Today we celebrate the publications of one of the best, most popular American children’s fantasy books: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Picture this, dear reader: it’s May 24, 1900, and the world’s about to get a swift kick in its Victorian teeth. L. Frank Baum, some nutty scribbler with a penchant for the surreal, drops The Wonderful Wizard of Oz onto the shelves like a flaming bag of dream-dust, and—boom—the American frontier just got a whole lot weirder. Unlike traditional fairy tales, this is a full-throttle, technicolor fever dream, a book that grabs the prissy norms of its day by the collar and spits in their eye with a cackle.

Baum’s got guts, I’ll give him that. More than just writing a kids’ book—he’s smuggling dynamite into the nursery. His protagonist, Dorothy, isn’t some wilting damsel waiting for a prince to save her from the vapors. Hell no. She’s a Kansas-born badass, navigating a world so strange it makes your average opium den look like a Sunday picnic. She’s got courage, sure, but it’s the kind that’s forged in grit and desperation, not the polished heroism of those stuffy Victorian penny-dreadfuls. Baum’s playing a different game, blending fantasy with a fierce, unapologetic femininity that’d make the corset-clad moralists of the era clutch their pearls and faint dead away.

And let’s talk about the world he builds—Oz, a place so vivid you can practically smell the emerald ozone. It’s a kaleidoscope of wonder and menace, where scarecrows talk, lions whimper, and a wizard’s just a conman with a hot-air balloon. Baum’s storytelling doesn’t mess around; it’s got the raw, pulsating energy of a carnival barker who’s three sheets to the wind but still knows how to work a crowd. He doesn’t coddle you with moral lessons—though, sure, there’s some lip service to resilience and heart and brains. But what Baum’s really doing is handing you a pair of ruby slippers and saying, “Go figure it out, kid.” And it’s that sort of thing, dear reader, that spawns a franchise still kicking 125 years later.

Let’s not kid ourselves: those ruby slippers (silver in the book, but we’ll let Hollywood have its glittery rewrite) aren’t just footwear. They’re a mythos, a symbol of defiance and magic that’s outlasted empires. With this book, Baum lit a fuse. And on that fateful day in 1900, the explosion started a wildfire we’re still dancing in. So raise a glass to the man who gave us Oz, where the yellow brick road leads straight to the edge of sanity, and the only way out is through.

I am significantly behind schedule in book production, but I’m going to be working overtime to get back on track.  I’m being contacted by an almost inordinate number of folks about marketing and publicity for either book.  This herd needs to be culled, but I’m already too busy to bother with that, so I’m hoping by laying out a couple of truths, a significant self-winnowing might occur.  To that end, here we go:

1. If you have your “preferred pronouns” in your signature block or bio, I’m not working with you.  Not a chance.  You might as well put at the top of your email, in bold, red letters: “I don’t even understand elementary English grammar.”  Because either you are truly ignorant on how the various parts of speech work, or you do know how pronouns work, but you’re so spineless and weak that tossed the rules of grammar out of your little apartment window because you instantly buckle to pressure from The Herd.  Either way, I can’t respect you, and, thus, you have no place on my team.
2. I will not be speaking to or sitting for interviews with any corporate media outlets.  Not their American offices, not their Australian offices, not their British offices, none of them.  None.  Not one.   They blew their credibility out with me years ago and I have nothing but the deepest contempt for each of them.  Now that the extent of their egregious lies are starting to come into public view…all the deliberate deception around Covid, it’s origin, the efficacy and associated dangers of the vax…now the blatant and treasonous cover-up of a president who was quite obviously an absolute idiot with dementia before he even took the Oath, of whomever was actually running the country and using the autopen…and the myriad “smaller” cover-ups they have knowingly and actively participated in…I find it all disgusting, and what little credibility corporate media ever had is now circling the drain and I hope will be completely flushed away soon.

In other writing news, I’ve decided tonight is the night: a marathon viewing and review of the entire Human Centipede Trilogy.  Might as well get this over with.  Wish me luck.

N.P.: “I Wanna Be” – Fluke