Lizards, Rhinos, and Waffling

That’s me, but the critter on my shoulder is not Leine, the star of my last novel, A Different Dragon Entirely. 

Smaug is the critter’s name, and Smaug hales from Australia and belongs to my grand-nephew Archer.  Smaug is not a Texas horny toad as Leine is, he’s longer and has no horns at all on head or torso. He can scuttle with great exuberance across the carpet, and he does cling with authority to one’s shoulder with his spatula-type feet and claws. He has holes in the side of head, which I suppose are ears. But he doesn’t squirt blood from his eyes to deter predators like Texas horny toads do, and he certainly isn’t cabin-size and able to float and fly like Leine. And as much as I tried to commune with Smaug via telepathic Latin, I never got so much as a grunt from him/her.

For all those differences, I found Smaug to be a delightful faux-Leine during our weekend visit to Archer’s house. Archer is named Archer because his parents are both nuts for fantasy books, a genre in which a good archer is pretty much required for any company of main characters who take on all sorts of beasties. So, we have a teenage Archer in our McBride clan now, and Archer has his own mini-dragon named Smaug. I don’t know if Archer can handle a bow and launch an arrow that will take out the eye of a charging warg, but he beat me in a chess game when he was ten, and was on his school’s chess team.

Since this post started with a lizard named Smaug, Part 2 features a nameless two-headed rhino I found on the internet.

 I showed this one to four-year-old grandson Jackson who couldn’t wrap his head around it until I used two of his identical toy woolly mammoths to demonstrate the illusion of a big critter who doesn’t seem to know if he’s coming or going.

Not knowing if one is coming or going is one of the norms of modern life in which we all face too many demands, too many choices, and too many magical electronic gizmos we call ‘devices’ these days.

‘Which way to go’ was also a decision made every day for a few months for the three ranking Confederate generals in Louisiana in the spring of 1864. That’s where my company of main characters (who are archerless) find themselves in With Might & Main. They are marched hither and yon, all over much of Louisiana for weeks, as the Confederate brain trust grapples with how to stop an invading Union army that is three or four times its size and supported by a strong fleet of river-born ironclad gunships.

The climax of With Might & Main reflects the surprising historical outcome of those Rebel generals’ dilemma. Rather it will, as soon as I quit acting like a two-headed rhino and make my own final charge to get the climax written.

 I tend to waffle when it comes to letting my fingers on the keyboard finally decide which of my beloved characters needs to die in battle.

I hope August starts well for you, and I get down to business and finish WM&M before Labor Day.