His Dogness

Garnet and I have a book out now called “The Wonderful World of Sparkle Girl and Doobins.” The book has five stories with the same characters.

Along with Sparkle Girl and Doobins, there’s their mother, Garnet, and such characters as Mr. Chundy, who runs the Magic Mart across the street from their house, and Jerome, a giraffe that drives a convertible.

Whenever the children go for a ride with Jerome, they end up in some other land. It might have marshmallows that grow on trees or mountains made out of ice.

At Mr. Chundy’s Magic Mart, you can order regular or magic versions of milk or house paint or most anything else you might need. With the magic versions, you have no control over what happens, which is part of what makes it fun.

The stories grew out of stories that I made up on the fly for the kids at bedtime.

When I would make up a story for Sparkle Girl and Doobins, I would let each of them tell me one or two things that they wanted to include in the story. One night it might be a dolphin and a fairy. Another night it might be a chocolate doughnut and an orange.

To that, I would add elements from the day, elements from the things swirling around in my head, elements from who-knows-where? and see what happened.

One thing I have been carrying around in my imagination for years began with a story I wrote for the newspaper about a woman who fixed Sunday dinner every week for her grown children and her grandchildren and anyone else they invited that day.

On any given Sunday, she might have 25 to 50 people in her house.

In talking with her, it was clear fixing Sunday dinner was done with a lot of love and brought her an immense amount of satisfaction.

Somewhere along the way, I started imagining the invisible light of love shooting out of her house while she worked. As I go about my day-to-day, I sometimes imagine that invisible coming out of other places, too.

So, for stories that I made up for the kids, it was natural to invent “sunglasses” that would enable you to see love’s otherwise invisible light.

Mr. Chundy’s special Magic Ice comes from real life, too. One day, it was just me and the kids. We had run out of things to do. I asked them if they were interested in smashing some ice in the street.

They thought it was a great idea. It turned out to be heaps of fun. We started doing it regularly. From there, we started imagining magical things appearing when we smashed the ice.

With the stories made up as we went along, it would sometimes be a struggle to get to the end. Sometimes, we would get to the end, and I would look back in satisfaction at how things had turned out.

Those stories, I would hold onto. I would write them down later, and, with Sparkle Girl and Garnet’s help, work on them some more.

Garnet spent hours and hours and hours drawing pictures to go five of those stories and now we have a book.