How to Create a Step List

Writing Resources; Dictionaries, Thesauri, Encyclopedias, the Internet and Catalogs

Contrasting Genres: How to Structure Storylines in the Major Fiction Genres of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Introduction

All AR stories' themes have embedded in the premise or lesson, some measure of domination. AR stories can be subdivided into the AG or non-AG classes where the protagonist changes gender or not. This document will concern itself mainly with the second class, because many of the writing principles delineated here can be applied to the first class as well. Unwilling AG is a more severe form of domination for a male wherein he is not merely verbally castigated as a straightforward AR story, but is literally castrated by means of the transformation. Usually, the antagonist is a female, who reduces her victim to the age of child with the implied promise that she will be the caretaker. In the cases where the antagonist is a male, then the caretaker tends to be the mother, wife or girlfriend of the protagonist and is an accessory to the deed. Indeed, since the physical reduction of an adult into infancy tends to posit a secondary character who will care for the resultant infant, female domination and loss of control to a woman become important themes in the Age Regression (AR) sub-genre.

AR writing itself can be subdivided into two categories: Fantasy and Science Fiction, although there is some interplay between the two. Although a means to regression must be created for a properly written AR story it does not constitute a basis of division. Magickal regression can partake of either genre, being either a Science fiction device or a Fantasy device. The major difference between the two worlds is that Science Fiction as a genre describes a change to the protagonist's entire world instead of the Fantasy genre where the change is confined to the protagonist himself. Thus, it is possible to write a Science Fiction story whose technology is magickal or a Fantasy story whose technology is wholly scientific.

Realistically, it doesn't matter which class the story falls into as long as certain rules of writing are observed. There is a fair amount of overlap between the two genres so the point is somewhat moot.

This document will begin by describing basic ideas in story writing and how to create a believable storyline. Then it will move on to the basic concepts of writing in the Fantasy and Science Fiction genres without regard to AR writing in particular. At the conclusion, a special AR-Infantilist section will describe those techniques needed to create an outstanding AR story-Infantilist. Because of the strong contrasts that an author is able to develop when the protagonist is regressed into full infancy, this document will primarily concern itself with that sub-genre although most of the techniques can be used for any regression below the pubescent level. At the end of the document I have provided a number of reference Appendixes to make AR story construction easier. The writing tips in Appendix A apply to any genre of fiction writing and although short, are well worth perusal.

Characters as People

The most useful insight into people for an author is that people never really grow up. Men in their sixties play with automobile engines and dream of becoming race car drivers just as they did when they were ten. Women's coffee klatches are often replays of the tea parties that they had when they were five years old. People's daydreams may become more detailed as they become older, but with the exception of sexual elements, their dreams may not change substantially from when they were quite young. A little girl of five fantasizes about having a house and baby of her own. The same girl may mature into a young woman who have the very same dream as she toils at her secretarial job as a single woman. When people are pushed to their limits, they have a tendency to regress to childlike behaviors that have the merest patina of adulthood. A grown woman who hears a strange noise in the night may rouse her husband to go to the living room and investigate as if he was her father. A tired man might demand that his wife feed him whenever he is hungry and pick up after him as if he was a helpless child.

If a man becomes ill, his training usually allows him to wallow in regressive behavior. Women must make meals and take care of the children whether they are ill or not, but most men have never risen to this responsibility. Because of their expectation for coddling, most men become infantile when they are ill. There are few men who can resist the temptation to regress into virtual toddlerhood when they are sick.

The worst case of this particular syndrome occurs among physicians. Physicians are notorious among the nursing staff at hospitals as patients. Because they are used to being in positions of authority, the sick male doctor combines the helpless demands for attention with his previous authoritarian position. His medical knowledge gives the ill doctor countless dark thoughts of serious illnesses that he may be suffering from. The result is an intractable male patient who demands constant attention and who is unwilling to wait or accept no for an answer. In short, they become frightened babies who need the constant attentions of their nurse.

The aspiring author should observe his or her workplace and draw parallels between Kindergarten and the corporate setting to see the truth of this observation. Managers have temper tantrums like four-year-olds when they don't get their way. Men and women form small groups to talk the way they did when they were five to ten years old. When the world grows dark for adults, they tend to run back to their parents for comfort as they did as children.

