Sometimes I don’t believe in the magic I believe in… Er, well, it is something like that. I mean, things happen in life that you never imagine could be possible. Some things are unbelievably bad, and others are unbelievably good. For instance, the Cardinals lost their last two football games. They had an amazing year with eleven wins and a spot in the playoffs, but the @#&$$!!! St. Louis Rams broke their first AND their second string quarterbacks in that last win they won. No more wins for this year barring a playoff miracle. And I had been developing a heart problem since we went to San Diego in October to see my son graduate from Marine boot camp. I have been waking up every night with heartbeat arrhythmia… at least, that’s what I thought it was, and what the doctor suspected it was… but it wasn’t. I went in yesterday to get the bad news from the cardiologist, and he showed me test results that proved my heart is totally healthy and beating normally. Apparently I was being fooled by muscle spasms in my chest caused by arthritis in my rib-cage. Don’t that beat all? Bullwinkle shows us there is nothing up his sleeve, reaches in into the magic hat expecting to pull out a lion, and we get a little white rabbit.
Monthly Archives: December 2014
Watch Me Pull a Rabbit Out of My Hat!
2014 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,200 times in 2014. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.
Filed under Uncategorized
Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In
There is a place so like the place where my heart and mind were born that I feel as if I have always lived there. That place is a cartoon panel that ran in newspapers throughout the country from 1913 to 1955 (a year before I was born in Mason City, Iowa). It was called Toonerville Folks and was centered around the famous Toonerville Trolley.
Fontaine Fox was born near Louisville Kentucky in 1884. Louisville, of course is one of the two cities that claims to be the inspiration for Toonerville. Apparently the old Brook Street Line Trolley in Louisville was always run-down, operating on balls of twine and bailing wire for repair parts. The people of Pelham, New York, however, point to a trolley ride Fox took in 1909 on Pelham’s rickety little trolley car with a highly enterprising and gossip-dealing old reprobate for a conductor. No matter which it was, Fox’s cartoon mastery took over and created Toonerville, where you find the famous trolley that “meets all trains”.
I didn’t learn of the comic strip’s existence until I was in college, but once I found it (yes, I am the type of idiot who researches old comics in university libraries), I couldn’t get enough of it. Characters like the Conductor, the Powerful (physically) Katrinka, and the terrible-tempered Mr. Bang can charm the neck hair off of any Midwestern farm-town boy who is too stupid to regret being born in the boring old rural Midwest.
I fancied myself to be just like the infamous Mickey (himself) McGuire. After all, we have the same first name… and I always lick any bully or boob who wants to put up a fight (at least in my daydreams).
So, this is my tribute to the cartoonist who probably did more to warp my personality and make me funny (well, at least easy to laugh at! ) than any other influence. All of the cartoons in this post can be credited to Fontaine Fox. And all the people in them can be blamed on Toonerville, the town I used to live in, though I never really knew it until far too late.
Filed under art my Grandpa loved, artists I admire, cartoons, Toonerville
The Next Little Project
All right, the time has come to figure out what to write next. I have another thirty-plus-year-old writing project that would make an absolutely, terrifically horrible novel that I want to try to tame. I have a cartoonized version created back when I was young and stupid… in about 1981, before the invention of the graphic novel. It is in full color. It was done before I learned how to draw. It is a book that will now go under the ridiculously alliterated title The Captain Came Calling.
The novel is set, like all of my hometown stories, in Norwall, Iowa… The fictionalized version of Rowan, the town I actually grew up in. It isn’t quite as dorky in real life as it appears in my cutsified illustration, but it is approaching it at glacial speeds.
The town’s portrayal will have to change as I attempt to update and clarify characters.
The people have to be switched about. Phyllis Murphy has to become Mary Murphy. The Pirates will have to switch from the 90’s Pirates to the 80’s Pirates, as the main character, Mary Phillips has to create a new Pirates’ Club that didn’t exist when I first wrote this bilge. I have to update and increase the plot, adding the back-story through the inclusion of the Captain’s Logbook… How else can I get mermaids and the voodoo priest into the story otherwise?
I also have to be a little bit more politically correct about the portrayal of the tiki-idol-men. South Seas’ Magic can’t be racist or misogynist. And then there’s the whole thing about Captain Dettbarn’s less-than-Iowegian morals that has to be dealt with. He’s basically a clown character, not a villain.
And the Captain is cursed with invisibility. That is no small thing to pull off in work of fantasy fiction in a Young Adult style. It has to be believable enough to make the audience accept it, even if it is a comedy caper of the lowest sort.
Filed under cartoons, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Toy Tiger
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright!
I see thee holy in the night,
This for that, and that for this,
Shoot the gun,
And never miss!
A sillier poem there will never be,
And Tyger! Tyger! this poem’s for thee.
The first stuffed toy I ever owned was a tiger. It was almost as big as me the first time I remember it. I got it from Mom and Dad sometime before I started remembering things in my life.
When my oldest son was born I bought him a stuffed toy tiger. It was bigger than he was at the start. I don’t know why, but now that my son is a Marine in dress blues, looking spiffy and military trained… It just seemed important to remember a toy tiger.
