Author’s Note: A New Way of Looking at Reactions

The Flickerlings were created to make something children experience every day—the moment between feeling something and reacting to it—visible and easier to talk about.

The Flickerlings are aware of the boys long before the boys become aware of them, and that awareness develops gradually throughout the story. The cascade of thoughts, feelings, impulses, and distractions reflects the busy, darting quality of a young mind. It is meant to pull readers into that experience while keeping them engaged with the story.

In this distracting age, this book isn’t trying to make a child’s mind behave like a traditional children’s book. It is trying to meet that mind where it is—darting, curious, impulsive, imaginative, and easily pulled in different directions—and give children a way to notice what is happening inside them before they react.

The Flickerlings: A New Way of Looking at Reactions

Rusty Ruins the Fort and Other Important Things introduces a concept that may be unfamiliar to both adults and children:

Flickerlings are not emotions. They are the reactions that can arise after an emotion and push us toward action.

That distinction is central to the story.

Many children’s books about emotional learning focus on identifying and naming emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, and happiness. Rusty Ruins the Fort takes a different approach. It asks the reader to look one step further:

What happens after the feeling?

A child can feel angry—and then experience an urge to yell, a sudden impulse to act, a reflexive response, a distraction, or another reaction. The emotion and the reaction are not the same thing.

That is the thinking the Flickerlings are designed to make visible.

The variety of Flickerlings is intentional. They represent the many different thoughts, impulses, urges, distractions, and reactions that can arise in the wake of an emotional experience. They are not a collection of emotion mascots, and they are not intended to correspond to a fixed set of basic emotions.

The story is asking readers to learn a new distinction:

EVENT → EMOTION → REACTION → PAUSE → CHOICE

By the final chapters, the boys begin noticing the strange thoughts and competing impulses inside themselves, culminating in Theo’s creation of Hank’s Field Guide. At the same time, the boys are beginning to grow out of their imaginary world and leave Hank behind.

The Field Guide represents what they carry forward from that world: a new way of noticing what happens inside them before they act.

The Flickerlings are not about stopping emotions or eliminating impulses. They are about learning to notice them—and discovering that there can be a moment between the feeling and the reaction when a choice becomes possible.

That moment is where Impulse Intelligence begins.

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