Adults with drug or alcohol problems experience this phenomena in spades. The drug/alcohol makes them ineffective and forces them into a dependent role with their spouse. Their unlucky spouse may be forced to undress them at night for bed and get them up to go to work in the mornings. If they're hungover, the spouse may have to call their spouse's boss and tell him or her that the person has a twenty-four hour virus and cannot come into work, forcing the spouse to act like a parent with a wayward child. If they're too drunk to drive, the spouse may have to tell her partner that she won't permit him to drive in such a condition. This can result in either the drunken spouse having a tantrum, or passively accepting a childlike position in the household.

Drunken or heavily medicated people may also wet their pants or the bed while they're sleeping. This resurrects the historical feelings of guilt that the person suffered during toilet training and automatically places them in a child role vis-à-vis their spouse. Imagine how it must feel to be a man who has wet the bed in a drunken state to be roused and pulled from their bed by his wife. He must stand idly by the bed in a sleepy condition while wearing his pee-sodden underwear while he watches his wife strip the bed and remake it with fresh bedlinens. While he stands by the bed wearing steadily cooling wet undies, she berates him for wetting the bed like a toddler.

The AR author in particular should be aware of this phenomena and exploit it to it's fullest. If everyone is a child at heart, then it is relatively easy to draw parallels between an adult's behavior and a child's behavior. Both men and women can become whiney under stress making them appear to sound like children when they complain. Men are not brought up to be housekeepers and have a tendency to make messes that they don't clean up. In addition, the male anatomy sometimes causes their urine stream to shoot off at an angle rather than in the toilet bowl that they're aiming at. It is also not unknown for the stream of urine from a penis to be directed at such an acute angle that sitting on the toilet seat merely causes it to be deflected upwards and outside the toilet even though the man is sitting down, thus creating an embarrassing puddle on the floor or wetting the pants and underwear which are pooled at their ankles before them. Statistically, men don't wash their hands or wipe themselves as often as women do. Also, because men are in high stress positions more often than women, they tend to have anal hemorrhoids more often than women which occasionally leads to a light soiling of the rear of their underwear.

Men are the perfect target for the AR writer. They tend to be less mature and more self-conceited at any age then women. In general, they lack the social skills which might divert trouble and let a problem become a crisis so they can attack it head-on with all their physical and mental prowess. If this approach is used during a situation while they are being regressed into infancy, their normal stratagems fail utterly. Men's mental strength is derived from three sources; belief in their physical power gives them courage, their social position lends them credibility and their mastery of language gives them the skills to overcome obstacles. Once their physical prowess, social position and linguistic powers of adulthood have been stripped from them, men become helpless children and the story of their reformation at woman's hands can begin.

For example, consider the following vignette:

"As the puff of smoke dissipated, the fate of the man was revealed. He had been magickally regressed into a drooling, nine-month-old infant who knelt on all fours at his wife's feet. He crawled forward a bit and heard a crinkling noise as he moved. He stopped and put one hand down to feel his bottom and discovered thick cloth covered with a layer of plastic. With a start, he suddenly realized that he was wearing nothing but a bulky cloth diaper and plastic panties. He tried to yell at his wife, but all that came out of his mouth was an infant's babble.

He rapidly glanced around the room to check his surroundings. What he saw made him dizzy with disorientation. Everything had become enormous and terrifying. The coffee table that he'd marred with the heels of his shoes by propping them on it's waxed surface had suddenly become level with the top of his head. The couch that he'd carelessly throw himself into every day looked like a fabric covered blue mountain. When he tried to look up to see his wife's face, he discovered the he had to tilt his head all the way back to his shoulders to enable him to see his wife towering over him. As he lifted his head to look pleadingly at his wife, he realized how helpless he'd become. He had a vague memory of slapping her the night before in a drunken rage. Memories of beating his wife rushed into his mind. He had mistreated his wife in the past with the arrogant knowledge that she could not retaliate. Everything had changed. Now the shoe was on the other foot.

