Blueberry pancakes all around! It's Stomp's one-year anniversary.
A fine excuse for woodland debauchery and sasquatch robbery.
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“Why do I only get one cupcake? I’m 280 years old. Shouldn’t I get 280 cupcakes?”
Stomp Freedomfoot—seven feet of buckskin-garmented smuggler ‘squatch—sits at a cabin dining table with a—let’s be real, it’s not a cupcake. It’s a cake the size of a Christmas ham.
“It’s my me anniversary, not your you anniversary. It’s not your birthday. It’s the one-year anniversary of the stories.”
“Right, but it’s my stories, so gimme 280 cupcakes.”
“You have one in front of you and it’s the size of a ham.”
“Mmm. Ham cupcakes. With ham icing. Just a brick of ham with chocolate with ham mixed with chocolate mixed with ham. Delicious.”
“Please stop making words happen. Why don’t you go play in the mountains or rob blind ladies or whatever it is you do when I’m not writing you?”
SNFT.
“What the f—what did you just blow out of your nose?”
“A catty pillar.”
“Why is there a caterpillar in your nose? Does that caterpillar have a suitcase?”
A black and orange caterpillar, incensed with caterpillar rage, squeaked incessantly as it dragged a suitcase across the dining table.
“My tenant didn’t pay. He had to go.”
“Your tenant?”
“I’m subletting.”
The caterpillar scrunched up on its hind 40 legs and screeched at Stomp.
“I told you—no pets. My nostrils can’t handle the dander.”
A baby aphid peeked its alien head out of the caterpillar’s fur and gave Stomp the finger.
“I’m sorry, baby aphid. I’m sorry, baby caterpillar. The market is mean right now, isn’t it?”
Stomp dipped his head and sniffed the chocolate iced—it’s a cake. But it smells like a ham covered in chocolate. I’m so confused. I didn’t bake it.
Stomp looks at me: “Don’t ask questions.”
It is one year since I started publishing Stomp Roams. We’ve seen Paul Revere pee-pee his britches in 1775 and smuggled unicorns in a beer truck on the I-5 in present day. Getting held down and shaved by orphans along the Appalachian Trail. Solving the murders of mice serial killers in Central Pennsylvania.
Writing is synchronistic—as much as one tries to turn all of their creative amplifiers inward and immerse themselves in their own private room of expression, you’re never purely writing for yourself—the writing is not fulfilled until eyes have been on it, like a seed bursting in its shell that does not know solace until it finds light.
Some writers write with creative gigantism—they must expand exponentially forever, gathering subscribers like Pogs in 1995, until they’ve forgotten the joy of it. The work is a churn, designed to reach an amorphous destination only known as “growth.”
Some writers develop an intricate system of tunnels. They dig inward. They burrow in the soil and dig around in roots and earthworms, sniffing the moist earth, tossing shovelfuls of it back out onto the surface. A stratum of self-discovery.
Me? Well, I serve a different purpose.
For who will write to advocate for the beloved owlpig, the downy hoofed creature of the underloam, scratching about for grubs, swarming together in alarm at the slightest drop of a nut and wheeling, stampeding through the meadows with gruff oinks, hunted so cruelly for their delicious tail meat?
Who will write for the glorious Eastern Piebald Unicorn, speckled in soft matte browns and white, with their echoed trumpets rippling across mountains in tremolo, and their pale moondust shed in the soil and scraped up by prospectors to sell for $11.99 in vials at flea market vape shops?
Who will write for the North American Sasquatch, living in junkyards and scrabbaging among filth for candy wrappers with a bit of melted maggoty chocolate remaining inside, as they roam the wilderness and all the creatures of the wood yell, “Stinkprowler! Stinkprowler!,” as they are hunted for their fur oils and fangs, as they rob indiscriminately, as they howl in the pain of their heartbreaks, and their buckskin pants are worn with the scent of urine and musk, hot and dank like a wood ox in heat—
“Hey, that’s not nice.”
Stomp looks up from his chocolate ham cake.
“Sorry, Stomp. I’m feeling provocative. Please let me finish my monologue.”
“Really unnecessary. You didn’t have to say the heartbreak thing.”
“Shush, please.”
I love to cause laughter. In myself and others. The endorphin hit is like wriggling glowworms that burrow into all limbs and climb up into the foliage, where they dissolve into a fine filament web of light that ripples out through the branches that live in my eyes.
I am glad that you are here to enjoy this world. I want to show that loss can be shared. That creating means safety. That living in an eternal state of childlike curiosity and playfulness is the only way I want to adult.
Many of you are new. I’ve compiled a few frequently used pieces of this world into the Stomp Roams glossary. If you’d like a story recommendation, I take you back to a time in Maine in 1931, as a lonely sasquatch turned turnips with his plow moose Barry, and found himself guardian of 11 feral orphans who showed him it’s okay to feel things again. This was the first Stomp story to ever see daylight, and some darkness too.
I have a story in the works. I’m going to try something new and release it in four pieces over four weeks. For now, I go back to work.
“Stomp, what do you want to do for the rest of the day?”
He gazes out the window into a blare of verdant greens speckled with the robin’s egg blue of a June sky completely at rest. The chipmunks are munking, the wood trolls are trolling, the caterpillars are—um—searching for a new nose to sublet.
He breathes in and sighs.
“Let’s go play in the woods.”
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How deep into this world do you want to go? Read Stomp’s last adventure, Stomp Bigfoot saves Dan Boone and robs trains with James, a historical fiction tale from the Cumberland Gap in 1770 to Dodge City in 1871, about a young juggling sasquatch who will run mountains to find his family.
I cannot express how much joy these stories bring to me! I love being made to laugh out loud whilst reading truly witty, creative, thoughtful words.