Gome World

Wullie Comes to Life... at High Lakes Elementary in Bend, Oregon.

One of the most exciting things for any author is to see his or her creation come to life in the minds of the readers.  I have had Wullie-The-Mahaar-Gome in my imagination for over forty years!  I have written about him in seven books now and have many new adventures planned for him.  But it is when I see what my young readers think of him that he really comes to life for me.  Ms. Storey's Talented and Gifted third and fourth graders gave me several versions of how they see Wullie in his petrified form and in his "alive" form.  Here are a few of those:

   

     

There are also some great pictures of Wullie jumping off high shelves and bookcases onto piles of dirty laundry in Finn's bedroom.  Here are two of my favorites:  

One of the kids also did a great job of making a comic strip with lots of scenes from the book in one picture.  In this you can see Wullie in Finn's bedroom on a bookcase, on the window sill of his bedroom, being washed in the boys bathroom at the Magnolia Academy of Arts and Sciences and also sitting on Finn's shoulder as Finn and Hadley walk to school:  

One of my absolute favorite pictures from Ms. Storey's class is one that shows Wullie sitting outside Finn's bedroom window as he is described at the end of Chapter 5 on page 36 of The Rusty Pelican, smoking his smelly pipe of cowdie and looking out at the waters of Elliott Bay by the night sky.

  So as Wullie-The-Mahaar-Gome looked out over Elliott Bay from a high window ledge in Magnolia Finnley James Murray McDougall lay back on his pillow and fought back waves of sleepiness.  The tiny man was silhouetted by the moon, the smoke from his pipe curling up into the night sky.  This had been the strangest day in Finn's young life.  It was like a dream. He just hoped it wouldn't all be gone in the morning.

Wullie's colorful language

Wullie has lived for a very long time.  He has been used as a paperweight in many studies and libraries.  In all of this time he has read widely and listened carefully. He speaks many languages fluently, both gome and human languages, including English.  So he can make himself be undestood whenever he wants to.  But when he gets particularly grumpy, bad-tempered, and exasperated, his rough Scottish roots come out with an increased smattering of Scots slang.  He is particularly fond of colorful Scottish insults (of which there are many to choose from).  When a pompous bureaucratic gome asks him if he is a friend of "Lord Bluebeard," Wullie's temper explodes:

"That snottery, weasel-blawn, glumshy, tatterwallop's nae nobleman... I wouldnae gae that wraikful, wansonsy, ramstougerous, mowdiewort the time o' day.  I'd be happy tae see his big black bum sittin' on a good coal fire, so I would!"

Even without knowing what these words mean you get a sense that they are not exactly complimentary to Bluebeard!  Someone who is snottery has a lot of nasal mucous hanging out of their nose.  If you are weasel-blawn it means you look unpleasant and ill-natured as if affected by the bite, or breath of a weasel.  To be glumshy is to be sulky or sour-looking, and a mowdiewort is a Scottish mole (a small, brown, furry, burrowing creature with poor eyesight) but can also mean a sneaking, underhanded, slow-witted, and underhanded person.  To be wraikful is to be vengeful and destructive.  A wansonsy person is mischievous and treacherous.  My personal favorite is ramstougerous, since it just makes you feel better to say it out loud a few times.  A ramstougerous person is rough, boisterous and disorderly.  If they are also a tatterwallop it means they are dressed in scruffy rags.

If you are interested in learning more about the wonderful and colorful Scots language you can obvioulsy consult your nearest copy of Munro, see http://gomeworld.typepad.com/gome_world/munros_scottishenglish_dictionary/index.html

and if that is not easily available then you could go to the website of The Scots Magazine, at www.scotsmagazine.com and clink on wirds.

Don't include the "n"... or else!

