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”.
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
If you have looked carefully at my blog and tried to make sense of it, you have probably noticed that sense is hard to make. It certainly makes no cents. Though, I am told by my writer and publisher friends that a blog is critical to marketing books, I really and truly have not figured out how. I am guessing here, but successful authors must do what they love in their blogs and hope that leads people to think seriously about buying a book with their name on it. But will people ever want the frabjous daylight that makes them say “caloo calay!” from my burbling books filled with nonsense and purple paisley prose?
Maybe I need to clarify what I write about. Hmm, how do I do that? I end up with such a plethora of scattered categories… err cattered scattergories… err, no… right the first time, that no one can make a mental framework that accurately describes my work… including me. But I have to try… even if it kills me… but if it wants to kill me, I already have six incurable diseases (maybe seven) and am a cancer survivor, so it will have to take a number and get in line.
The bird-word post I did yesterday is what I call humor. It is pun-ish if not punny, but possibly pun-ishable. I like word play and word pictures and rhymes and alliteration, all the stuff that my serious writer friends warn me against. Mark Twain, whom I actually deeply respect, says “When considering the adjective, cut it out!” But I find myself unable to do that. I have to spread the adjectives on two or three layers thick like butter, jam, and peanut butter. I never use one word for something when I can use seven. So part of the style that is mine is excessively goopy phraseology. I guess I write like I talk and, since it’s humor, I actively try to talk funny.
What else can I say is characteristic of what I do? Well I was a teacher for three hundred and ten years (possibly divisible by ten). That may have impacted the way I write and what I write about. I am pigeon-holed in the Young Adult novel genre because I write mainly about school age, particularly junior-high-aged, kids… Their problems with corresponding creative solutions, and the kind of things that make them laugh (there’s a lot of pigeons in that hole!). Education issues are important to me. That is probably the key reason that the novel I am working on today, The Magical Miss Morgan, is about a classroom teacher. I hope that doesn’t limit me to an entirely kid-audience, because adults have the book-buying money, and not every adult gives in to a kid whining about wanting to buy a book (because most kids don’t and there are adults who don’t have kids). (Besides, says another aside, kids is really little goats who eat books before they read them).
Finally, I am a student of art. I search for it, chew on it, digest it, rearrange it in my heart and guts, and spit it back out with colored pencils (Dang! I must be a kid too, at least at heart). In my blog I have written about and shared with you Norman Rockwell, Paul Detlafsen, Thomas Kinkade, Maxfield Parrish, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Frederick Remington. I know of a few more like George Herriman, Cliff Sterrit, and E.C, Segar that I am compelled to write about too. Oh, and N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Milt Caniff. Uh-oh, better stop before another list comes on. So, in conclusion, this whole mess will never really be concluded and since it’s convoluted, it will get all mangled up and end up back where it began. I have tried to make sense out of everything, but instead I’ve just made soup… or if I take out the broth… stew!
I recently broke out my old Talislanta Dungeons and Dragons book. It contains drawings from the late 80’s and early 90’s in which the never-ending adventure went to the world of Talislanta where there are no elves or dwarves or goblins. The primary enemy were the beast men. They inhabited the great plains in the middle of the world. They were ravenous, and mostly evil… but a few were adopted as heroes and heroes’ companions. Here’s a look at the good guys and bad guys I found in the Plains of the Beastmen of Golarin.
Filed under artwork, colored pencil, drawing, Dungeons and Dragons, heroes
Back in about 1968 my Grandma Beyer was seriously scandalized by an artist named Paul Detlefsen. Detlefsen did a lot of covers for the “Ideals Magazine” that Grandma always had on her coffee tables. He scandalized her by putting a painting on the cover that showed a young boy taking his pants off, the rear view only, so he could go skinny dipping with a group of naked boys. Truthfully the picture shown above is by Detelfsen, but it is not the one that offended her. I have discovered that this painter of old-timey things like blacksmith shops and one-room school houses has painted at least four different versions of “the Old Swimmin’ Hole”. And Grandma was easily scandalized when we were kids. She was a very conservative woman who loved Ronald Reagan and his politics most severely and thought that Richard Nixon was a leftist radical. She didn’t like for people to be naked, except for bath time, and maybe not even then. She is one of the main reasons, along with this painter whom she adored, that I came to learn later in life that “naked is funny”.
