Yesterday’s quote from my fantasy novel The Wishing Map was warmly responded to. And I’m currently in the throes of editing the novelization of my feature film Healing River (to my editor’s satisfaction, I pray). And so I’ve re-posted the first serialized episode of the Wishing Map below for those who’ve never read it or would like to read it again. I’ll post the second tomorrow, with a link to the entire book. But enough intro–Let the adventure begin!
Preface
Bedtime is the time to stall. And asking for “a story” is the best way to do it. In response to such requests, many years ago I began improvising an ongoing story for my daughters about two princesses, who coincidentally happened to have the same names as them. They lived in a castle at the end of a cul-de-sac with Queen Mommy and King Daddy (hey, when you’re five-years-old this is great stuff). 
Their adventures at the end of the cul-de-sac continued until one night the Princesses stumbled upon a fantastical world accessible via a mysterious map. This was an immediate box office smash. From now on, my daughters insisted that all of their namesake adventures be “Wishing Map stories!”
The epic continued into their middle school years when King Daddy, who happened to be working in the movie biz, 
had an offer from another magical kingdom to pitch ideas for an animated series. The first thing he/I thought was, “The Wishing Map!” Calling it “a modern American Chronicles of Narnia,” the Disney folks were enchanted. I worked on the storyline and characters—the two leads having morphed into a brother and sister named Zack and Gina Dore—while illustrators created the concept art.
Everything was magical until one day some mid-level minions said, “Holy (bleep)! This is going to cost a ton-a-money!” In computer animation, the more settings and characters a show has, the more it costs. And The Wishing Map had scads of both. So the animated series was put on hold until its source (me) could create a book series that was successful enough to justify spending a (bleeping) ton-a-money!
Some years have passed. It took a while for this script writer to learn how to be a novelist. In the meantime the Disney offer cooled. Will it ever happen? Don’t know, don’t care. I fell in love with fiction writing! So I’ll keep on going either way.
Our journey begins here:
The Wishing Map
Prologue: The Unknown
“There’s magic in the world. And it’s waiting to be found.”
That was what Zack and Gina Dore’s Aunt Aloysia always said just before she left. She never told them what she meant. She never explained anything, ever. Never told them when she was coming, either. Just arrived, then left, a week later, an hour later, and never a word about when she’d be back. She was like one of those ultraviolet lights that lets you see things you didn’t know were there. When Aloysia was present you suddenly realized the world wasn’t the way you thought it was, and the things you thought you had control over, you didn’t. For example:
When Zack was seven years old, he noticed that the Centerburg Northern always took precisely eight minutes to pass Middleton. Always. So he’d come to think of Middleton as exactly eight minutes long. He’d taken comfort in this, secure in the fact that he lived in an eight minute long town. Then one day, right after one of Aunt Aloysia’s visits, the train hurtled past in four minutes.
Impossible. How did Middleton get to be four minutes long? It bugged him, really bugged him. If Middleton could change, what else could? Would he wake up one day and find his dad turned into a hippopotamus? His house into a lake? His sister into a bowl of ice cream? (Well, some change can be good.) Of course, he was older now, and understood about things like rate and motion. Still, he’d never felt quite as certain about anything since then. After all, if time and distance weren’t fixed, what was?
Nothing. Because, like ants in the pantry, the uncontrollable, the unknown, will always find a way in.
Always.
And for the Dore family, the way in was Aunt Aloysia.
⇔ ⇔ ⇔
Thoughts: Is our concept of reality, like Zack’s “eight-minute-long town,” really all there is? Or is there magic in the world, magic that’s “waiting to be found?”
To read The Wishing Map 2, click here.
My Featured Blogger this week is River Dixon of The Stories In Between. I don’t know a lot about River, except that he lives in Arizona and writes short stories and poems (he’s authored seven published collections to date). The poem below approaches all-too-familiar territory: the pain of rejection. Sincere-but-amateurish love poems are legion. But that’s not River.
My first feature film as a writer-director, 
want to be perceived positively by people we don’t like. In short, we want everyone to like us. This of course leads us to present ourselves in ways that are inauthentic. This is a recipe for disaster. I am never happy when I pretend to be someone I am not. The birth of social media has put this pretending on steroids… We seem more interested in pretending to live interesting lives than actually living interesting lives. (Instead), we should see social media as a way to bring a positive message of hope to a realm filled with so much negativity and hopelessness.”