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the astonishing lives and amazing history of gomes it is easy to see how they might get them confused and mixed up in their mind with things as trivial and silly as garden gnomes.  After all, if you asked someone to describe a garden gnome they might say, "It is a small, cute-looking, humanish kind of thing made out of plaster or rock."  Actually, the person might replace the phrase "cute-looking" with "tacky" or "ridiculous," or "stupid," and, hopefully, they would not use a word like "humanish," since it is not a real word at all... but, even so, the point is this.  If you asked someone like Finnley McDougall or Hadley Kobayashi, someone very familiar with gomes, to describe what a gome looked like they might well say, "It is a small, cute-looking, humanish kind of a rock-sort-of-a-thing."  Well, with the possible exception of Wullie, I wouldn't describe many gomes as being "cute-looking."  "Weird," "scary," or down right "ugly," yes, but "cute-looking," no.

But, whatever you do, do NOT compare gomes to garden gnomes in the presence of a gome, or you will, as Finn quickly found out, be pelted with rocks or clumps of slimy moss by the angry and disgruntled gome.

It is hard to blame the gome.  First of all, they are rude and bad-tempered by nature, some being worse than others, in that regard.  Secondly, gomes have roamed our planet for many thousands of years longer than humans have.  The fact that certain deranged human beings find it amusing to place ugly little statues holding fishing poles, or bagpipes, among the flowers in their garden is baffling to most gomes.  And insulting.  As far as gomes are concerned, garden gnomes don't even make good petraglifs!  How many people do you know really LOVE their garden gnomes?  How many people really bond to them or have an emotional attachment to a garden gnome?  Exactly!  NOT many!  When gomes arrange things so that a garden gnome gets broken, and when they grind it up to divine its inner value, what do they find?  Not much.  They may find traces of amusement or happiness along with larger quantities of ridicule or revulsion, but mostly they just find... nothing.  So you can see why most gomes are insulted by the idea of being compared to garden gnomes.

So as you read these scruffy, rude, bad-tempered stories about gomes I would like to know what they look like in your imagination.  What do you think Wullie-The-Mahaar-Gome looks like?  Let me give you a big hint... he does NOT look like this:

What do you think he looks like? You can see the drawings that the kids in Ms. Storey's class did. Here is a sketch of what I think he might be like sitting on Finn's window sill being grumpy:

Small Packages

It is sometimes said that "the best presents come in small packages."  The examples that people use often include diamond rings, or i-Pods, and the like.  Certainly, the small package that Great Uncle Hugh McDougall gave to Finn, when he visited Seattle, turned out to be the best present that Finn ever got.  Wullie-The-Mahaar-Gome may be on the small size, as gomes go, but he has a lot of talent, skills, and power that he hides inside that wee body.  He has used his small size to his advantage over the centuries.  He is small enough that he can be easily carried by a human; in a pocket, or standing on someone's shoulder.  He has spent years on end being used as a paperweight on the desks in the libraries of educated men and women.  When left alone Wullie made use of that time to learn from books.  He has a vast knowledge of history, science, art, literature, magic, medicine, folk lore and everything in between.

Wullie is a "very-special-Scottish-paperweight."  Very few educated people would use a big dirty hunk of rock, like Bluebeard, as a paperweight on their desk.  So, although he is strong and powerful in some ways, Bluebeard is about as well educated and as well read as... well... as a lump of coal.

Like many small people, Wullie has learned to be tough, and to stand up to bullies.  He is a perfect size to be thrown by humans.  He can petrify into a streamlined missile with a hard titanium pointy-head.  This way, with the help of a human companion, he can get to places much quicker than most gomes.  Most humans couldn't even lift Sandy or Big Tek!  Those gomes have to lumber slowly to wherever they want to go, and they can't get into so many small secret places as Wullie can.

We haven't seen half of Wullie's secret talents yet.  When Finn grabs him unexpectedly off a street in Edinburgh, Wullie stings Finn's hand as though Finn had grabbed a handful of nettles.

Wullie roared, "What dae ye think you're doing, ye glaikit wee neip heid!?  You could have been injured.  Never... EVER... sneak up on me.  Ye don't know what I'm capable of.  Now away you go and leave me alone.  I'm busy."