Christmas Carol: A Short Story - Part XXXVII

Entry posted by DZ-Jay January 5, 2019

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To fly ... or to boat ...? That's a question I have now, based on a dear friend's suggestion.

She points out that a boat is too slow, so that perhaps the Evil Snowman could use a different mode of transportation to escape from the North Pole with his loot. My first reaction to this was ... hmm ... does it really matter?

I mean, it is fantasy after all, and we've somewhat established (via an introductory letter to the reader) that "elf time" runs parallel to, but at a different scale than, "real time"; which allows an entire adventure to transpire in the span of a single night.

Even my wife, when I mentioned it to her, responded with, "wait? was there a boat?" Which suggests that the detail was so insignificant within the scope of the story that perhaps it doesn't even warrant a distinct memory.

But when I asked my friend for suggestions on alternative modes of travel, her response was "I don't know, a Zeppelin maybe (that seems cool)?" -- and that just blew my mind!

A Zeppelin does indeed seem very cool. Now that I have that bug in my head, I can't picture the Snowman's escape in any other way. The problem is that, replacing the word "boat" with "Zeppelin," seems insufficient. What used to be merely an expeditious way to get the Snowman from one point to another, now sounds like it should be an action sequence in itself -- or at least a bit more interesting than the simple single sentence it now encompasses. That means a bit of re-writing and expanding that passage.

Still ... a Zeppelin.

And just to give you an idea why I find this notion so interesting, consider that when I think Zeppelin, I don't mean this:

I mean this:

or this:

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or this:

I can definitely picture the crafty Evil Snowman escaping in one of those. Wouldn't it be be cool if he did?

I think so.

See ya'
-dZ.

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DZ-Jay 8,171

Posted January 6, 2019

I have decided: the Evil Snowman escaped on a Zeppelin. It's a fact. Apparently it was like that all along and I just mistook the flying Zeppelin with a boat, silly me. :grin:

I won't make too many changes. Right now, the "boat sequence" is not a sequence at all -- it is Carol telling Santa how she tracked the Snowman's escape and pointed out that he took a boat from the coast, across the Arctic Ocean, and landed somewhere in the northern coasts of Asia. That's it. That's the whole scene, two sentences.

Well, Carol needs some prescription glasses because what she really saw was the Snowman hopping on a Zeppelin moored at the harbor, soaring away with the winds across the ocean, and then forced to land somewhere in Central Asia due to some violent crosswinds.