Category Archives: blog posting

January 31, 2019 · 5:24 pm

Videos Now? Really, Mickey?

I suppose it was inevitable, given my spectacularly bad luck at marketing. that I would have to move into new ways of self-promoting and marketing my books. So, I decided I had to move on into the realm of YouTube video blogging. I can handle this, right? It is just talking to people on video. I don’t expect to be as skilled as some of the other content creators you find there, but if I can get some people to be foolish enough to click on my videos, I might… well… you know, sell a book.

My goodness! That was certainly more difficult than I thought it would be. Of course, I only did one take. After all, as a teacher. you don’t normally get do-overs. I know some of you do videos, and you know how to do them a lot smoother than that, and time them better too. But I am trying to teach a really old dog new tricks here. (My age expressed in dog years is 434.) I will get better with practice. And since the first video is always expected to be the worst video, I anticipate having nowhere to go but up.

Well, maybe the second one is worse. I can’t help it. I am old and not exactly media savvy. I know too that video editing software is available to make things better. But I don’t really have the time and money to spare on that right now. Seriously, even five dollars is too much to spend on this blog post. But perhaps it will add to my two huge paychecks from Amazon this month, one of $0.85 and the other at $0.35, to help me afford better in the future. Creativity can help you through a lot of things. But technology you can’t afford ain’t one of them. And I hope you weren’t too badly traumatized by my hairy old face. We’ll try again next week, next Thursday most likely, and hopefully do a bit better.

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November 23, 2018 · 4:49 pm

Blogging Advice

The only advice I am actually qualified to give here is… don’t take any blogging advice from me as worth more than diddly-squoot.

Life is like moose bowling because… In order to knock down all the pins, you have to learn how to throw a moose.

That being said, my blog views are gradually going up year after year.  I am followed by readers all over the world, and some of them actually read my blog regularly, rather than just looking at the pictures and occasionally hitting the like button.

I have not yet, however, learned to throw the moose.  I started this blog in order to promote my published writing.  I now have seven published books available on Amazon.  I made $2.60 in royalties during 2018 so far.  So, as a marketing ploy, it has been a total failure.

But as a tool in my writing life, here are some things I definitely count as benefits;

Writing a blog post every day makes the ideas flow more easily and does away with any threat of writer’s block. 

Writing every day is practice and it makes me a better writer.

I have learned how to engage with an actual audience.

I am able to try out various writing ideas without worrying about success or failure.

So, all of these things add value and keep me at this blogging thing which didn’t exist in my early life when I was planning for becoming a writer when I left teaching.

If you are tempted to make the huge mistake of following my advice and emulating me, I would warn you, I do not make a living as a writer, and I never will.  I am a writer in the same way I am a diabetic.  I can’t help it.  I wouldn’t change it even if it were possible.  I have a body of work that I intend to continue to build on until I am no more.  The creation of it is a necessity of my existence.  And I certainly don’t regret a single syllable, though what happens to it when I am gone is not important to me in any way that matters.  I hope my children will keep it as a legacy, but I only do it because it shapes the story of my life.

And so, I continue to throw meese (or mooses… or moosi… or whatever the hell the funniest plural of “moose” is) and continue not to knock down any pins.

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September 26, 2018 · 4:59 pm

Essential Sorting

The internet is a golden treasure chest with an attached bag of holding for me.  In other words, a lot of the writing I do depends heavily on a resource that didn’t really exist until I was almost 40 years old.  I save stuff from my eclectic surfing forays in computer files that tend to become amazingly complex garbage dumps.  So today, I decided to sort one of them to go through stuff I thought might make an interesting blog post.

So, let me show you some of the treasures I have found that could become upcoming blog posts.   I will go through the sorted files from July of 2018.

The Dragon Prince

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This is a funny, fascinating, D&D-type adventure series from Netflix and the creators of Avatar, the Last Air Bender.

I have recently watched the entire first season, and love this show enough to write a gushing love-review.

Fresh Off the Boat

This is a show on regular TV, the ABC network.  It is about an immigrant family originally from China.  I think I am married to the spiritual twin of the lead female character, an obsessively controlling Asian wife who has to have her fingers in every single pie in the neighborhood.

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It is chocked full of little things that are both bizarre and funny about Asian cultures being assimilated in this country.  And the kids are cute and extremely talented.