http://www.freeplaypost.com/PaulDetlefsen_VintageArtPrint_A.htm
Grandma Beyer also seriously loved puzzles, and besides “Ideals” covers, Paul Detlefsen did a beaucoup of jigsaw puzzles. (Beaucoup means a lot in Texican, I tend to think in Iowegian and talk in Texican and completely forget about the need to translate for those people who don’t know those two foreign tongues) One of the puzzles we spent hours working on was “Horse and Buggy Days” that I pictured here. They were the kind of puzzle paintings where every boy was Tom Sawyer and every girl was Becky Thatcher. And there were a lot of them. Here is another;
http://www.bigredtoybox.com/cgi-bin/toynfo.pl?detlefsenindex
Grandma had this in puzzle form also. We put the puzzle together, glued it to tag board, and framed it. It has hung on the wall in a Grandparent’s house, first Grandma Beyer’s and then Grandma Aldrich’s, since the early 1970’s. My own parents now live in Grandma Aldrich’s house, and that puzzle-painting may be hanging in an upstairs bedroom to this very day. Detlefsen is not known as a great artist. He was a humble painter who painted backdrops for films for over 20 years. In the 1950’s he switched gears and started doing lithographs that were turned into calendars, jigsaw puzzles, laminated table mats, playing cards, and reproductions you could buy in the Ben Franklin Dime Store in Belmond, Iowa and hang on your back porch at home. I believe I saw his paintings in all these forms in one place or another. According to Wikipedia (I know, research, right?) “In 1969, UPI estimated that his artwork had been seen by 80 per cent of all Americans.” That is pretty dang good for a humble painter, better numbers than Pablo Picasso ever saw. Let me share a few more of his works, and see if you recognize any of these;
Filed under art criticism, art my Grandpa loved, artwork, homely art, oil painting
In Catch a Falling Star, the only good novel I have actually in print so far, I have a race of aliens called the Tellerons. They are an unusual sort of green men from Mars. They are green,and they have a base on Mars, but they are from a distant star system in the local group and the swampy world called Telleri that orbits that far star. The ones in my book come from the space station their empire established in the Barnard’s Star system, where the characters in my stories were all born. They are also not men. They are amphibianoid beings, frog people. They have never set foot on the home planet. Here are two aliens who are crucial characters in Catch a Falling Star.
These two are Farbick the Navigator and young Davalon the tadpole. Farbick is a very wise and loving male Telleron who gets foully treated for his racial differences. I know you and I can’t really tell by looking, but his race is Sindalusian Fmoog. You can tell by the yellowish cast to his amphibian face. Oh, and there’s something funny with his ears. Davalon is the son of the Telleron captain, Xiar. He loves Farbick who has been more of a father figure to him than Xiar has. Dav is unusually bright for a Telleron, just as Farbick is recognizably more competent than others of the Fmoogish race. You might actually think, if they were the only two Tellerons you ever met, that their people are highly inquisitive, intelligent, and have no racial prejudices at all. Of course you would be highly incorrect and most sincerely wrong.
I have started work on a sequel to Catch a Falling Star. I am calling it Stardusters and Lizard Men. It follows the crew of Xiar the Slightly Irregular’s Base Ship in their adventures following the invasion of Earth. They accidentally fix the on-board computer systems by correcting a math error in navigation that had been present for more than 100 years of star travel in the Telleron Empire. Of course this means that all of their space coordinates for every destination they know are wrong. And so, without hope of ever returning anywhere else in the universe, they arrive at Galtorr Prime, the planet of the infamous carnivorous reptile people. They will have to colonize or die. And the Galtorrians are just like Earthers, except, they have a society that is even more corrupt, greedy, prejudiced, and hateful (if such a thing is even possible). I hope to show in this story what human society may become on the path we are currently following, so it will be a kind of post-apocalyptic bit of science fiction set on a world that is not Earth.
These two female Telleron tadpoles are Brekka and Menolly. They are dancing to Mickey Mouse Club music because Tellerons, quite naturally, have been totally corrupted by Earther television shows. Galactic English, the language all Tellerons speak, is based on the language of old I Love Lucy television episodes, the favorite show on the home-worlds of the entire empire.