As he looked into her eyes, there was not a hint of sympathy. The glint of anger from her eyes told him that her rage was consummate and their wasn't anything he could do to change her opinion of him. He knew he was a failure as a husband and a man. The talons of the vengeful harpy that his manifold sins had created from his loving wife would soon descend upon him to collect a painful justice from his body. His head bent as he averted it from the soul penetrating gaze of his wife as he huddled close to the carpet in remorse for what he had been and done. When he looked up again, he saw his wife smiling in triumph with her hair brush in her upraised hand. He knew with absolute certainty that he was going to be brutally spanked on his bare bottom in the next few minutes and that there was nothing he could do to stop his wife from exacting a painful revenge on his behind for the acting like the monster he had been.

Fear gripped his stomach and he began to panic as the realization of his utter defenselessness set in. Terror made his bladder and bowels void their contents into his diapers. He began to weep in humiliation at his fall from power. He realized that his power had vanished and he was at his wife's mercy. As he looked up again with tear-streaked cheeks into his wife's smiling face, her pleased countenance told him she was aware that he'd peed and pooped himself. He knew that she was aware that she ruled the household and she could retaliate in any way she wished for his sins against her. He cowered in fear as his wife mercifully put aside the hair brush and bent down to carry him up to the nursery she had created in the spare bedroom in anticipation of his transformation. He whimpered and hid his head in her shoulder as she held him close to her chest, securing him to her with one palm propping up his diapered bottom as she mounted the stairs.

His wife smiled maternally as she laid him down on the changing station and began removing his plastic pants so she could change his diaper. His diaper wasn't the only thing of her husband's that she planned to change…"

The Maguffin or "How Did I Become Involved in this Mess?"

The Maguffin is the plot device which draws characters into the story. For example in the story, "Rockabuy Baby", the protagonist is in the drugstore to pick up his prescription for his allergies while the antagonist is there to stock up on disposable diapers for her victim/clients. Each of them has their own Maguffin for being in the drugstore. Often it is necessary to create a Maguffin for each character in the story. If on the other hand, a character has friends or colleagues, his friends or colleagues may be drawn into the story by loyalty or organization. For an example, consider the ending of "Rockabuy Baby" where the super-antagonist Becky brings along the Coven to assist her with meeting out justice to Krystyn and the baby. In this case, the Coven and Becky share a common Maguffin.

The Clues to the Protagonist's Doom or "How Did I Ever Miss the Import of What She Was Saying and Doing?"

Since an AR story should lead up to the protagonist's regression, it follows that there must be a fair amount of action and dialog before the transformation. During this stage, clues to the protagonist's fate must be carefully buried in the actions and dialog that will give an astute reader Godlike foreknowledge of the protagonist's immediate future. For example, in "Rockabuy Baby", when Andrew and Krystyn go to her minivan to drive to her house, Andrew notices the worn look of the baby seat in the back. Logical reasoning would make a rational person wonder how long she had owned the seat and how many babies had ridden in it. Since it is not common practice for owners of Adoptive Services to drive around all day with a baby in the back seat of their car, the implication is that she had owned the seat for a number of years. Agatha Christie's detective novels were prominently mentioned to make it clear this was a clue that something wasn't right. When she took him home and they toured the house, the clues became clear and ominious. Her dark bedroom with a blood red canopy over the wrought iron bedstead that looked like a living plant that had been magickally changed into dead metal was a clue that Krystyn was allied with forces that were anti-life. The red and black tapers in the candlestick gave a hint of Black Magick. The sense of power that exuded from her room should have told him that all was not right. The nursery was obviously a prison for its diapered inmates. A metal framed door, an extremely deep and heavy dark wooden crib should have made him run in fear for his life. Clues are not just parts of mysteries, but form an essential part of the moral lesson. The central concept is that in stories, just as in everyday life, there are obvious clues that tell the character what is about to happen. It is important that the author subtlety delineate why a character missed the clues. The reason the character missed the clues is important because it constitutes the character's Fatal Flaw. In Andrew's case above, it was his sexual lust for Krystyn that blinded him to reality.

Fatal Flaws or "Why Was I so Blind?"

