What's your costume for Halloween?

For this year's Halloween I'm dressing up as the Wicked Witch of the West from the book Wizard of Oz, my favorite book since my childhood. Since I could actually read books until I was in 6th grade, I was obsessed with Wizard of Oz and all of its series books. A kid's library in my church had an entire shelf full of Wizard of Oz books -- not just the original but all the sequels by other authors who expanded on the original later on.

Even though L. Frank Baum, the author of the original Wizard of Oz, never intended to write sequels, many young fans wrote and requested him to write more. Baum never wanted to write more but he eventually started to repond to the popular demand. From 1904, which is four years after Baum wrote his original Wizard of Oz, until his death in 1919, Baum wrote thirteen new books of the series.

After Baum died, the Wizard of Oz fans urged Ruth Plumly Thompson to write more. Thompson, who was a fanatic lover of Wizard of Oz, worked at Baum's publisher Reilly & Lee as a vice president. She wrote her 21 sequels between 1921 and 1939 mainly because she had to support her family. I remember storylines of every single book of Baum and Thompson; I remember that even though I certainly loved all of their books, the story became boring as the series went on. The stories were always about an American child with a talking animal traveling in the magical cities and meeting magical or enchanted creatures.

What makes Thompson still special is not the fact that people thought she was Baum's niece, or she wrote more sequels of Wizard of Oz than Baum. Thompson is special because her sequels of Wizard of Oz were beyond just novels. Thompson's Oz poems were collected and publihsed in 1992, two decades after she died. I didn't like this book, called the Cheerful Citizens of Oz, only because it was a 15 pages long pamphlet and I finished it in less than half an hour.

So many other artists and writers continued to produce sequels of Wizard of Oz that are not limited to paperbacks. There are so many films, comics, parodies, and most importantly, musicals such as Wicked, the life story of Wicked Witch of the West.