Tag Archives: children

Frank and the Plot of the Hypnotizing Slime, Chapter 1

Frank

© James Pyles

If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

This is a story my seven-year-old granddaughter and I started last Halloween. Like most children her age, her interests move from one topic to the next, and it was ignored for a long time. When she showed an interest in it again, we worked to finish it. I added the ending page last night.

Now she wants to publish it. I’m not aware of any publisher who would be immediately interested, so the story now appears here on my blog. It’s all in fun and I hope you enjoy it. If you think your children and grandchildren would like it, by all means please share.

Oh, and my granddaughter wants to write a sequel.

Chapter 1

Once upon a time there was a spider named Frank. He was evil but there was a good spider named Lilly. And a team that was evil too teamed up with Frank. Frank and the team of evils had an idea. They will hypnotize Lilly with hypnotizing slime. But Lilly had a team of spiders too. They were good like Lilly. But Frank and the team didn’t know. Frank and the team also didn’t know that Lilly had a force field but the force field could only be up for 10 minutes. Frank is working on an evil weapon but it’s really hard to make. But he is distracted because he is falling in love with Lilly.

But wait. How could he be falling in love with Lilly? To answer that question, we have to visit their first encounter, a random meeting a little while ago when Frank ran out of flies and went to Lilly’s web to ask for some spares.

“Um, excuse me,” Frank said. “I see your web is full of flies and mine just ran out. Could I bother you to spare me a few?”

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When My Daddy Found Me

J Hardy Carroll

If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

She dreamed of this all her life and now, she’d found it. A burned out brick building next to a concrete bridge. Emily had searched photographic archives from all over the world before discovering the object of her nightmares in rural Ohio. She had to push the overgrown foliage aside just to get a look at it. She didn’t know how she remembered, but she put her foot on the edge of one of the lower windows. Then she heard a newborn baby cry. Her mother had abandoned her there. Her “Daddy” was the firefighter who found and adopted her.

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Ken in a Barbie World

load

PHOTO PROMPT © Na’ama Yehuda

If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

Okay, fine. I’m a “Ken” in a Barbie world. How did that happen? Darn Rochelle and her writing prompts, anyway.

“It’s not Rochelle, Grandpa. It’s me.”

“Dani, have you flipped? You can’t leave me like this.”

“I turn Grandpa into a Ken doll.”

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Where Are the Families in Science Fiction?

lost in spaceNot long ago, I read a blog post by Caroline Furlong called Why Science Fiction Lacks Mothers and Fathers – and Why This Trend Needs to Change. At the time, I didn’t notice it was first published in July of 2018, but that doesn’t really matter.

Caroline lamented the abysmal lack of supportive parental characters, Moms in particular, in modern works of science fiction. She narrowed down the reason for this from her perspective here:

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My Grandchildren Are Storytellers

baby

© James Pyles

It was a hard day, in a hard week, in a hard nine months or more.

After dinner, while heating water for tea, I walked into my granddaughter’s bedroom. We’ve reserved one of our two spare bedrooms for her, mainly because when she was smaller and stayed with us, she’d take afternoon naps. It still has her bed, a lot of her toys, plus the walls are decorated with her drawings and paintings.

She’s four-and-a-half, and as I was wandering around, I remembered something about her I’ll tell you about in a bit.

My grandson is almost eleven. Ever since he was about five or six, we have played “the game.” It started out in a really primitive form. He made up some situation and what his character was going to do to my character, but being an adult, I’d always find a way to top him.

As he got older, the stories became more sophisticated. For about two-and-a-half years, I turned some of those role playing games into an ongoing story for him published on this blog. I adapted the very first story I wrote for him, and it became one of my early published short stories in the Magical Reality fantasy anthology from Pixie Forest Publishing.

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Bookpunk

art

© Sue Vincent

Eleven-year-old Keel watched his thirteen-year-old sister Alina from behind as she trudged down the alleyway. "C'mon. Don't wanna b late," she signaled.

The thin, waif-like boy, walking through January’s half-frozen muddy puddles in dirty, sandaled feet, dressed in over-sized khaki shorts with hems down to his shins, and a ratty green sweater made from an old Army blanket, heard her synthesized voice and simultaneously saw the text on his head’s up.

"Geek off. We've got time," was his caustic reply. He had slowed so he could look at Gemmi’s tagging, he was pretty sure it was her work, freshly painted on the old bricks. He was oblivious to the cold breeze from behind, blowing his matted, tortilla-colored hair with violet tips (all that was left of last November’s dye job) into his eyes.

"This is more important than your hotties for Gemmi." She impatiently grabbed his wrist, causing him to regard his sib for the first time that morning. She covered the holes in her thin, coffee-stained white tank top with a black leather vest, the one she ripped off from the dying multiplex in the burbs last month. There were just as many holes in her black yoga pants (she liked retro), and if he’d listen to her actual voice instead of what came through the interface, he’d have heard the faint, metallic click as numerous piercings colliding in her mouth when she spoke.

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Familiar

girl and cat

– PrettyScary @ Deviantart

Christina rubbed her soft, feline fur against Gwendolyn’s face as the ten-year-old girl looked into the distance at nothing and everything.

“Yes, I can see it now, too, dearest.” The child was entranced at the interplay between energies from four of the ten dimensions.

“Silly little one, Christina chided. I detected the intermix ages ago.” In mid-sentence, the white cat’s tone changed from one of annoyance to affection, for she dearly loved the girl, and she always would.

“That’s because you are wise.” To anyone looking at the scene, the fifth grader was lying on her bed on a lazy Wednesday afternoon after school, contemplating gray clouds which threatened rain later in the evening. Yet gazing into her eyes, it would have been easy to tell that they might as well have been blind, at least to anything in the so-called “real world.”

“It’s best not to get too lost in the vision, my sweet, lest you lose your way and be forever swept into other spaces.”

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Sunday Afternoon, a Little Girl, a Tree, and Dragons

I was spending time drawing with my three-year-old granddaughter, and while she was scribbling on her piece of paper, I borrowed another she’d lightly worked on and added a few things.

I can see all the colors of autumn out my back window, so naturally, I started with a tree. Then, because I read one of my dragon stories to my nine-year-old grandson earlier, I had to add a few of them.

Enjoy.

© James Pyles

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Do Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie Absolutely Have to be Gay? No, and Here’s Why

bert and ernie

Sesame Street’s characters Bert and Ernie

Recently, as reported at Newshub, screenwriter Mark Saltzman, himself a gay man, told LGBT news site Queerty that the beloved Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie were created based on his own loving relationship with a man. Of course, in the Newshub article, Saltzman back peddled a bit, but too late to quell the internet buzz, including on twitter.

Among other rumors was the idea that the two muppets were going to publicly come out as gay on the Sesame Street show and even get married.

Wait! What? On a television show made for pre-school age children?

Even the (in my opinion) left-leaning Snopes.com declared that rumor as false.

And yet, an opinion piece at Chron.com declares It matters that Bert and Ernie are a happy gay couple, and here’s why. Here’s the core of the article by Nora Reed:

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