Every character has a fatal flaw which leads to his downfall. Drunks, womanizers and drug users have obvious fatal flaws. Fatal flaws are part of the Weltlichkeit or world view of the character. For that reason, their flaws make them edit out the parts of their existence that conflicts with how they wish their world to be. Thus a man can be completely purblind to a clue that everyone else considers obvious. Fatal flaws make the character more human and thus more believable. In the Star Wars movies, the android-robot, C3PO, was made human by making him a coward. His particular mission in "life" was to overcome his cowardice to become a brave robot like his companion, R2D2. Give the protagonist a fatal flaw that is both common and understandable by the audience if you want them to identify with the protagonist in the story. Axe-murdering serial rapists make poor protagonists and trite antagonists. The reader should be able to identify with both the protagonist and the antagonist to some degree. Both must have Weltlichkeits that are self-consistent and rational considered from their viewpoint. In heroic myths, the character overcomes his fatal flaw to succeed and become the hero that was hidden inside. In Greek tragedies, the hero is destroyed by his flaw. In the general Science Fiction genre, the hero overcomes his fatal flaw and transforms the world. In Fantasy, the hero overcomes his fatal flaw and is transformed. In AR-Infantilist fiction, the protagonist either allows himself to become regressed or is regressed because of his fatal flaw. The flaw itself is transformed by the rejuvenation. Babies are not permitted to be drunks or drug users, nor do they have the necessary equipment to be womanizers. Their regression has brought them back to a state of relative innocence.

The Premise: The Gateway to a Moral Meaning and the Hidden Lesson

Just as your English teacher probably taught you in High School that every paper must have a thesis, every story must have a Premise. The Premise is the central idea that ties the story together. Ideally, the Premise leads inexorably to the moral meaning and hidden lesson behind the story. Consider the AR story, "The Drunk". The Premise is that it's bad for a man to get childishly drunk on a regular basis. This leads to the moral; being a drunken, uncaring husband is bad because it makes him less than a man. In turn, this leads to the hidden lesson that if the reader selects this course in life, his infantile irresponsibility may force others around him (his wife, for example) to assume the role of his parent while his life is reduced to the level of control that he can safely manage by himself, i.e., life as an infant.

Meaning: The Hidden Lesson

Stories are about revelation. The meaning of the character’s life evolves through the story through conflict. When the final resolution of the character’s problems occurs, the protagonist can see his relationship to the world. The protagonist’s foibles and flaws become apparent to him as he undergoes his personal revelation. The character of the protagonist changes as a consequence both of his insights and the condition he finds himself in. The protagonist realizes that he can never go back to what he was. He has changed forever. This is the essence of revelation; it is the knowledge that changes one’s life. Revelation redefines the character’s relationship to the world. It’s important to realize that the reader undergoes that same revelation as the protagonist. The protagonist’s revelation is the readers revelation. Just as the protagonist is changed by the cosmic knowledge he has obtained, so is the reader.

Viewpoint: A Tool for Emotional Exploration

Story Viewpoint is a valuable tool in the hands of a master storyteller, it sets the tone of the story and defines the limits of knowledge that the reader may have about a given scene in a story. The master storyteller will choose the viewpoint carefully for the effects he wants to produce. In the hands of an inept storyteller it is a curse, the story will change viewpoint without warning an leave the reader wondering if the storyteller has lost direction. The following lines give a thumbnail description of the use of each.

First Person: Allow the storyteller to express his intimate feelings about the actions and the other character, but story can only be seen from one viewpoint. Useful for surprise and suspense situations where the story hinges on the final twist or surprise but it's extremely limited otherwise.

Third Person: Allows the storyteller to describe the intimate feelings of all characters or if the storyteller wishes, no feelings may be described at all. It’s best to include the feelings of characters if possible to mimic the reader’s experience in life. The people that a reader sees every day have expressions, tones and body language that "telegraphs" the person’s emotional state. A storyteller may choose to exclude the expressions and emotions of the characters in situations where the characters are members of a group that the storyteller wants to ‘dehumanize’ by making them emotionless robots going about their tasks. It’s a ploy that can be made to work, but is seldom successful for use throughout a story. Readers expect to "see" the emotions of the characters they read about. People want to read about people and a character without any emotions will be seen as less than human. In general third person is the best overall mode for telling stories.

