that roughly hewn rock of belief. They are the Wilds (as I call it in my western fairytale series) all wrapped up in a fragile skin. As we grow older we become more tame. The more tame we become, the less we remember Faerie. The less we remember, the harder it is to believe. But, children, even the most mistreated, can find the doorways to Faerie. (It might not the be bright fairy side, but they still find the invisible, intangible, and ineffable.) Children are their parents link to the world of raw belief.

Hopefully, when the day arrives and our children run away to Faerie land, we will choose to join them in their Faerie land adventures. As often as we do, we too will remember.

Beginning this evening, you get to do the coloring and compete in a coloring contest.

Announcing the first coloring competition for The Adventures of Tomy and Jon. The deadline for the contest is Sunday, April 22th. Each entry should be mailed to m.j @ rndm .us [put the email all back together] with the Subject line: Tomy and Jon Coloring Contest. The message body should contain name, age, and completed Tomy and Jon coloring page—scan or photo submitted as a .png or .jpg.

Each entrant’s email will be automatically subscribed to this blog. If you wish to remain unsubscribed please inform us. We will not give or sell your information to anyone.

The entries will be sorted into four age groups:

3-6

7-12

13-17

18 and up

One winner of each group will receive an original piece of art. (*** It will be uncolored***)

Let the coloring begin!

To download the image right-click and select “save” or click on the image and drag it to your desktop.

When reading about faerieland (fairyland), we often get so wrapped up in the stories that we can’t (or choose not to) even think about the parents of faerieland runaways. The parents are baggage that has been thrown off so that we can soar the heights with Pan, swim the depths of tears with Alice, or conquer witches with the Pevensies.

What about the poor parents of wandering children? What keeps them from loss of mind and facilities? What keeps the parents from entering into the tale of their children to rescue them? In the story (with a lengthy title), The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making the author, Catherynne M. Valente, tells us that parents of Fairyland runaways are not cross with their children when the children return, because they know they have been to fairyland. [paraphrased]

Okay, but in the meantime what about the parents? What happens to them? What of their hearts? What loving parent wouldn’t be out of their mind trying to find their child?

When creating tales, as authors, we shouldn’t just think about the action within the tale. What of the action without the tale? It is our job to understand our tale’s affect on those not directly involved. I like the Wizard of Oz in this case, Dorothy was absent; she was missed. Her absence created a hole in the lives of her aunt and uncle, it wasn’t filled until she returned.

Unlike Oz, the Pevensies’ were not missed. There was no stir from their disappearance. Their outside world is virtually gone from mind and reality. Sadly, this is sort of a copout. It makes the real world disappear, in order to create a fairyland that works. It shouldn’t have to be so. An author should be able to hold both existences in tandem. The author should be able to show the effects of a runaway’s disappearance and still communicate the tale without destroying the main point. While it isn’t perfect Oz does do an adequate job of handling this tension between the Faerie and the Real.

What we do with those outside of the tale is as important as those inside, because it brings a bit of reality into Faerie. That reality only grounds the tale and thus allows the reader to not break out of the tale with questions like: what are the parent’s feeling, do the parents/guardians even know, or do they even care. By bringing in the feelings or actions of those the runaway has left behind we can answer some important questions while allowing the tale to move forward and placing the runaway’s real life in a reality.

If you’re interested in my own fairytales check out: The Adventures of Tomy and Jon. It is only the beginning, but every tale has to have one.

Much later, I had hoped to release it in mid-January, but after several computer related troubles and a birth in our family, that too will be delayed. At this point, I hope for a February release.

This next issue introduces the fairytale aspect of Tomy and Jon and the greater story, outside of a family with two young boys begins to emerge. Get ready for talking animals, giants, dragons, Bigfoots (Bigfeet?), and many other folk tale, fairytale, and legendary beings, in the issues to follow.

My hope is that by the middle of January, if not before, New Friends will be published and available. Here is one image yet to be colored from the latest issue.

If you have purchased, read, and enjoyed this story, thus far, please consider leaving a review, where you purchased it. The better the reviews the more people will purchase, the more they purchase, the more I can spend time on the next issues. Thank you.

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