To see the complete Chapter 1, use the following link;https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2018/11/24/hidden-kingdom-chapter-1-complete/
Hidden Kingdom (Chapter 2-adding page 9)
Filed under artwork, comic strips, fairies, Hidden Kingdom, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink
If You Have a Good Idea…
Perhaps you should write it down. I mean, that’s basically why I am writing this today instead of the most wondrously intelligent and well-written post anyone ever wrote anywhere and anytime. I had the idea while I was out walking in the park and didn’t have a pencil. And ten minutes later, the idea was forgotten.
Oh, well. I can still write something. It just won’t be as good.
What I could do is write down some ideas I can write about in the future. You know… so I don’t forget.
I saw some YouTube videos about Stephen King talking about his writing process. In some ways, we are a lot alike. But we also work in very different ways, and we write about very different things. I could compare our varying processes.
I have a head full of useless knowledge about cartoons and cartoonists. I believe I have written about Fontaine Fox and his Toonerville comics. Also, I posted about George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Windsor McKay’s Little Nemo. and E. C. Segar’s Popeye have also made one or more appearances in this blog, as have Milt Caniff’s Steve Canyon, and Carl Barks’ Ducks (Donald, Uncles Scrooge, and all the other denizens of Duckburg.) There has to be at least one or two more cartoonists I could talk about?
I am currently writing and illustrating a novel and a novella. That means I can post some of the drawings and illustrations I do for that, talking about how I illustrate, or how the writing is going… or how the writing is blowing up, giving me nightmares, warping the universe around me… you know, the stuff writers go through and then don’t tell you about.
And there’s always the stuff that torments artists of all kinds. The Devil is in the details, as Basil Wolverton could tell you. The attention to detail can make the work of art very beautiful… or very, um… like what Basil saw whenever he drew something.
So, tomorrow, when I also will probably have forgotten about the most wondrous idea I had ever thunk about, I have a list of stuff to look at, and then probably ignore and think up something else.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, insight, Paffooney
Synesthesia (Part Two; The Color of Music)
Okay, so on the synesthesia tests I didn’t score as a synesthete on the music/color test. But I was extremely synesthetic on the tests for color/months/days of the week. I was a little over the mark on letter/number/colors synesthesia too, but it was more a problem with manipulating the color-selector device when I don’t have a mouse to use on my laptop. The test for music did not test the way I see colors with music. They wanted me to respond to what color each individual note seemed to be, and that isn’t even close to the way I experience it. For me, the perfect description of how synesthesia works for me is Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D minor as it is depicted in Fantasia.
I was shocked when I first saw it. The colors are wrong for this piece, but the visual experience is almost exactly how I experience music, especially wordless instrumental music. The only problem with this piece is that the overall color schemes are wrong. But this comes about because every synesthete sees the colors differently. And I have no doubt that at least one of the artists who created this had synesthesia. If there were more reds, yellows, and magenta in the opening and more indigo contrasted with silver later, this interpretation would be perfect.
Music synesthetically works in two directions for me. The picture above, called The Wings of Imagination, makes me think of La Mer by Claude Debussy.
If you listen to the piece, don’t look at the YouTube illustration, look at my picture if you want to see the music the way I do. The following song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, is a multicolored song that I can best express with the colors in the picture I call Rainbow Peacock.
The full range of primary colors together in one picture, or one song, always means completeness, fullness, and happiness to me. If there is absence of one or more of the basic colors from the color wheel, the mood and emotion present in the song or picture is altered to something other than happiness. The Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky goes from the indigo and navy blue of fear and confusion to instances of angry red and feverish orange. It would look something like this in the theater of my imagination;
And one of my favorite instrumental pieces of all times, Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun by Claude Debussy, is full of melancholy and sexual tension, deeply felt vibrations in the depths of my stomach, and would look like my picture Sleeping Beauty with its teal and blue melancholia juxtaposed with candle-lit yellows and wood brown mixed feelings of joy and anxiety.