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Gene Colan

Gene Colan was one of my favorite comic book artists in the 70’s and 80’s.  I will probably do a more in-depth biography post on him in the future because he really helped me learn to draw in pen and ink.  I copied his work from Daredevil, Howard the Duck, and Tomb of Dracula.  But all of the work I will show you is done not by me, but by Gene.

Miscellany

This is the stuff that didn’t need its own folder.

 

Twitter Nudists

This is one I might not be able to use and still maintain a mild R-rating.  But I am, in fact, a member of the online nudist community.

Theodore Roethke

This one was already turned into a good blog post.

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The Wizard of Ozz

It goes without saying, nobody can have too many Wizard of Oz pictures.

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August 19, 2018 · 10:01 pm

Braindrain With a Side-Order of Lethargy

Because of weather, depression, and dealing with a wounded automobile, I have been having trouble getting writing done lately.  I mean, me, the goof who writes every day and claims to never have writer’s block, is having trouble with being motivated enough the write things.

It is entirely possible that it is due to an improper diet.  I mean, I haven’t been eating well this week.  Having to squeeze the food budget to be able to pay all the bills this month is a part of the problem.  The effect intermittent rain and heat have on my appetite could also be at least partly to blame.  I stress eat, and am not always smart enough to depend on peanuts and peanut butter to get me through the problem.

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I realize I need to eat protein to aid my brain, and fruits and vegetables so that my diabetes will slow itself down in the process of eating my brain.  That process can make you a bit stupid.

I am also quite aware that eating food that has eyeballs and mouths and occasionally cat ears is also a bad idea for dietary propriety.  Especially if it can also talk to me.  Do non-cartoonists also have this problem?

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Eating right with Ramen noodles as seen in the movie Ponyo.

All right, I admit it.  My writing problems probably don’t stem from eating cartoon food.  Or eating food in a cartoon for that matter, a thing I haven’t tried in real life.  But the whole cartoon food allusion has gotten me halfway to 500 words today.  So it is worth something.  And the real solution to the problem has been to just sit down and clack away at the keyboard, even if the only thing it yields is foofy nonsense.  (And I know “foofy” isn’t even a real word, but WordPress counted it anyway.)  I managed to write today simply by doing it.

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May 14, 2018 · 3:24 pm

What to Write When Your Head is Empty

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Sometimes when my health is poor and too many things are already on my mind, it is hard to think of a subject for the daily essay.  I don’t let that stop me.  Yes, indeed, I can write with a completely empty head.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not a stupid man.  But sometimes life’s demands can empty your mind of idea seeds, and the garden of your mind might be slow in providing new blossoms and palatable fruit.  But some people do a lot of writing with empty heads.  Some are toxic to read because there is no substance to what they say.  And some can spin out a tale or a logic trail that fascinates even though the idea furnaces are initially cold and not ready to cook.

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So maybe I have an idea to write about today already.

Maybe I can say something about how I get ideas out of my stupid little head.

But my head is completely empty today.

Oh, well… I already re-blogged something else anyway.

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Filed under blog posting, goofiness, humor, Paffooney, teaching, writing, writing teacher

May 11, 2018 · 3:06 pm

Reblogging

I have lately taken to reblogging some of my previous old posts, some of the 1,676 I have at the moment and this one probably adds to.  I do it not because I am being lazy, but because now, more than ever, I have people looking at my posts, looking at the pictures, and even sometimes reading what I wrote.  So I take pride in re-presenting some of the little essays I am most proud of or have recently rediscovered myself.

Yesterday was focused on lying as an art form.

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That’s actually Mark Twain in the background of this picture.  Which is a lie.  And if you can’t easily tell that, then no wonder Trump is now our president.

I re-blogged an old essay on telling lies… a how-to sort of piece called Lying as a Form of Social Responsibility  And then I promptly followed that up with a bit about one of the biggest lies I told my classes every year when they asked me how old I was and why I wasn’t already retired.  I called it Mickey is 561 & 1/2 Years Old which is a lie, but probably reasonable to believe considering the old saying, “Old English teachers never die.  One day they just lose their class.”

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On the day I had the weird confrontation with the coyote in the early morning light I wrote Morning With Coyotes and found it to be such a weird experience that I had to re-post What Do Martians Look Like?