Meet George Jetson. He is named after one of his father’s favorite shows from the 1960’s. He is one of the Telleron tadpoles that will take the lead in exploring the dark and dangerous planet of the lizard-guys.
It doesn’t come in on cat feet.
That’s probably Chicago you’re thinking of.
It comes in on the sound of screeching tires…
and ambulance sirens…
because of all the idiot drivers…
in their silver-gray WASP rockets…
that don’t know how to slow down…
or turn on their low beams…
for safety in the big, cold city of Dallas…
where the air is yellow…
except in the fog…
and rush, rush, rush…
business never waits…
for a foggy day.
I have been a conspiracy-theory nut for some time. Back in the 1970’s, my father and I went to a movie called Chariots of the Gods. It presented the insane theories of Erich von Daniken as if they were fact. It mentioned the Nazca Lines, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, and other ancient wonders and seemed to show depictions of ancient aliens in the art of those cultures. My father and I were convinced by his arguments and thought there really must be something to it. I went to college with a real hunger to learn more.
I was disappointed to learn later that the man was a completely unprofessional, untrained archeologist, and that he may have actually stolen his main thesis for the Chariots book from Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii in their book, Intelligent Life in the Universe. Sagan would go on to say;
“That writing as careless as von Däniken’s, whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times. I also hope for the continuing popularity of books like Chariots of the Gods? in high school and college logic courses, as object lessons in sloppy thinking. I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of von Däniken.”
—Carl Sagan, Foreword to The Space Gods Revealed (quote and citation borrowed from Wikipedia)
So I went through a number of Sagan-influenced years of my life saying that there was no sound reason to believe that out of an infinity of places to visit, interstellar tourists would want to come and visit here. Does a normal, sane tourist want to go to an island full of cannibals? Our movies, after all, always depict us killing, dissecting, or taking advantage of alien visitors.
But then I discovered the whole story of the Roswell, New Mexico crash in 1947. Convinced at one point that the crash really was a Project Mogul weather balloon, I began to discover the work of another alien-visitor-obsessed gentleman by the name of Stanton Friedman. This man is much harder to dismiss. He has a master’s degree in physics and spent fourteen years as a nuclear physicist “for such companies as General Electric (1956–1959), Aerojet General Nucleonics (1959–1963), General Motors (1963–1966), Westinghouse (1966–1968), TRW Systems (1969–1970), and McDonnell Douglas, where he worked on advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and compact nuclear power plants for space applications.[2] Since the 1980s, he has done related consultant work in the radon-detection industry. Friedman’s professional affiliations have included the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and AFTRA.” (quoted from Wikipedia… I know, I know… but this is all verifiable information, not made up or imaginary like von Däniken’s.) He is also the first civilian to investigate the Roswell crash. He began by interviewing the air-base’s intelligence officer during the incident, Major Jesse Marcel.
More and more I became interested in the phenomenon and the people who research it. I have a pretty good list of liars and clowns who talk about aliens, and I will use some of that in a future post. There is comedy gold in that topic.
But I do believe that aliens are real and have visited our planet. I began researching the topic again for my novel, Catch a Falling Star, because it centers on an alien invasion and a clash between incompetent space travelers and single-minded Midwesterners who can’t possibly believe. There are just too many people surfacing with stories to tell about alien encounters, UFO sightings, and government cover-ups. People like Nick Pope, a former Minister from the British government, Paul Hellyer , a former Defense Minister from Canada, Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo astronaut, and numerous technicians and inventors from McDonnell-Douglas and other aircraft manufacturers are coming forward in legions to testify that things like this are very real.
Filed under artwork, colored pencil, Paffooney, tinfoil hats
The more I looked at the silly simpering grin on my old foolish face, the more I realized it needed a few things added. So I added a few of my dream babies. You know, those characters I have created in cartoons and novels who may have started with my own three kids, or kids I grew up with, or kids I taught over the years, but ended up with a large injection of my own mental DNA in their final, fictional selves. So here is a self portrait that I privately refer to by the title “Goofy Me”.
Man, is that ever goofy!
Filed under artwork, cartoons, drawing, self portrait
Catch a Falling Star 