Now, if you have waded through all of this goofy color-and-music analysis from a source whose sanity is questionable at best, you probably have no earthly idea what any of it has to do with anything. But if you have that aha!-moment and see it all clearly too, then I suspect you probably are a synesthete too. Poor you. It is not a treatable condition. But it is also not a burden. Learn to enjoy it. It resonates in your very soul.
Taking a Break Today Means…
I am seriously busy with transferring my writing process to a new laptop that is completely different from my old laptop. And so, I must post something really short and not demanding of my composition skills.
This is a ten-minute post to keep my 412-post daily streak alive.
And now I need to get some laundry done and get back to novel writing after.
Filed under Uncategorized
Synesthesia (Part One; French Blue Monday)
This link will help you understand Synesthesia
Yes, Mondays are blue. Specifically French blue. Every day of the week has its own color. Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre, Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue. I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints. I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head. I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world. I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name. It is called synesthesia.
It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”. When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence. I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns. Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns. It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color. Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word. But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue. It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”. And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.
Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.
I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do. I certainly was. I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue. My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing. I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word. I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there. But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true. The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded. I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls. My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters. She is left handed and also gifted at drawing. I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.
Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.
Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about. But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about. And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases. It is not a bad condition to have. In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing. I could use some good for a change. Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway. (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).
A Phone Call From the End of the World
I can hear you thinking as you read, “Oh, no! That fool Mickey is going to prophecy the end of the world again.” But… No, I’m not.
Things like the Biblical Book of Revelations are really just vague lists of things that probably will happen in the future no matter what we do, woven together by fantasies about how the fairy tales of Judeo-Christian religion fit together like puzzle pieces that you must pound into place.
My predictions from the End of the World are only about my personal world coming to an end. You see, I am a 65-year-old man in poor health with six incurable health conditions and having been a cancer survivor since 1983. Realistically, if I manage to live as long as my mother did, I have twenty-two years left. But I developed diabetes at age 48 while she didn’t develop hers until she was older than 65.. That could easily take away 17 years from the equation, meaning I only have five years left.
So, when I got the phone call from future me at the end of time… my end of time, not the whole world’s, I was asked to list the things I needed to get done before I died. I came up with a simple list.
- I needed to get out of debt so I would leave no tragic burdens to my family.
- I needed to write and publish my best novel ideas (Snow Babies, Catch a Falling Star, Sing Sad Songs, and the Baby Werewolf.)
- I need to face the truth about myself being a victim of sexual assault during childhood, and my deep desire to become a nudist.
- I need to raise my three children to adulthood.
- I need to live a life that is worthy.
Looking at my to-do list realistically, I don’t really have any big worries.
- I paid off my Chapter 13 Bankruptcy in December of 2021.
- All four of those stories (originally titled; Nobody’s Babies, the Star Child, Little-Boy Crooner, and the Baby Werewolf) are now published along with 17 other books.
- And I have been told to shut up about these things in my blog, which I probably won’t do, but I have shared all of my deepest, darkest secrets already.
- My children are now 27, 23, and 20.
- And all I have left to do is reach the day of my death without doing anything horrible, evil, or criminal.
So, my personal Book of Revelations have no birds pecking at my dead eyeballs, and no real indication that I am headed for Hell and an eternity of torment like the Baptists, Catholics, and Mormons all told me they want me to.
I do worry about the rest of you though. Nuclear War, Environmental Collapse, Wars of Armageddon, Dogs and Cats living together…. Well, I can’t give you any positive insights about all of that. But I am one of those crazy old men now who go about wearing the sandwich boards that say, “The End of the World is Near!!” And I am not afraid anymore… or particularly worried about anything.
