I have made up stories all my life.

As a child I acted them out with dolls on a built-in bookshelf in a room that wasn't mine. The shelf was shoulder level and must have been over a foot tall, because my Barbie (singular) and Ken could stand up on it. Barbie was never the main character; she was my main character's best friend or the Male Object of Affection's sister and was a princess, a gentleman's daughter, or at least a rich girl. She had the clothes for it.

My main character was a month doll. She came with a necklace with the month's stone and a flower, so one of her hands curled up with the pinky extended, like she was drinking tea. I had two of these dolls, February and May. May had pretty black hair and a yellow dress, but February won my heart; she looked just like me. She was short (compared to all the other dolls) and even though I was big for my age at the time, I knew I would never get very tall. She had a pot belly and a flat chest (Can you believe they made dolls like this?) and so did I. And her hair was auburn with all the curl I wished mine had (I loved her so much that after a while I French braided her hair to hide the mess; dolls hair and combs were never meant to meet). She even wore purple, my favorite color.

Her Object of Affection was a paper doll who was two or three inches taller than her (the same size as Barbie). He came from a set designed to show what Victorian clothes looked like. He looked too young to be the parent of the children included in the set and even though the woman had beautiful clothes, I hated her on sight. She was my villain's sidekick, sometimes Ken's sister, sometimes not. The boy (slightly taller than Main) was O of A's little brother and the girl was random background character.

This set was given to me by a woman who was dating one of my uncles. She said she'd had it since she was a child and so I wondered why most of the outfits weren't cut out. When I got home, I looked at the back and realized that the copyright date was only the year before. They weren't together long.

My villain was a doll only slightly taller than Main with a porcelain head, hands/forearms, and feet/calves. She was a reward for not missing any days of school for a quarter. My mother promised her to me and even bought her from the Avon lady weeks before I completed the impossible feat. Several times during that eon, my mother let me take her down and touch her, but then she would put her back in her box on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard by the stove. She was a shepherdess, with painted blonde hair held back with a painted blue ribbon under a fluffy cotton bonnet (or maybe mob cap). Her white dress was sewn almost all the way up the back, fastening with a hook and eye, so it could be removed. She also had white bloomers that covered down to the top of the porcelain, which was important as they kept her legs from clinking together.

I wanted her so bad and worked so hard for her that I really can't explain why I hated her as soon as she was mine.

Also among my actors was a Daisy paper doll, but I'm not sure what I called her. She had a huge head in proportion to her body (like strawberry shortcake, but grown up) so even after gluing her to the folder she came in, I had to reinforce the neck with a popsicle stick. I think she might be the oldest doll of any of them.

I bought one of those dolls with rubber clothes with my hard earned money (rather than the dimes I stole from the basket goose where my father dumped his change when he came home. That is also where he kept his wallet, but I can solemnly swear that I never touched the wallet, except to get to change underneath.) She cost six dollars and she came with a purple shirt and yellow shawl and a green and fuchsia tutu and headband with a sprig of hair spouting from the top (no fashion sense what so ever). Her leotard was fuchsia paint and her hair was molded blonde with a painted head band. I only had the outfits she came with and I soon grew bored with it, so I made her a beautiful Arab outfit out of colored Kleenexes good enough for A Thousand and One Nights.

The robe was a pink tissue and wrapped around her from under her arms to her feet with the end over her shoulder. On the bare arm, I made a tiny armband from blue tissue, held fast with the judicious application of spit. More of the blue tissue was fastened into a headscarf with a veil across her face and a pink band wrapped around her head like Mary in the Bible story book my mother read to us when I was little.

I keep her in that outfit for months, maybe a year, but one night when I was staying at an aunt's, some cousins spent the night in my room and removed every bit of clothes from every doll I owned. By this point, I had no more colored tissues, so I never tried to redress her. All white just wasn't good enough.

For a while I had a doll made of oyster shells, but I gave her away to my friend who moved away in fourth grade. (I lost a friend every year this way, except third grade when I moved.)

I also had a baby paper doll (I'm not sure where it was from) and one of those tiny infant plastic cake decorations used for baby showers. For a while I had a bigger one, almost two inches long with eyes that opened and closed, but that was so long before my play acting that I'm not sure it really existed or I just wished it had.

But my baby that was loved and adored by Main and her O of A (husband by then -- always) was a Fischer-Price peg baby that came with a cradle and a changing table.

My characters were always named the same thing (but the only name I can remember is Andrew and I'm not sure which paper doll he was). And they had assigned rolls. If I needed a back stabber, I introduced the Victorian woman, if I needed a rich friend, it was Barbie, a poor one or sister to Main went to the May doll. I acted out my storied this way for years. None of them had any adults. If the King declared his son was to marry, word was brought through the characters I had ("Dad said we can't go." and so forth).

The stories were always romances. Always.

Later I gave them up, (the dolls are in a box under my daughter’s bed) and the stories stayed in my head. But the problem with thinking out stories in your head is that to everyone else it just looks like you lying in bed with your arm over your eyes at three in the afternoon.

But I found a remedy for that. I just have to write them down.

So now if the dishes don’t get done or the laundry washed or the floor vacuumed or dinner started (not that I ever start dinner), even if I spend the eight hours in the same position, people don’t looked at me sadly and worry. I just smile and say, "Sorry about the -whatever-, I wrote five thousand words today."

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My complete list of stories is at http://frogs-of-war.livejournal.com/16294.html

Complete character list for A Prodigal's Dilemma and Waiting for Valentine's at http://frogs-of-war.livejournal.com/16701.html

And the reason why I might not have put up anything today at my homepage