Book excerpt: The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term "fairy tale" as a fictitious, highly fanciful story or explanation. Can such a narrative furnish pragmatic advice on important topics like sound thinking, overcoming indecisiveness, stress reduction, emotional self-management, and getting along better with others? This book, Practical Fairy Tales for Everyday Living, shows that it can. Practical Fairy Tales for Everyday Living provides twenty-five highly fanciful stories featuring characters who successfully battle a variety of personal problems and mishaps through the formulations of general semantics, a science-based "self-help" system designed to assist individuals to better evaluate and understand everyday difficulties. (Steve Allen, polymath and author of numerous books, including Dumbth: 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter, lists as Idea Number 81: Learn general semantics.) While the stories are not true in the literal sense of that word, the British pundit G.K. Chesterton observed that "Fairy tales are more than true-not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten." Some of the stories you will find here contain plot elements from familiar literary classics and children's fairy tales. Other yarns offer completely original scenarios. All the stories have in common a desire to inform and entertain with a bit of humor. That was my purpose in writing these tales, and I hope that is your experience in reading them.