Filed under Uncategorized
Comic Strips Can Make Me Cry
I have been a cartoon nut for a long, long time. I think it goes back to a time before I really have memories. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know who Cat in the Hat was, or that Pogo was a possum and Albert was an alligator, or that Daisy Mae constantly had to chase Lil’ Abner afore they could git hitched. And I have always known that cartoons and comic strip characters weren’t real. But there were a few times in life when comic strips made me cry. Am I really that much of pansy that I wilt in the face of cartoon tragedy? Yes. Whole-heartedly!
Take for instance Tom Batiuk’s long-running spoof of teenagers and life in high school, Funky Winkerbean. One of the first things that makes this comic special is that the characters have lives that expand into the deepening depths behind the daily gag and four-panel strip. They grow and age. Les Moore (the geeky kid with the dark hair and nerd glasses, the character I most identified with) grew up to become an English teacher in the same high school where he had to deal with the issue of teen pregnancy. Lisa, the girl he liked, was pregnant. Les helped her go through the pregnancy and give the child up for adoption, and then eventually married Lisa. Les would go on to raise his daughter with Lisa and then have to live with the fact that the child Lisa gave away wanted to find his real mother.
The strip added layer after layer to the over-all story, making me feel like I knew these people. Funky turned his after-school job at Montoni’s Pizza into a partnership and a career as a restaurateur. Les would. like me, become a teacher and a writer. Crazy would go on to be a postman and… well, Crazy. And then the story added more layers by not always being funny. I cried when Wally Winkerbean stepped on the mine in Afghanistan and I thought he was dead. I cried again when Wally’s wife, Becky, moved on and married again. And then, there was what happened with Lisa…
The artist himself had a bout with cancer. He. like me, was turned into a cancer survivor. It chills the bones and changes you on the inside to have a doctor tell you that you have cancer and it is malignant. And it became a part of the story. Lisa became first a breast cancer survivor, and then… sadly… a victim. She died of cancer. Her husband, Les, took up the cause and started the Lisa’s Legacy Walk for the Cure which he pursued religiously every October. And Tom Batiuk made it real. You can donate real money to the real Lisa’s Legacy Fund. It is a cancer fund and fund-raising event that honors the struggle and death of a fictional character. It makes me cry again at this moment. They are real people to me, too, Tom.
…And it doesn’t end with Funky Winkerbean. Today’s re-blog of Stories From Around the World’s post does an absolutely wonderful job of encapsulating the essence of Lynn Johnston’s family comedy strip For Better or for Worse. This engaging story of a family who also grows up, changes, and shifts from one generation to the next also tore my heart out with the un-funny episode where the dog, Farley, saves youngest daughter April from drowning and then expires from the effort, dying a hero’s death. Another memory that causes me tears even today.
I do not regret reading comic strips. My life is richer for all the second-hand and third-hand experiences they have given me. Not just Popeye and Pogo and Beetle Baily making me laugh, but comic strips that make me weep as well.
Filed under cartoons, comic strips, humor
He Rose on a Golden Wing… Canto 10
Weeping violins were playing on Mom’s kitchen radio as she had it playing something from the classical music station in Des Moines. The announcer said something about the music being composed by a Venetian master, Tomaso Albinoni, in the 18th Century, and now being known as being synonymous with sorrow and sadness. As Valerie placed the spoons and the forks, she felt like it was the perfect background music for her entire life.
“So, Rance, be honest with me,” Mom said. “Did Val apologize to Dash for the misery she caused him at the dance?”
“Well, she made a promise to him about what she would never do again.”
“That’s not the whole truth,” said Valerie.
“Oh? Why don’t you explain your version of the conversation then,” said Uncle Rance with a smile that seemed somehow sad.
“Uncle Dash was afraid I was being like Stacey, that I was going to run away and never come back.”
“And what did you tell him about that?” Mom asked point blank.
Tim and Aunt Jen sat silently at their places at the table. They were both looking at her with unsmiling lips tightly pressed together… as if they feared the answer.
“You know what a cardinal is, right?”
“The little red song bird?”
“Yes, the bright red bird we often see in the snow around Christmastime. The one that doesn’t fly away when the winter comes? Never migrates? Never flies away from the cold, and the wind, and hard times?”
