Two More Oziana Short Stories

Last week’s posting about a mystery story in Oziana 2024 made me realize I’d never noted Oziana 2023, which contains two of my stories.

As I reported last week, I’ve been seeking inspiration for new stories from pairing two recurring characters in the Oz books, as L. Frank Baum did in his Little Wizard Stories of Oz.

“The Soldier with the Green Whiskers and the Guardian of the Gates” is a natural pairing: two officers of the Wizard’s Emerald City government who kept their posts under the Scarecrow and then Princess Ozma, working together as friends.

The Oziana 2023 stories, in contrast, pair characters who have little in common and start out at odds with each other.

“Button-Bright and the Professor” shows the small boy from Philadelphia and the highly educated Wogglebug quarreling over directions before they’re forced to deal with a giant riddle-loving pangolin. This story was illustrated by Marcus Mébes.

“Glinda and the Glass Cat” follows the transparent feline to the China Country, the Hammerheads, and the Fighting Trees while the powerful sorceress seeks to make her curb her willful instincts. Anna-Maria Cool supplied fun art for this tale, and for the magazine’s cover.

Like other recent issues of Oziana magazine, the 2023 collection is sold through Lulu.

A Mystery Tale from the Early Emerald City

Oziana is the International Wizard of Oz Club’s creative magazine for fiction and art inspired by the Oz books. It’s been published annually for about half a century now.

The latest issue, printed at the end of last year, includes my short story “The Soldier with the Green Whiskers and the Guardian of the Gates,” delightfully illustrated by Rob Lauer.

This story is set shortly after the end of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Wizard has flown away, leaving the Emerald City under the rule of the now-brainy Scarecrow. And then the Scarecrow departed to escort his friend Dorothy to the castle of Glinda the Good. So the soldier and the guardian are the highest-ranking officials in town when Winged Monkeys start tearing a hole in the city wall.

I wrote the first version of this story when I was in junior high or high school, but was never fully satisfied with it. A few years ago I realized that it fit into a couple of trends in my newer Oz writing:

• It was a mystery, and could be a better one.
• It paired two recurring characters, a form L. Frank Baum used in his Little Wizard Stories of Oz and which I’ve been using to springboard other tales.

I wrote the story again from scratch, hopefully better. At the time I didn’t have a copy of the first version. Since then I came across an old photocopy, but I haven’t dared to read it, lest it be so much worse or even a tiny bit better.

If you care to read “The Soldier with the Green Whiskers and the Guardian of the Gates,” plus six more stories about the early history of Oz, all illustrated, and a closing poem, please order Oziana 2024 from Lulu.

Discovering Lost Tales of Oz

Joe Bongiorno’s Royal Publisher of Oz releases its latest book today: the short-story anthology Lost Tales of Oz, featuring illustrations by the multiple-Eisner winning artist Eric Shanower. This volume contains eighteen stories—over 500 pages of new fiction in all—inspired by and adhering to the Oz book series.

One of those stories is a little piece by me called “Ojo and the Woozy.” For folks who haven’t read The Patchwork Girl of Oz, in the jacket art above Ojo is the boy dressed in Munchkin blue and frills near the left side, and the Woozy is the cubist blue creature at the far left.

In the same year that he released The Patchwork Girl of Oz, L. Frank Baum wrote six short books collectively titled Little Wizard Stories of Oz. Each was about two established characters, such as Dorothy and Toto, or Jack Pumpkinhead and the Sawhorse, having a brief adventure together.

Several years back, I set out to create a new story along those lines, using some pair of characters Baum didn’t get to. Ojo and the Woozy felt like a natural choice. In Baum’s seventh Oz book they travel together to the Emerald City. The Woozy is almost always calm, cheerful, and straightforward while Ojo is a moody fellow, so their personalities can play off each other.

My “Little Wizard” story ended up never leaving the vicinity of the Emerald City. The drama of Ojo and the Woozy’s adjustment to life there after having spent years in isolated forests was too interesting. As a result, this tale offers its heroes no greater challenge than being a shy new boy who doesn’t know how to play the local sports.

Which is, of course, a great challenge indeed. I may have given Ojo some of my own childhood experiences.

Lost Tales of Oz is available in hardcover and paperback via Lulu.

The Second Oz Series

When L. Frank Baum returned to the Oz series, he had left Dorothy and Ozma in a good place. Too good a place, in fact. Supposedly he wasn’t even able to contact them any more. Solving that problem (through the new technology of wireless) was less challenging, however, than coming up with a new fuel for stories about Oz now that Dorothy could live with her family in the Emerald City and Ozma could feel safe about Oz.

Furthermore, since Baum evidently now planned to keep writing Oz books as long as he could, he was no longer thinking ahead to a series end. He needed to keep his characters interesting, or come up with new ones.

With a story called “Little Dorothy and Toto” in The Little Wizard Stories of Oz (written for younger readers than the novels), Baum found a new unresolvable foundational conflict for Dorothy. Though she has a perfectly comfortable, safe home in the royal palace, she insists on wandering into the countryside and heading off on dangerous missions. In that story, the Wizard tries to cure Dorothy of this bad habit. It doesn’t work.

Thus, in The Magic of Oz, Dorothy’s idea of birthday shopping means going into a forest of wild beasts and asking to borrow a dozen monkeys. In Glinda of Oz she’s eager to go to the edge of Prof. Wogglebug’s map to get involved in a war. In The Patchwork Girl of Oz she invites herself on Ojo’s quest, and in Rinkitink in Oz she heads to the Nome Kingdom.

As for Ozma, she continues to be so kind-hearted that she has trouble governing. In Glinda of Oz, the title character advises her to stay out of the turmoil in one corner of Oz, and she insists on heading there anyway and telling her subjects they should be nice. In The Lost Princess of Oz she gets kidnapped, and Dorothy (of course) heads out to rescue her.

But for most of in his second series of Oz books, Baum had antagonists drive the plot, or found other young protagonists: Ojo, Betsy, Trot, Button-Bright, Inga, and Woot. Most of those new kids didn’t hold up for more than one adventure because they didn’t have unresolvable foundational conflicts. Once Inga rescues his parents, or Betsy finds a home, there’s nothing left for their characters to do.

The two young characters who play important, distinct roles in more than one of Baum’s novels came with foundational conflicts that continued to drive them into adventures. Trot is little, but curious and just as brave as Dorothy. Button-Bright gets lost whether he means to or not. If either of those sources of conflict ever disappeared, so would their stories. Like Dorothy and Ozma, Trot and Button-Bright are built for an open-ended series.