The Principle of Justice

The Principal of Justice requires that the characters be treated justly by the storyteller, i.e., that the characters be accorded a fate that is determined by their actions. If the character must be punished by the Gods, his punishment must be equal to the crime. To punish the character more than he deserves is unjust and demonstrates the inherent sadism or moral turpitude of the Gods. If the character is punished less than he deserves, it illustrates the lack of concern of the Gods. Unless the point of the story is to display how unfair and capricious the Gods are, the storyteller should strive to find a balance between the crime and it’s consequences. In the end, the reader will correctly assume that the storyteller has the qualities that he has imbued his Gods with. A storyteller whose tales are filled with injustice and cruelty will be perceived as morally and ethically deficient.

A good story is a type of morality play where the characters play out their feelings, aspirations and flaws against a fantasy backdrop. The difference between real life and a story is that in a fantasy story anything may happen. As a consequence, the ‘adjustment’ to the character that would normally take place in the framework of real life takes on fantasy proportions.

Therefore, do not have the characters punished unless their fault and fatal flaws require a response from another character or ‘Cosmic’ re-balancing to address the flaw. It is a given that the character will think him/herself innocent and has been unfairly treated. (All felons are innocent in their own eyes and have been treated in a grossly unfair way by the system. Another way of saying this is to recognize that people who wrong others and refuse to acknowledge their error have the moral development of toddlers.)

Conflict and Resolution

All storylines deal with conflict and resolution. Whether the storyteller is an Native American jongleur sitting at the campfire telling the story of the various paths a warrior may take or a Hollywood writer hammering out a script about a Columbian Drug Lord and his inexorable path to downfall, the stories are the same in one respect; they tell the reader/viewer about the problems a fantasy person encounters and how this imaginary person deals with them. Conflict gives definition to the story. Without conflict, the character has nothing to strive for or against. There can be no profit or loss in such a situation, only ennui. The character of the protagonist is defined by the struggle he is engaged in. If the struggle is for good, the protagonist is a protagonist. If the struggle is for power and domination, the character is an antihero. It’s important to realize that no one in real life is purely good or purely evil. It’s a mistake to make a protagonist purely good or evil, readers will not be able to identify with a protagonist that’s either too good or too evil. The protagonist loses his believability and becomes a mere comic book caricature. This is a fatal error in storytelling.

The Triad of Denouement: Story Premise, Conflict Resolution and Climax

The premise of the story revolves around the moral. For example; Drunks make bad husbands and everyone in the relationship would be happier if he was a turned into baby who drinks formula from baby bottles rather than the booze from fifths of liquor he drank as an adult. The moral is the lesson of the story and is inherent to the premise. In the case above, the moral is drunkenness is bad.

Conflict Resolution is ofttimes confused with the climax. The resolution is the idea which solves the essential problem as opposed to the climax when the resolution is implemented.

A "Resolving Conflict" often occurs after the climax to tie up loose ends and prove the story premise in more complex stories.

Creating a Story Climax

The Final Line of the Denouement

Just as the first line in a story sets the mood and tone of the story, so does the last line of the story. The final line is the author's last word on the theme and properly managed, it can give a reader nightmares in a horror storyline or reduce them to tears as in a tragedy. Usually the climax and denouement are simultaneous, but not always. Sometimes a resolving conflict must be employed to finish the story off, or the author uses the opportunity to give the reader one last gut-wrenching verbal punch to conclude. Authors often lay out a story with the beginning and ending in mind and then write the middle to connect the two pieces. Sometimes an author will create the story with a single statement in mind for the end and write the entire story to give it "punch" at the end. If the story ends weakly, then the whole effect of the story is lost. The author needs to leave his reader feeling shaken and a little woozy from the final lines. A story that peters off in the end is a failure. If the author reads his work and decides that the end lacks emotional "grip", then he should write a final line that meets his requirements. Then he can either; change the ending slightly to match or (my favorite) change the title to match the ending and add details and subplots to support the last line as a resolving conflict.