“What does that mean? That you promise not to run away from your problems?”
“Well, if a little red songbird can do it…”
Mom put her hand over her eyes. Was she crying? Had she said the wrong thing?
”Do you have any idea how much what you did probably hurt your Uncle Dash? You know he loved your Daddy very much. And he’s tried so hard to be like a father to you since…” A sob caught in Mom’s throat.
“She told Dash that she didn’t blame him. She blamed herself.” Uncle Rance had no right to say that part out loud. But… she couldn’t say it herself. Not after shouting it in front of Charlotte and the whole world. Why didn’t they just talk about it all behind her back like normal parents do?
“Did you know that Tim kissed Dilsey on his date? Did he tell you that?” She knew that one wasn’t hers to tell. But she needed to change the topic. Needed it desperately. She could always apologize to the king of brats later.
Tim was grinning at that.
“Is it true?” Aunt Jen asked, smiling for the first time in a while.
“How did you know that, Val?” Tim asked.
“Dilsey told me.”
“Was she bragging… or complaining?”
“What do you think, Lothario?”
“More like Romeo, I think.”
“I hope you didn’t do something you didn’t have her permission to do,” said Uncle Rance.
“You know, Val, I wasn’t done with the other topic yet,” said Mom.
“What topic would that be?”
“You are not the only one who was devastated by what your father did.”
“I know that, Mom. I was here when we lived through all of that… more than once, I think.”
She hadn’t taken the hand away from her eyes since she first put it there.
“I love you, Val. You know that, right?”
“I love you too, Mom.”
“And you know I worry about the fact that suicide might run in families… I’ve thought about it. And I am afraid you have too. Can you…?”
“Promise you?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t. But I am like the cardinal, Mom. And suicide is a form of running away.”
At that point, nobody had dry eyes but Valerie.
“I… I want you to write the thing about cardinals down for me, Val. I need that in writing.”
All Val could do was nod, or she would be bawling too.
“Well, now that we have all ruined our appetites, maybe we should think about actually eating something,” said Uncle Rance with a soft chuckle and tears still in his eyes.
The dinner changed into a rather quiet discussion about more normal family things, and Dilsey and Tim’s first kiss. And, sporadically, some roast beef and mashed potatoes was eaten too.
Later, as the Kelloggs were leaving, Tim stood in front of Valerie at the door. Tears glistened in his eyes again.
“You know, Val, I really liked the cardinal thing too. Blueberry is in the hospital. One of my Pirates is very ill.”
“Dilsey told me about that too.”
“Did she tell you we need to visit her? There are hard winter times coming our way there too.”
“We’ll be there for her, I promise.”
She wrapped him in a hug then. The first time in a very long time. He didn’t resist. If anything, he was hugging her back.
Filed under battling depression, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Baseball Season
Every Spring is a new beginning, a new hope, a new chance to win the pennant.
When the baseball season starts fresh each year, it renews me, makes feel like I have another chance to make things happen and conquer the world again. It makes me feel alive again… even now when I am old and retired and in constant pain.
People say to me, “Baseball is boring and slow and not as great a game as…” and then they try to tell me stuff about football and soccer and NBA basketball. I’m not buying it, even when it is my eldest son selling it.
Baseball became my sport when I was a child in the 1960’s. Great Grandpa Raymond was a frail and ancient man then, too elderly to share much of anything with me as I was young and full of energy. But on Sunday afternoons in Spring and Summer, we listened to the Minnesota Twins play baseball on the radio. I heard Harmon Killebrew hit homers and Tony Oliva make game-winning hits. I learned that the game was about numbers and strategy… a team game, yet filled with moments of man versus man, star of one team facing off against the star of another, skill versus skill, willpower versus willpower. I learned that baseball was a fundamental metaphor for how we live our lives.
