Alex Brown is the mother of five, wife of one, and Founder of Romantic Shorts. A stay-at-home hypomanic mom is never without a serious ‘Ta-Da List. With a flexible but jam-packed schedule, sometimes the only thing that gets her through the day is a good-old, gut-wrenching, contact-lens-ruining, fall-on-the-floor, laugh. It’s either that or die crying.
Alex learned a long time ago that no one wants to hear her troubles. But if she can put a funny spin on them, leaving her audience gasping with laughter, she can vent all she wants/needs. As the stories took shape and began to pile up, she began to blog and write seriously. Check out the stories of raising her own five kids at her blog, Escaped Convictions; they’re all filed under “Raising Steel.”
“You should write a book,” they tell her. “Your stories are hilarious!”
Yeah, sure. I’ll just give up the two hours of sleep I manage to get every night as it is.
But drawing is a love as much as writing. And a picture paints a thousand words.
So to relieve some of the creative constipation, Alex took to cartooning the life of a ‘parallel’ family. The Dareals are not the Browns. They look a little like them. There are some similarities. But they’re not real. Not all of the happenings in the Dareal household actually happened, or happened exactly the same way, in the Brown house. There is no need for the Brown children to feel – exposed.
Honest.
There are a dozen initial strips posted here. But there’s a shoebox full of napkins/scraps/gum wrappers each with a new strip idea. It’s just a matter of time before the drawing board once again spews forth a plethora of hilarity. Stand by. (Gawd, I love the new thesaurus!)
In the meantime, if you have an idea that you’d like to see happen, contact Alex and run it by her. New ideas would help make the Dareals a little less, well, Brown.
Email me. alex at thickerthanwater dot ca (That’s .ca, not .com.)
Laugh ’til it hurts!
Thicker Than Water 
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