It turns out the reason nobody’s ever gotten magic to work is, magic only works for seven minutes each day.
And they’re not even consecutive minutes. A minute here, a minute there – you barely have time to recite an incantation to kick off a spell, or, more often than not, the minute’s over and you’ve only spoken two syllables of your final abracadabra, and the lost coins you hoped to magically gather from the schoolyard are still lost and show no signs of bestirring themselves to fill your empty, much-recycled lunch bag. So you have to wait for the next Magic Minute to roll around, and it might be hours away, and you might get interrupted, or mispronounce alakazam, and blow it all over again.
That’s the premise of my next book, What We Found in the Corn Maze and How It Saved a Dragon. The book has nothing to do with the kind of wizard pictured above. The wizard above, with his unique approach to the problem of crocodile storage, is just an image lifted from an old 19th-century magic-lantern slide, which is a source I tirelessly plunder whenever I’m in need of some public-domain eye candy. I’ve stuck another lantern-slide image below. Staring at it long enough should cause the bargain-basement Dumbledore to conjure a demon. Staring at it a little longer should banish the demon back to Bogeyland, and good riddance. (More on the upcoming book in the next post.)
And they’re not even consecutive minutes. A minute here, a minute there – you barely have time to recite an incantation to kick off a spell, or, more often than not, the minute’s over and you’ve only spoken two syllables of your final abracadabra, and the lost coins you hoped to magically gather from the schoolyard are still lost and show no signs of bestirring themselves to fill your empty, much-recycled lunch bag. So you have to wait for the next Magic Minute to roll around, and it might be hours away, and you might get interrupted, or mispronounce alakazam, and blow it all over again.
That’s the premise of my next book, What We Found in the Corn Maze and How It Saved a Dragon. The book has nothing to do with the kind of wizard pictured above. The wizard above, with his unique approach to the problem of crocodile storage, is just an image lifted from an old 19th-century magic-lantern slide, which is a source I tirelessly plunder whenever I’m in need of some public-domain eye candy. I’ve stuck another lantern-slide image below. Staring at it long enough should cause the bargain-basement Dumbledore to conjure a demon. Staring at it a little longer should banish the demon back to Bogeyland, and good riddance. (More on the upcoming book in the next post.)
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