I remember when Bob Gibson was the greatest pitcher in baseball, and he played an entire career with my favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals. I remember Lou Brock setting the record for stealing bases in a single season, a monumental accomplishment. I actually saw Lou Brock steal a base in a game against the Houston Astros, though not in the record-setting year. I was there in person. I listened to Bob Gibson’s no hitter of the Pittsburgh Pirates on the radio, listening in a campground in St. Louis while the Cardinals actually played in Pittsburgh. I didn’t get to see Stan Musial play ball. He retired before I first became aware of the game. But he was on TV quite a lot on game day, and I hung on every word.
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Baseball has gotten me through some very rough times in my life. I used to play ball, baseball and softball. I was a center fielder for our 4-H team and made some game-saving catches in the field, hit a home run once, and once saved a game for our side when I threw out a runner at home plate from center field. And I have religiously followed the Cardinals year after year. In 2011, when health problems and family problems and depression threatened to destroy me… the Cardinals won the World Series in seven hard-fought games. When you reach a moment of crisis, with the game on the line, you can reach deep inside for that old baseball player magic… tell yourself, “I will not lose this day!” and find the power within you to make that throw, get that hit, catch that long fly ball…
Baseball is a connection to family and friends… teammates… everyone who has ever shared the love of the game. If you don’t win it all this time… there’s always next Spring. God, I love baseball.
Filed under baseball, humor, inspiration, Paffooney
Think About It
Life is a matter of mind, not matter.
What do I mean by saying something stupid like that?
Did you stop and think about it? Did it change who you are to think what you thought about it?
Why not?
Was it because you are committed in your mind to not be changed by a question you are asked to think about?
This is Bobby and me as boys at the skinny-dipping pond.
But is it really? Are we really naked if you can’t see whether we are wearing swimsuits or not?
Boys really only have to cover one small thing to not be naked, right? Is being naked just a perception? Can you be naked with all your clothes on?
And how can this really be me and Bobby? It is merely a picture, and pictures you draw are mere interpretations, and if it is an interpretation, can it be considered real? Boys of this age were not allowed to wear their hair this long in the 1960’s, so does that make it less real?
And why is there a mountain range in the background? We grew up in Iowa, and are there any mountains like that in Iowa?
This is the boy who might’ve been my son if I had married a different girlfriend.
Does this have something to do with Charles Lamb’s essay Dream Children?
Why am I thinking about children who are not my children? Why is every picture in colored pencil and a picture of boys rather than girls?
Why does an author and artist think any of the things he or she thinks?
Why is this post mostly made up of questions? Does it show how people really think? Is it really the Socratic Method?
Is it possible that this is some form of poetry? Designed to make people think?
Spacey Stories
I am usually considered a Sci-fi and Fantasy author when anybody tries to categorize me. I learned to write during the 70’s when Tolkien and Michael Moorcock and Frank Herbert were growing bigger, and Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov were gods. Of course, I also have the YA-thing hanging around my neck like a bell. I learned to tell stories being a dungeon master for middle-school and high-school boys back in the eighties. And because it was Texas with a deeply-held and violently-enforced religious fear of anything with demons in it, I was forced to change my role-playing games from sword and sorcery to science-fiction. I played endless Saturday-afternoon Traveller games that could span parsecs and light-years in a single afternoon. And I was one of those game-masters who used humor to build a campaign and keep the players engaged and interested. We had epic space battles and conquered large swaths of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy. When I began turning my Traveller games into fiction, I used the personalities of the boys who played the game with me for characters in the stories. I often used the same plots (applying considerable polish to portions of plot where… well, you know… teenage boys, not remarkably G-rated.) I created things that made me and some of the players laugh, and even feel sad… with deep, cathartic effects, as if we had experienced those things in real life. (The deaths of favorite characters and tragic failures of galaxy-saving plans come quickly to mind.)