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Today I found a piece that I still love very much called Mother Mendocino and re-blogged it, and it already had 9 views before I even finished this essay about re-blogging.

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So re-blogging isn’t just being lazy and fishing for likes, it is about reconnecting old ideas to new.  And to relive past writing moments and treasured reflections.  I intend to do more of it.  Especially with posts so old that you newer readers have never had the chance to look at the pictures and ignore the text.  So now I have fulfilled my moral obligation to warn you of what’s coming.  Now protecting yourself from what I might re-blog next is entirely your responsibility.

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February 5, 2018 · 3:55 pm

Doing Daily Business

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Today left me with little time for writing because I had to pursue the payment of property taxes and I finally set up non-interest-accruing payments for my faux-heart-attack hospital bill.  But the ideas still come.  I will just have to work them out later in the week.

I want to write a nudist-related idiot’s essay about body image, and I hope to work on g-rated illustrations that will illustrated naked ideas without offending those whose ears catch on fire from encountering nakedness, a breed of people who are not so rare in Texas.

I also want to write about the joys of listening to classical music of Erich Korngold.  I know that sounds like a boring snooze-fest, but I intend to elucidate and surprise you.  Kinda the way I was myself blown away by discovering this turn-of-the-century gem of movie music.

And there are other burning possibilities tickling the insides of my cranium.  But there is business to take care of today that will not wait.  And next week… bankruptcy court.  Oh, joy…

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January 22, 2018 · 3:46 pm

Leftovers in January

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You reach a point after a hard month has lingered long where you have to eat the leftovers and accept what is.  I face challenges in the new year at least as large as the challenges of 2017.  When faced with such a situation, I need pie.

So here are some of the things left in my January file for use in this blog.  The only reason they are here is because I haven’t used them yet and the ideas have not been knitted together for any rational purpose.

This will be a crazy quilt blog post.  But crazy quilts keep you just as warm in winter as any other kind.

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My newest Facebook friend is the daughter of my wife’s cousin.   I have only known her as the sweet-faced little smiler at Filipino-American family gatherings who sometimes gets my attention by squirting me in the ear with a water gun.  Her father is from Greece and teaches Math in San Antonio.  Her mother, like my wife, is from the Philippines.  I won’t tell you her real name, but we used to call her “Sweetie” because of her resemblance to the little pink Tweety-bird character from Tiny Toons Adventures.

I have also spent considerable time writing to and for nudists I have connected with through their various websites and on Twitter.  These two lovely works of nude art were shared with me on Twitter.  I have collected a number of nude pictures from Twitter nudists that I can’t use on WordPress because I am still entirely too modest to be the unrestrained naked person that some nudists are.  I can’t really claim to be a complete nudist myself.  But I do have stories to tell about naked people, and I have been working on them diligently.

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Of course, I still miss being a teacher.  I was a teacher of English for 31 years.  I taught reading and writing in English to over 2,000 kids.  I also learned how to stare in Klingon.  It is a useful skill for keeping students in line and keeping them from becoming a disappointment to the empire.  I miss teaching kids, especially talkative kids.  Far fewer people talk to me during a day of retirement than used to talk to me in a single class at school.  Those interactions were precious.

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And several things are just too confusing for my old brain to explain.

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But I do like this picture I found on Facebook of Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, playing with multiple kittens.  I don’t know why, but it makes me happier.

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Filed under artwork, blog posting, Dr. Who, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, nudes

December 29, 2017 · 4:25 pm

Writing Every Day

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Teachers of serious writing will often tell you… or more correctly, give you the Word of God, “You want to be a good writer?  You have to write every single day.”  And having been a teacher of writing at the high school and middle school level, I am committed to passing that on to you also as the inviolable Word of God.  You see, I have long been, well, not a serious writer exactly, more of a dedicated writer with warped notions of reality and a tendency towards goofiness.  You can see by the view of my WordPress insights page that I have steadily, in five years’ time, been noticed and looked at by increasing amounts of thoroughly duped WordPress viewers.

