The Word Begins Again
(How an unintended sequel began… )

After finishing “Magic Will Find You,” my first thoughts were not about writing something else. Certainly not what I was going to write next in my Fraggle saga. I knew what would come next, but there was no hurry to begin writing the remaining stories just yet. However, time has a way of reminding you of loose ends. They begin to gnaw away at your certainty of a job properly finished. So it was that after a month or so, I began to realize that “Magic” ends at a moment that begins the very next day, when Darl wakes for the first time in Fraggle Rock, and realizes the enormity of where he is, what he had done, and how he is to pursue the rest of his life. It is the story of a Silly Creature’s first day in an entirely new life.

When I began writing, I thought it would be a fairly short piece – perhaps 7-or-8 thousand words. Little did I know that it would bulk out at over 18,500! To be honest, I didn’t even know where it would go, only what ground I needed to cover in the middle. How I would get there was also a bit of a mystery. So I just kept writing, dealing with unanswered questions when I came to them, and by some magic found the answers when I needed them.

Magic was the word. Magic was the McGuffin that organized all the points that that I needed to cover along the way, motivated the actions of my characters, and validated an ending that hopefully wasn’t expected by the reader. (Although I clearly foreshadowed it.)

At issue in “The World Begins Again” is that the first story barely introduces Darl to Fraggle Rock, and his first sight of other Fraggles (other than Kiki) was fleeting. The next story that I had written is set some weeks later, when Darl already knows Gobo and the others. How could I have overlooked Darl’s proper introduction to new friends and a new world? The matter couldn’t be resolved with a few “how’d ya dos.” Darl knew absolutely nothing about The Rock, and had to be shown how to wash his feet when he came home and what things not to touch, or risk breaking out in itchy blotches. There was a long list of issues that I had to explain in a manner that wasn’t too didactic, and those issues had to be covered in a way that wouldn’t waste too many words. Nor could it end simply because I had no more to say. There had to be some point to all this – what had Darl learned and how had he adapted this new world?

It also had to be interesting, or who would read it?

As usual, I’m grateful to my friend Walt Wentz, who like any good soldier stood his ground by proofreading all 18,500 words of “The World Begins Again” in record time. More than correcting my abominable habits of sprinkling punctuation haphazardly around the text, he was also a source of useable suggestions. If he thought a little more description was desirable, or that clarification of an idea was needed, he was almost always correct, and I would steal the suggestion shamelessly. I rarely disregard his advice.