I enjoy practically everything Sci-Fi, from Flash Gordon, to Buck Rodgers, to Star Trek and Star Wars… I loved Mechwarrior books and comic-book Sci-Fi like Adam Strange, Hawkworld, and Guardians of the Galaxy (the old ones that came before Groot and Rocket Raccoon). I let it warp and weave my imagination and the imaginary worlds that blossomed from it.
And the ideas continued to morph and change and become stories that I really had to tell.
My first published novel, Aeroquest is a compilation of old Traveller adventures. I published it well before it was ready for market and used a cheap-o publisher that wasn’t worth the free price-tag, They gave me no editorial help and apparently didn’t even read the novel. I will not defame them by name here, but if they sound to you like Publish America… well, there might be a reason.
I love stories about time travel and sci-fi gadgets… trans-mats and starships and meson cannons and sentient plants… oh, my!
And now that I have revealed that I have such a massive nerd-head that I really ought to own Comicon by now, I hope you will not suddenly turn me off and read my blog no more. I can’t help it. I was born that way… and any child doomed to be born in the 50’s and a child in the space-race 60’s was bound to have George-Lucas levels of Sci-Fi nerdism.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, science fiction
Catch a Falling Star 
An Unexpected Gift
This post is a movie review for Thor : Ragnarok , though I don’t really plan on talking about the movie very much. It was an excellent comic book movie in the same tongue-in-cheek comedy tradition as Guardians of the Galaxy. It made me laugh and made me cheer. It was the best of that kind of movie. But it wasn’t the most important thing that happened that night.
You see, I spent the weekend in the hospital thinking I had suffered a heart attack during the Thanksgiving holiday. I thought I was facing surgery at the very least. I knew I might have had an appointment to play chess with the Grim Reaper. It is a lot to worry about and drain all the fun out of life.
Well, one of the things that happened that day, Tuesday, my first full day out of the hospital and, hopefully, out of the woods over heart attacks, was that I received my new replacement bank card because my old one had a worn out, malfunctioning chip in it. So, I took my three kids to the movie at the cheapest place we could find. I tried to run my bank card for the payment, and it was summarily declined. I had activated it previously during the day, and there was plenty of money in the account compared to the price, but it just wouldn’t take. So I had to call Wells Fargo to find out whatever the new reason was for them to hate me. It turned out that it had already been activated, but a glitch had caused it to decline the charge. While I was talking to the girl from the Wells Fargo help desk, the lady who had gotten her and her husband’s tickets right before us put four tickets to the movie in my hand.
The middle-aged black couple had lingered by the ticket stand before going in to their movie just long enough to see a sad-looking old man with raggedy author’s beard and long Gandalf hair get turned down by the cheap-cinema ticket-taking teenager because the old coot’s one and only bank card was declined. They were moved to take matters into their own hands and paid for our tickets themselves.
That, you see, was the gift from my title. Not so much that we got our movie tickets for free, but that the world still works that way. There are still good people with empathetic and golden hearts willing to step in and do things to make the world a little bit better place. The gift they gave me was the reassurance that, as bad and black as the world full of fascists that we have come to live in has become, it still has goodness and fellow feeling in it. People are still moved to pay things forward and make good on the promise to “love one another”. I did not have a chance to thank them properly. I was on the phone with Wells Fargo girl when it happened. The only thing that couple got out of their good deed was thank-yous from my children and the knowledge that they had done something wonderful. I plan to pay it forward as soon as I have the opportunity. Not out of guilt or obligation, but because I need to be able to feel that feeling too at some point.
I do have one further gift to offer the world.
After we got home from the movie, I opened an email that contained the cover proof for my novel, Magical Miss Morgan. Soon I will have that in print also if I can keep Page Publishing from messing it up at the last moments before printing. It is a novel about what a good teacher is and does. It is the second best thing I have ever written.
Sometimes the gifts that you most desperately need come in unexpected fashion.
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Filed under commentary, compassion, happiness, healing, humor, illness, movie review, NOVEL WRITING, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as gifts of love, goodness in people, paying it forward, Thor Ragnarok