School Is Out For Miss Morgan
I have done it. I wrote the final scenes in my story of the school teacher who loves to teach and runs afoul of fairies fighting a war of good versus evil. The epilogue put the cherry on top last night, so I actually finished this book on Christmas Day 2014. I have great plans for this book. It is the best thing I have ever written. I based the lessons presented and the teacher experiences on my own teaching career. I transformed myself into the viewpoint character, Miss Morgan, though I did not actually have the sex change operation. The fairies are all based on real fairies I have known… as are the students in Miss Morgan’s classes… based on real students, I mean. The evil principals, teachers, and parents in the story are totally fictional. Yes, I have to keep telling myself that to prevent nightmares. I don’t know about the goblins. It’s hard to get to know critters you are spending your life stepping on and wiping out. I hope a few people read this book one day. I think it is one of the greatest pieces of literature ever to come out of a Midwesterner who moved to Texas and became a school teacher for 31 years before losing his mind, wigging out, and believing he could become a published author writing great pieces of literature.
Filed under artwork, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, teaching
Dickens of a Season!
I shared this Paffooney last year too. I don’t really celebrate Christmas any more, but I do believe in the self-sacrificing love that informs Bob Cratchit, and is so obvious that it converts Ebeneezer Scrooge. There in lies the “reason for the season”.
Reading Assignments
Yesterday I revealed that I have no earthly clue how to be a best-selling author with a blog and a brand and all those other things that marketing racketeers keep pettifogging at me about. I may not know anything about marketing and being an author, but I do know how to be a writer. I have learned to say things flat out when they are on my mind and I know how to do the two essential things that a writer has to know how to do… I can practice writing every day, and I can read.
If you are one of those few who actually read my blog regularly, you may remember some talk about the classic novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Believe it or not, I know how to read and understand great books. You can find me on Goodreads.com to see some of the wonderful things I have been reading, and to decide if you might like them too. If you are not on Goodreads already, why not? That is now your next assignment, young reader. Oops. You know what they say, “Old English teachers never die, they just lose their class.”
Today’s little self-imposed book report is about a book that I read my senior year in high school, 1975. It is called The Other by Thomas Tryon. It is a book that was made into a movie. The author is also a Hollywood actor that has been in many films. He wrote the screenplay for the movie version. But I have to tell you, the movie pales in comparison to the book itself. Movies simply cannot give you the rich depth of atmosphere and the delicate psychological nuances that a book can. Movies show you something. A book can explain something in detail. And that is a key difference.
Filed under book review, NOVEL WRITING
How to Rip Your Own Heart Out in Three Easy Steps
Okay, I do admit that the title is entirely misleading and wholly inaccurate, but it got you wondering… Didn’t it? I have apparently developed tachycardia, a condition where the heart races and beats like a jackhammer plugged into a nuclear reactor. It is not fatal in itself, though it may lead to heart attack or stroke which are definitely in the fatal category. Yesterday I did two things about that little heart condition, one which hopefully helped, and another which definitely hurt. So, let me tell you a fairy tale.
No kidding. It is a fairy tale about novel writing, feeling like a murderer, and cardiologists.
Step one… I went to the cardiologist in Plano, Texas. I have had a heart monitor taped to my chest for three weeks. I have to push the record button three or four times every night. The tachycardia is a night-stalker, hitting me while I’m asleep. Then it shakes me awake, makes me sweat and fret and try to decide if I need to go to the emergency room or not. I lie awake worrying just long enough that when I awake in the morning I am a sleepless, colorless zombie that feels the need to stay in bed all day, but can’t for fear the heart problem will attack again at any moment. The heart monitor itself likes to complain and make a nasty beeping noise to irritate my sleep-deprived brain, and the places where the electrodes are taped to my chest are so itchy from three weeks of sticky plastic thingies stuck to them that I want to claw my own skin off.
At the cardiologists office, I had a sonogram done. They used sound waves to map out what my beating heart looked like and how the blood was flowing through it in daylight. The objective was to make certain that there were no holes or lumps or discarded candy wrappers in there that would require surgery. So I got probed with a hot sonogram beeper offset with cold contact gel, and wouldn’t you know it… I didn’t even get to take the heart monitor off for the procedure. No rest for wicked, itchy chests. But on the up side, I did not at any point notice the technician shaking her head sadly or calling for an ambulance. There were no immediate negative results to the testing. So now I get to fight tachycardia some more without knowing anything more about my condition until the doctor explains on December 30th.
Step Two… I am using my down time to continue writing my NaNoWriMo novel, The Magical Miss Morgan, which I didn’t finish in November. It is a story about a sixth grade English teacher based on personal experience, when I taught sixth graders myself and was a woman… wait, that can’t be right. Is it possible that tachycardia effects the brain after a while? The novel has a number of characters who are fairies. 
(I did say this was based on real life experiences, didn’t I?) The fairies get involved with an irate parent, trying to help the teacher who has befriended them, and I am at the critical part of the plot where a crisis point is reached and a murder is about to take place. (The usual for parent-teacher conferences.) Anyway the conflict comes to a boil, and though the murder is prevented, a fairy is killed in the prevention of it. And it isn’t just any fairy. It is my favorite among all the foofy little buggers. I wrote that part on Monday and edit it into permanence yesterday.
Step Three… I spent half an hour crying my eyes out. I know it is not normal to be so affected by the unexpected death of a beloved character, but I can blame it on the tachycardia. It kept me awake so much, and I am such a sleep-deprived zombie-writer that it is possible that I dreamed the whole thing. I may discover when I reread it for a fourth time that the fairy character didn’t die after all. Except… no, wait… that’s not what it says. I need to finish this up now so that I can go on another half-hour crying jag. I have no one to blame except myself. And I can’t even write the character back to life (though I may try) because the scene is just too good the way it is. Oh, well… hopefully soon the cardiologist can give me a magic pill to make everything all better.
Filed under artwork, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 