THIS WAS MORE OR less the story I’d been telling Oggie ever since we moved out of Ansley Park.
Nothing was written down yet. I was just making it up as we went along.
It took me a few months to get to this point of Amory and Alphonse deciding to visit the Mysterious Mole People. Not because I think slow or anything. I always knew where I was headed, down into the Mysterious Mole People’s kingdom. I just wasn’t in a big hurry to get there.
That’s a trick you learn when you start making up stories for people. It’s better to travel around a little to drive up the suspense, hang out in different places, give your characters a few tight situations before getting into the main story.
You might want to have them associate with some bad types, or almost die a few times. The main plot is important, but if everything gets over too fast, people are disappointed. They expect some adventures along the way to kind of whet their appetites for the real fireworks later.
Well, I’ve got to say Oggie fell for everything. He got completely hooked on Amory and Alphonse’s adventures. He was crazy about the Mysterious Mole People and desperate to get down to their underworld kingdom. And he was always pestering me to tell him more. I wouldn’t give him the story every day though. I’d save it for times when things were out of whack, usually around his bedtime after he’d had a bad day.
“WHAT if Amory and Alphonse GET KILT? HOW are they going to escape THIS TIME?” Oggie would screech whenever I quit for the night, usually with Amory and Alphonse on their last gasp, going over a giant waterfall on a snowboard or something. Oggie would look pretty worried.
He wasn’t really worried, though, not the way he worried about real stuff, like Mom and Dad splitting up. He knew Amory and Alphonse would probably make it somehow. He’d get into bed and lie down to think about them. Five minutes later, he’d be asleep.
“I don’t know how you do it. What story are you telling him?” Mom would ask me when I came back downstairs. She was pretty much in awe that I could put Oggie to sleep like that.
I never let on about The Mysterious Mole People, though. I’d shrug and say I wasn’t telling him anything special. That story was like a secret pact between Oggie and me. We kind of needed it to hold on to. We were afraid if we told anybody, they might say something that would wreck it for us.