A Step List is merely a short list of actions that lead from the beginning of the story to its conclusion. It can be as detailed or as bare as you like. Remember that a Step List is not an outline to be turned in to a Professor of Literature, but a simple list to help you keep track of the action. It is an excellent place to place notes about scenes and subplots as your story grows more detailed. The best advice I can give is to keep it simple; don't clutter it up with headings and subheadings unless that is what helps you most. Don't even worry about being grammatical; the list are only notes to help you work. I don't use headings at all, instead, I use something like the following format;

1. Boy meets girl at drugstore, boy is timid and slightly embarrassed as he looks over diapers. Girl likes him and invites him home. They go to minivan. She has infant seat in backseat. It appears worn.
2. Girl gives boy tour of house. House appears okay, but girl's bedroom and nursery are foreboding. She makes coffee and secretly phones friend from kitchen to come over.
3. The Transformation: the girl says she is out of coffee, but her friend who has brought her baby along offers the boy some "virgin" (from unused bottle) milk from baby bottle. Boy doesn't want to appear ungracious so doesn't refuse. Boy drinks "milk" laden coffee and begins transformation.
4. After transformation, women explain that they are witches and that girl's business is rejuvenating men into infant's that she can illegally sell for adoptive purposes.

As the ideas develop, I add to each section with ideas that I don't want to forget. For example, in the above Step List, I had an idea about a Siberian sleigh ride being as dark an foreboding as the nursery. To make the nursery have the same "ambiance", I created the concept of a crib that resembled a deep-sided Siberian sleigh and added a detailed description under section B so I wouldn't forget to add it when I got down to writing that part of the story.

Step Lists can help you when you have a specific scene (or several scenes) in mind but are not sure how to connect them. Write out as much as the Step List as you can and begin writing those scenes. From the behavior of the character, it is usually possible to divine some sort of McGuffin and insert an area in the Step List where the character should reasonably appear.

Everyone has emotional buttons that can be exploited. Within a general genre like Fantasy, the buttons are so copious that they can't be enumerated. More specific sub-genres like AR-Infantilist (horror) have well-known emotional "hooks" that may be exploited by the author.

In general, writing "hooks" fall into three major classifications; reverse emotional transference where the reader identifies with the emotion that the protagonist is feeling, object interest such as advanced weapons in an Action or Science Fiction story or baby items in an AR story and lastly, fantasy identification; for example, in an AR-Infantilist story, the reader imagines that he himself is being regressed into infancy.

Examples of AR emotional hooks:

1. Disposable Diapers

1. Standard disposable infant diapers are appreciated by the younger reader who spent their infancy in such diapers.

1. Formula: Whether a baby is breast fed or given prepared formula, the baby will wake up with a mouth that tastes of sour milk if he is fed just before bedtime. This can be extremely disconcerting for a newly regressed character. The bacteria in the mouth will break down the milk quickly while the child sleeps and he will awake with bad "baby" breath that is so powerful that he himself will be able to smell it. (Side note: Nursing mothers can smell it too, but they are mothers and are forgiving creatures.)

1. Powered formula: The powdering technique gives them a strong soy taste and should be used to "punish" a character.
2. Prepared Formula: Prepared soy formulas have improved in taste in the past few years. Although they are no substitute for mother's milk, they've become close in taste and nutrition. Cheaper prepared formulas have a pronounced soy taste which makes them objectionable to the adult mind. Infantilized taste buds will only intensify the protagonist's ability to perceive the soy taste and make the experience that much worse.
3. Canned Goat's milk: Similar in nutritional value to mother's milk, but with a canned off-taste that clearly differentiates it from fresh mother's milk. Use when breast feeding is impossible in the storyline but describe it to have the same taste as mother's milk. Serve warm (body temperature) in a baby bottle for greatest effect.
4. Fresh (Pasteurized) Goat's milk: Very similar in taste and nutritional value to mother's milk, use when breast feeding is impossible in the storyline but describe it to have the same taste as mother's milk. Serve warm (body temperature) in a baby bottle for greatest effect.
5. Breast (human) milk: This is the best that an Infantilist-AR writer can offer his character/reader. Part of the enjoyment of the reader is seeing how the author manages the kneading movements of the baby's hands on his mothers teat and how the nipple "grows" in the infant's mouth as he suckles. Many readers have fantasies about being breast fed and the inclusion of breast feeding at the end of the story gives them an intense emotional high that will be remembered long after they have forgotten the plot of the story.