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10,373 visitors have viewed something on my blog 17,383 times in 2017.  And I know that most are looking at the pictures and moving on.  That’s how I get away with writing some of the stupid stuff I post on my blog.  But there’s a secret to that too.  I drew or painted a lot of the pictures I use on this blog myself.  You would think that sooner or later some expert psychologist would trace violence in the streets back to my pictures as the ultimate cause, but that hasn’t happened yet.  I am sure that is mostly because not even the psychologists can muck their way through my paragraphs of purple paisley prose.  You see, I most often use my writing on this blog to commit atrocities of humor and wit.  I only rarely dabble in things intended to be uplifting, spiritual, politically challenging, or sentimental.  I complain on my blog a lot.  It is also a place for expressing my inherent grumpiness and old-man dyspeptic irritations with life.  But viewers tend to take my humor seriously and only laugh at the stuff I am most embarrassed about.

I was supposed to be doing this blog as way to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star, for I-Universe Publishing.  They set it up for me.  But, as they don’t pay me anything for the work I put into it, and it doesn’t really impact sales anyway, I use it now as writing practice.  I have as a personal goal to write 500 words a day.  The blog counts.  So it means that some days, the 500 words I write in my blog are the only words I get written that day.  Though, now that I am retired, 500 words of blog writing plus 500 words of novel writing can get me well past writing 1000 words in a day.  It doesn’t take long at that rate to build up an awful lot of words.   I shudder to think what would happen if the word dam were to suddenly give way, releasing a word-flood of monumental proportions.   Half of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex would drown in Mickian words if that were to happen.

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So, do I think that you should write every day?  Do I think it makes you a better writer?  Do I actually follow my own advice?  Yes!  To all three.  And as I have passed the 500 word mark yet again, I can stop now.

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December 17, 2017 · 5:26 pm

Extremely Strange Christmas Gifts

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This summer, in order to decompress a bit over the swimming pool removal crisis, I joined a nudist website in order to be able to write a blog for them. I believe it can be now revealed that it didn’t go entirely according to plan.  Pretty much in the same way that, because I am not Santa Claus I will not be delivering Christmas gifts on December 24th.

The deal was, I needed to give them a sample of my writing to consider, and then be prepared to write a blog post about my first visit to a nudist park.  It was technically a professional writing situation, but because of the cost of membership in the website and the cost of visiting a nudist camp, I was paying out money instead of taking it in.

So, I submitted a rewritten version of my blog post “Blushing in the Garden of Eden”, a piece about the comedy inherent in me being associated with nudist experiences written long before I ever imagined having the courage to actually go to one of these places and be a nudist at the same time.

I took the bull by the horns… okay, let’s not use that trite old expression because of its unfortunate metaphorical connotations… I prepared for the job by contacting a local nudist park, Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas, and I made arrangements.  Then, while my family was off enjoying roller coasters at Six Flags that I was not physically fit enough to ride, I went to the nudist park for a day visit.

I wrote about all the fool missteps, embarrassments, and gobbledygook I went through to visit a nudist park on one of the hottest days of the summer wearing only a thick layer of sunscreen, hat, and shoes.  I thoroughly embarrassed myself in an autobiographical essay or three about actually enjoying my brief time among the naked people.  And then nudist connections began to blossom.  Who knew that they might be so willing to recruit a spotty old naked man into their society?  My blog post was re-blogged on a popular nudist website.  Twitter nudists began following me by the baskets full.  I became connected to nudist sites in Canada, Great Britain, and, curiously, Spain.  I got tons of ads for nudists experiences in places world wide that I will never be able to afford to go visit.

But through it all, not a word from truenudists.com about my blog application.

Well, now, during this season of Santa Claus and gift-giving, I started receiving some extremely strange Christmas gifts.  Tomorrow I get to go sign the court petition that allows me to be bankrupt under Chapter 13.  No more credit cards for me.  Including the one used to pay for my Truenudist membership.  And then, out of nowhere, the blog coordinator of Truenudists contacts me about being delighted by my submission and being willing to publish my work on their website, Facebook sites, and Twitter account.  I am now officially a nudist blogger.  Now that the nudist wardrobe is about the only thing I can afford to wear.  And my wife added one last gift last night.  A plan to sell our house so we don’t end up losing it to the bank.

So, I wrote a letter to Santa Claus, thanking him for my wonderful gifts this year, and asking him to join me whenever possible at the nudist park so he can truly see how I have benefited from his presents.

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