Bats!
The October Chickadee magazine is out, and the Daisy Dreamer story of the month features a house decorated super-creepy for Halloween, and our heroine turning into a bat.
I was going to have her turn into a vampire bat, because, you know, they suck blood and stuff. And because Daisy was dressed up as a vampire for Halloween. But vampire bats really aren't very scary (they suck tiny amounts of blood) and they are really, really small. So we just had her turn into a bat instead -- we don't say what kind.
Cool bat story: This summer, my family was camping at Five Islands Provincial Park in Nova Scotia. Sometimes at night you can see thousands of bats flying there. They come up out of holes in the cliffs, where they sleep.
Well, one little bat had decided to sleep clinging to the brick wall of the bathroom building instead. There he was, hanging upside down, little head visible below the wings wrapped around him. Everyone would stop and look on the way into the bathroom. He stayed there for two days, and then he was gone. I've never had a chance to see a bat up-close like that before, and it was wonderful.
Labels: Chickadee, Daisy Dreamer, Neat stuff
Wolf Howling in Algonquin Park
The September Daisy Dreamer story in Chickadee magazine has Daisy and her pals in Algonquin Park (that's in Ontario) howling like wolves!
Algonquin Park has a wolf howling program. People meet up, learn how to howl, then howl as loud as they can. The wolves will often howl back. Pretty neat, I think.
Sometimes Daisy Dreamer stories take place in locations that aren't real. It's just a town, or a beach. But I like it when we can put her in a real place -- like when she was at the Ryoanji Garden in Japan, or on a whale cruise near Brier Island, in Nova Scotia, or at Mystery Creek Cave, in Tasmania.
The trouble with real places is that you have to make sure the story matches the place. Or you should try to. It doesn't always. In the Algonquin Park story, Daisy is in a small group of friends walking through the woods and howling like wolves. In reality, hundreds of people turn up for wolf howls in the park, and they don't go walking through the woods at night. Sometimes you have to change reality for the sake of a good story.
Labels: Chickadee, Daisy Dreamer