BACKSTORY AND ILLUSTRATIONS**

This morning I asked her about the davinoars in the above story and was rewarded with enthusiastic explanations that ended with a series of illustrations by her! Actually she started providing backstory on the Nineown (which I initially transcribed, apparently incorrectly, as Nineold) Open Plains since yesterday, pointing it out to me on the world map in her playroom. It is located in Australia, and is the home of “the other, real” Corythosaurus (i.e. the writer). Aladar lives somewhere in Northwest Africa (as she pointed it out to me on the map) but travels a lot and often visits the Nineown Open Plain of the Vulture, known as the Nineown Open Plains for short. The Nineown dinosaurs did not in fact originate from the Nineown Open Plains (known in our world as Australia) but from somewhere in Africa, then travelled to the Nineown Open Plains later. The waters surrounding the Nineown Open Plains are filled with good sea serpents, not bad ones. The bad sea serpents live somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea (she didn’t name this, but pointed to it on the map). Corin, who is purely a fictional character invented by Aladar and Corythosaurus, came from somewhere north of the Nineown Plains (she pointed on the map to somewhere in Borneo or New Guinea).

She pointed out the various locations again later on maps on her computer and yet later again on her world map, and was consistent with her stories each time.

They grow watermelons and cabbages in the Nineown Open Plains, but not lime or broccoli. Aladar grows them when he visits there. The davinoars are a type of jackindore and they live in the Nineown area. They are very tricky, and there are different types of davinoars, which are tiny jackindores – jackindores are apparently huge (“this big” she said, stretching out her arms as wide as she could). They are not dinosaurs, and have wings, not legs and not flippers – basically they are flying creatures. Their body parts also have unique names that she made up completely out of thin air (all the names here, besides the actual dinosaur names, she made up out of apparently nowhere).

Here are the illustrations she drew

I'm still behind in terms of transcribing, by about 2 weeks. I still have 2 stories to transcribe from the 29th, and then approximately 2 per day that I've recorded since then. Her most recent stories have shown other developments, but having not transcribed them, I am going by hearsay mostly. What caught my attention is her increasing use of places and creatures that she has made up out of thin air - she's still very much using the story-within-a-story mode, but her stories are increasingly sounding like fantasy adventure type episodes because of these fantasy-type names.

She is also still associating certain stories she tells with specific books she's using. Currently my Miraca Gross book is apparently the book that Aladar is writing, while a Ladybird book of Dinosaurs that belongs to the library is the book Corythosaurus is currently writing. She will continue her serials whenever she picks up either of these books or one of her old favourites (Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, and a devotional book just entitled, "Moms"), typically starting out with "where did we stop?...". She does also tell stories from other books, and those seem to be "light stories" that are more self contained (these are the stories she tells that don't feature Aladar and his friends).

Her newest stories involve a bunch of characters with very peculiar sounding names like Pish, Poock, and other such names only a baby would think of i guess. I can't keep up with her - it's literally impossible, I still only manage to record 1-2 stories from the many she tells everyday except for that day when we recorded 10.

Recently she wants to be recorded - the problem is she starts anytime, and all day long - I'm not usually watching her constantly, and the recorder is also slow to boot up, so often by the time I've realized she's started and switched on the thing, I've missed a good minute or more of the story also explains why many of the stories seem to start from nowhere on the blog - actually she usually starts properly, it's my fault..

Because of the random nature of my sampling, I sometimes miss the best stories and get garbled ones instead. If you've been reading her blog you'll see her story quality can vary a lot. I do listen to most of her stories, just not all, and record even less... but in general I can sum up what's currently happening, for e.g. her current thing is still the nested stories. Aladar and Corythosaurus are really competing in this, but Aladar seems more of a mentor/guru in more ways than just as a storywriter guide. She's been introducing new characters, and if you ask her, will give you their backstories as well.

Oh yes, one final thing I've noticed... her increasing use of vocabulary she's picked up from the books we read, which is natural, but especially from Enid Blyton - she loves to introduce a sort of "word or phrase of the day" and uses it repeatedly within many of her stories in any particular day. For instance, the two words she's been using repeatedly yesterday evening and today have been "clambering" and "scampered", and a new favourite since a couple of weeks or more ago has been "thingymajiggy".