Once All The Roads Were Satin

Once all the roads were satin. Highways of red and purple fabric stretched from here to far past where your Aunt Margaret's home is now. This was a long time ago, when your grandparents were still young. You could walk barefoot then, because the roads were soft. Not like now. Walking to school was a pleasure. The roads were beautiful; they would shine in the morning, reflecting the new day's light.

Then the automobiles came. They traveled on the roads too. They were too rough on the roads. Their hard rubber tires tore holes in the soft fabric.

Every Tuesday evening the whole town would go to the streets with needle and thread and repair the holes. Nobody minded the work at first. It was fun, and the roads needed fixing and the automobiles needed roads. But each week there were more and more holes. Too many holes to sew closed on one evening. People started to sew and patch the roads on Wednesday evenings as well. Then Thursday's. Before long people were working on the roads every night of the week. Soon there too many repairs to be made each week and the roads fell into disrepair. Eventually nothing was left of the roads but ragged shreds. Then there were no roads.

The automobiles found life difficult without roads. They wanted replacements. A stronger fabric was needed, so roads of linen were made. But the same thing happened. The automobiles destroyed the linen roads. Then they mourned their loss.

The automobiles demanded new roads but there was no fabric strong enough with which to make them. Trails of stone and tar were laid down where the roads once were. Walking on the stone hurt people's feet. Everyone had to wear shoes. This sacrifice was made so that the automobiles would be happy. Were the automobiles happy? No. The automobiles wanted roads of velvet.

What To Do With Arms While Walking

H didn't know what to do with his arms while walking. He wanted to leave them straight by his side. But he had seen other people do the same and they looked awkward and uncomfortable.

H tried to casually swing his arms with his steps as those around him did. But he worried about people seeing through his attempt at walking naturally and calling him out as an impostor.

He wanted to fold his arms in front of him, or dig his hands into his pockets. But C once gave out to him about his body language for being too cold and “stand-offish”, so he didn't want to do that.

He decided to put his arms behind him and clasp his right wrist with his left hand, just at the small of his back. H walked comfortably in this fashion for several paces. He then worried that walking like this could appear old-fashioned and eccentric.

By this stage H had reached the store. He bought something to hold for the way back.

From There To Here By Water

Dublin was grey so H decided to leave. He followed the Tolka River to Dunshaughlin and then the Boyne to the Bog of Allen. The Brosna took him to Lough Derg and the Shannon and her estuary plopped him into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Atlantic Ocean is easily crossed if one takes a run at it, so H soon found himself at the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. After resting for the night at Grosse Isle he followed Saint Lawrence to the lakes Ontario and Erie.

The Grand River flows roughly North to South. This pleased H so he walked her banks until he got a hole in his shoe. In New Berlin H found a job as an apprentice baker, using part of his wage to pay the cobbler. Liking his work and being tired from two days walking, H stayed put to complete his training.

The Major Problem Facing Contemporary Children's Literature

Of the many obstacles facing writers the most cumbersome and ill dealt with is the fact that all children are British upper-class and from the first half of the 20th century. This problem can of course be circumnavigated by not including any children in the story, as has been effectively mastered by many writers. Unfortunately often a writer would want a character a child can relate to and it is well documented that children relate well to children. Thus many authors wish to include children in their stories. In fact it is commonly desirable to have a children as the main characters. How to achieve this has been tackled in several ways in contemporary children's literature. Here we will discuss the pros and cons of the two most common approaches before recommending a third, less common, approach. There are other ways around the problem other than those discussed here but most are basically variants or combinations of the ways we will mention.

If the author happens to be of the same circumstance then this is all well and good. However, most writers these days are not. Some are British; a lot are upper-class and a handful are living in the first half of the 20th century, but the combination of all three is becoming increasingly rare.

The most common way to include children as principle characters in a book is to set the tale in early 20th century Britain and/or her adjoining fantasy worlds. This approach approach has the advantage of having everyone in their right place. You have people from early 20th century Britain in early 20th century Britain; the places and settings match up with the characters and events.

There is however one major flaw in this for the contemporary author. If one is to write a book for public consumption it ought to be worth reading. Otherwise the whole venture will be a commercial failure. Now, if a tale set in the first half of the 20th century is worth telling and worth reading then surely we would have heard it by now. Surely someone, a great author or a hack, would have bothered themselves to commit an account of the events to print. The modern child is sophisticated, more so than many writers give them credit for. They are well schooled in the rules of literature and know what is expected of them. They will gladly suspend their disbelief to any height for a skilled and considerate author. But what writer, no matter how adept at her craft, can expect to find an audience today who will accept that novel events she claims happened one hundred years ago have managed to go unheard of until now? Is the reader expected to believe that there is some sort of organization keeping yarns from the aforementioned time period under wraps and releasing them intermittently at their haphazard and perhaps sinister whim? I think that anyone who relies on this conspiracy theory thinks too little of their audience. Their sherry and port binges have left them scarred and out of touch with the book buying child.

The next most popular option is to set the tale in modern times and our respective adjoining fantasy worlds. This immediately removes the problem of ludicrous conspiracy theories but simultaneously introduces fresh problems. Why does our working class Canadian heroine address her friends as “chums”? Why is our young hero working in the fields in South East Asia dressed in a Public School uniform? Why are our band of young Norwegian vagabonds being evacuated from London when they live in Bergen and London is under no immediate threat? These are the types of questions on the mind of the reader of books in the Modern Day Movement. Such thoughts and questions distract the reader from the narrative and cause disinterest. Why should the reader care if Hattie recaptures the Goat of Power if they don't even believe that Hattie, naturally an upper class British girl from the first half of the 20th century, would have any reason to be in present day Udmutia where she discovered the portal to the savage yet charming fantasy world of Pooltakan? The intelligent child is bored or angry from the start and the author only manages to carry the truly stupid to the end, where no doubt we learn that there is a Goat of Power inside all of us or something inane like that. Of the many authors that have attempted this style of story very few have managed to create anything that even comes close to being worth reading.

The third approach is overlooked by all but the most intrepid of our modern children's writers. It is quite simple really. To overcome the issue having people from the first half of the last century in times and places they don't belong, set the story in the first half of last century. To overcome the issue that all stories from then would have been told by now, retell an old story. To put it simply, rewrite an already written book. The amount the author wants to change the style or order of the narrative is of little interest as long as they are telling us essentially the same story that has already been told. The way children's books are written needs to change, and this is the way it needs to change.