Moss Whispers

While I’m setting everything up to publish the Jingle Book, I’ll keep working on the Hillock stories. If I can’t see the characters that I’m writing about, there are a few different ways I could go:

•I could just make them up! Since that’s what we do with most of Life: make up our own stories and interpretations of Everything! Actually, I already have quite a few characters: Slab, Claire the Cook, The Queen’s Cook, The Fairie of the Castle of the Heart, The One-Winged Bird, CritterSeahorse, The Artist, The Writer, Preena of Preena’s Spa,The Stone Mason, Twigs at Twilight, and a few more.
•I could look for clues: like the holes in the ground, the tiny tree frogs that hop right in front of my feet like they want to tell me something quick! and then hop away. After all, the earth is presenting us with mystery and drama moment by moment, we usually just don’t pay attention.
•I could look ‘within’ and see what voices come forth. There are so many things I’ve just learned about life while being the caretaker and the mosstender of the hillock.
•I could keep looking at less likely but more obvious possibilities for characters: trees, roots, rocks, the Hillock itself, a Map (of the Hillock or of some mission or to some treasure), the pond (reflections), birds! hmmm…birds!
•I could accept the fact that the characters are hidden, not visible by me, or that they no longer live there
•I could be the character!
•If the characters are no longer there, or are hidden, I still might need to have some way to know what they’re thinking….perhaps by ‘mail’ at the world postal box, or maps, or messages left in the bottle at the bottom of the old aqueduct, or by bird or worm messengers, or through sound? bells?
•If the setting is the character
•I could let the hillock be a microcommunity of our whole world and see how it plays out.
•And then there are all the visitors over the years that I’ve noticed down at the hillock. Box turtles, green snakes, black snakes, toads, tiny frogs, giant bullfrogs, snails, slugs, lizards, birds,
I’m open to other suggestions if anyone wants to comment! Thanks!