I have been very prolific as a writer in the last couple of years. 2020, though a really dark and bitter year, saw me complete a bunch of writing projects.
Starting with the most recent finished writing project, Mickey’s Rememberries is a compilation of Catch a Falling Star blog-post essays chosen to represent all my teacher/school stories, my numerous conspiracy theory opinions, my personal history, the death of my father from Parkinson’s Disease, and pithy observations connecting the past world to the present world. I published it on Amazon as a self-published work of autobiographical non-fiction essays, with some original cartoons thrown in for good measure.
Before that, this summer, I finished and published The Wizard in his Keep. This novel is the endpoint of character arcs that began in the novel Superchicken, set in 1974. Two of the original kids’ liars’ club known as the Norwall Pirates, one who has become an FBI agent trying to find his sister’s kids who have been missing since their parents’ fatal car crash, the other a video-game designer who has those kids hidden away in a virtual-reality game-world that has all gone wrong with government interference. It is a rollicking science-fiction adventure that reunites two boys who were once best friends and possibly turns them into enemies as their objectives begin to clash.
Before that came Laughing Blue, the first book of essays inspired by Robert Fulgham’s Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.
Like the Rememberries book, it is made up of essays that appeared first here on my blog, Catch a Falling Star.
It is about becoming a teacher, becoming a Christian Existentialist, becoming a nudist, and being able to make the best out of everything, including the time I was sexually assaulted as a ten-year-old child. And all of it is basically done with humor rather than anger… even for those people on my list of who I am going to seriously haunt when I die and become a ghost writer. Oh, and cartoons for good measure here as well.
In June, before the essay book, I published the third in my AeroQuest series of humorous science fiction, AeroQuest 3 : Juggling Planets. This is a product of my Tuesday novel-writing posts that shares with you how the novel is progressing Canto by Canto, whether it is rewriting, or possibly entirely new writing. It is a story with lots of characters, lots of planets, lots of alien beings, lots of space ninjas, space cowboys, space pirates, Space Smurfs, space samurai, space nudists, and a White Spider of Prophecy who will weave together a web of interstellar civilization.
A Field Guide to Fauns was finished and then published in April. It is a story about a boy coming to live in the San Antonio area with his father, his step-mother, and twin step-sisters after the death of his mother.
The problem for Devon is, his new family lives in a residential nudist park, and they expect him to be a nudist too.
This book is beginning to become popular among the nudists I know from Twitter. It is probably not a book for everyone, but you never know. If you read it, it may surprise you too.
The first book I published in 2020 was…
actually the re-publishing of my book Magical Miss Morgan. It had been previously published by Page Publishing Company. But, since they don’t actually do anything for an author but print the book and think of new things to charge the author for, I reclaimed my manuscript and the rights to it, giving myself more control and less expense over everything.
You can see that I am not really bragging about six books written in 2020. I came into the year with the first half of A Field Guide to Fauns already written. AeroQuest 3 was two thirds done while I plodded along at a chapter every Tuesday. The Wizard in His Keep was the only book written entirely in 2020. But six books in one year all published is a special case. I still have more stories stored away in my writer’s closet that only need to be rewritten or revised, and a ton more in the mental closet in the mandatory mental-scape in my stupid old head. But I doubt I will ever publish six in one year again.
Catch a Falling Star 