1. Baby Food

1. Puréed infant food: AR devotees who like the infantilist genre can be hit hard with food of this sort. The problem is to find a food that everyone likes. Gerber Hawaiian Delight is good, as is the old standby, Oatmeal with Applesauce. Most people could eat any of the cereal or fruit purées without objection. The deserts, such as puddings, tapiocas, cobblers are more than acceptable. The new jarred "pie" flavors also have a very good flavor.

Foods of the puréed type can also be used to "punish" a character. Strained peas, carrots, and broccoli are most people's immediate response to baby foods they'd hate to eat and squash and potatoes run a close second in a survey of ill-favored foods. Although most readers never think of it, puréed vegetable, mixed vegetable and turkey, and mixed vegetable and pork,, mixed vegetable and beef, or mixed vegetable and bacon dinners taste far worse by comparison. The granular texture of such dinners is abhorrent to the adult palate and having regressed taste buds won't make this type of food any more palatable. The taste of these dinners is so difficult to describe that the author is invited to buy a bottle of each of the mixed dinners and try them for himself. The bright flavor of a particular vegetable becomes "lost" in the melange of the purée. The heightened taste perception of a baby won't be of any help to the protagonist here. (See Appendix B - An Adult Gourmet's Evaluation of Baby Food)

As a service to those authors who do not wish to carry out their own investigations of the taste of prepared baby foods, I induced a gourmet friend who has written cooking columns and has been a professional restaurant critic to taste-test some of the Gerber Mixed Meals. He has some renown at being able to replicate almost any recipe by mere taste alone. As a critic, he can identify and tell a chef which ingredient was too prominent in the recipe for perfect balance. He has reported back the following:

Vegetables and Veal: The dinner had a strong aroma of vegetable beef soup when first opened. The veal had the low flavor of canned commercial (grade 3) beef which lent nothing to the overall quality. The concoction had a high percentage of potatoes which was discernable by taste and texture alone. There was a hint of powdered dried onion in the mixture. The meal had a "mealy" texture that was caused by both the potatoes and finely ground particles of beef. The complete absence of salt in this dinner made it totally unpalatable. While I could see a baby eating this, I would not willingly eat this particular concoction again.

Vegetables and Turkey: The dinner had a strong aroma of vegetable soup with a slight hint of Turkey when first opened. The concoction had a high percentage of potatoes and peas which was discernable by taste alone. The "mealy" texture of the potatoes and finely ground particles of turkey was accentuated by the peas in the mixture. I found that the texture was particularly disagreeable in this dinner. As in the first dinner, the absolute absence of salt made the taste/texture combination abhorrent. As before, I can see this as a reasonable dish for an infant, but I would not willingly partake of this meal again.

Mixed Vegetables Dinner: The dinner had a strong aroma of vegetable soup when first opened. Like the Vegetable and Turkey dinner, the concoction had a high percentage of potatoes and peas which was discernable by taste alone. There was an objectionable "mealy" texture of the potatoes and peas in the mixture. I found that the texture was particularly disagreeable in this dinner. As in the other dinners I sampled, the absolute absence of salt made the taste/texture combination abhorrent.

Vegetables and Ham: The dinner had a strong aroma of vegetable soup when first opened. When I placed the first spoonful of the mixture in my mouth, I was assaulted by a slightly dead, rancid flavor of tainted pork. I refused to complete the test on this sample, believing it to be spoiled. I threw it out as inedible.

2. Semi-solid older baby food: This is somewhat useful as a transitional food in stories while the protagonist continues to rejuvenate, but lacks emotional "punch" of puréed food.
3. Toddler food: Least useful of all except as a vehicle for later transitions. Toddler food is too close to adult fare to make clear contrasts. Exception to the rule: While toddlers are often given animal crackers, it is considered unwise to give them salty snacks. An author may play on these differences. The character may ask for a pretzel or potato chip, only to be given an animal cracker.

1. Baby Clothes: