Category Archives: blog posting

January 13, 2017 · 12:18 pm

Unrepentant Blog Plans

I am not out of things to write about.  In fact, I have far more ideas than I have time to manage.  So I will waste some time I don’t have in plotting out the way forward through the creative jungle.

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I am at the climax of the novel Stardusters and Space Lizards.  I have seen by posting it chapter by chapter here that I must not only finish it, as a good, timely science fiction novel, but that I must experiment with publishing the entire thing on my blog.  I may later self-publish the thing, but you will get the chance to see the entire rough draft here… on Tuesdays.

I also have several cartoon series that I want to expand upon and publish here.  That includes my Action Figure Follies, my Tales From Fantastica, and Hidden Kingdom.  These are also posted in my vault, Mickey’s House of Fiction.

I want to post further on what I am learning about the perilous publishing journey that I hope to complete before I die, sharing with you some of the many secrets, tricks, hopes, and foolishnesses I have used to shoot myself in both feet and sink myself into the quicksand of author anonymity.

I have a post in mind about the YouTube videos of the NerdWriter, an auteur of infinite and in-depth ideas.  I want to share some of his amazing work and insights with you.

And the conspiracy theorist inside me is bursting to get out with everything I have learned about William Shakespeare. who has never really been who we think he is, and the very solid evidence of why I believe in this loony conspiracy theory when I don’t believe that the moon landing was faked by Franco Zeffirelli.

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At some point, too, I need to let you in on the creative processes that occur as I write the novel Recipes For Gingerbread Children.  It seems to be another inevitable novel that has to come out of me before my stupid old story-teller head explodes with it.

And maybe I need to explain who Dr. Seabreez is, and why there is more than just one me traveling through time and space and laughter.

I know that is a lot to threaten you with all at once, and you may find a post like this extremely boring.  In fact, you may have given up reading already.  But I do intend to make these writing abominations actually occur, so you may as well grit your teeth and get ready as the creative wheels turn, or have a flat, or grow spikes… something like that.

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December 15, 2016 · 4:24 pm

Crazy Head-Bashing List-Making

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Sometimes I have to stop and think where ideas for posts come from.  Yes, and that is usually the point at which my head is empty and I am out of ideas.  I spent years teaching the writing process and I advocated many different pre-writing idea-generating strategies.  I should be able to come up with something to write about without resorting to bashing my right temple with a hand-held blunt object.  After all, those ideas come out kinda wobbly and full of strangely-colored stars.  So, let me find a broom in the upstairs broom closet in the empty hallways of my mind and sweep together all the possible ideas I have in one pile to look at, grimace, and compare.

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There is a letter with a Martian stamp on it.  Inside it proposes I hold an aliens-only poetry writing contest and put the worst possible results into a post.  That could be worth a few chuckles, and possible a gazorpingwallow or two.  At least, that’s what the letter suggests.  It is from some Ixcanixian from the spinward edge of the Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way.  20160508_113700

 

I have several ongoing cartoon projects.  I could be adding another page to the Hidden Kingdom graphic novel I have been working on for thirty years.  I could also do more action-figure comics to rationalize all the time I spend playing with dolls.  And I like to do novel illustrations to go along with the many bizarre and mentally warped novels I have created.

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Of course we have recently received the kind of political Christmas gift that most of us would like to track Santa down to his lair for and return back inside the reindeer butt that it came out of.  Insulting the new orangutan king is an easy source of insult-based humor that I don’t have to work too hard at or feel too guilty about.  But too much of that is like getting drunk on cough syrup.  You intended to cure the problem, but you have only managed to add new problems and a hangover headache to top it all off.blue-and-mike-in-color

I still have to fix the cracked and leaky swimming pool before next spring, so that should yield some cementing-your-feet-into-the-pool-wall stories later on.  And there are the numerous frustrations of living life with six incurable diseases to write about.  I can probably make the flaking off of all the skin on the back of my neck from psoriasis sound pretty funny if I try hard enough.  The family dog is still producing dog poop at Guiness-Book-of-World-Records rates… and, oh, yeah, I am still a long way from being done telling you about the bad jokes from more than a quarter of a century of classroom cut-ups.

You know, I think the way to deal with the problem is to simply make a list of ideas.  I can throw darts at the list if I still can’s decide.

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November 20, 2016 · 5:16 pm

Writing Every Day

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These are volumes 3&4 of my daily journal that I have kept since the 1980’s.

Writing every single day is something I have been doing since 1975, my senior year in high school.  It is why I claim to be a writer, even though I have never made enough money at it to even begin to think of myself as a professional writer.  I kept a journal/diary/series of notebooks that I filled with junk I wrote and doodles in the margins up until the middle 90’s when I began to put all my noodling into computer files instead of notebooks.  I have literally millions of words piled in piles of notebooks and filling my hard drive to the point of “insufficient memory” errors on my laptop.  I am now 60 years old and have been writing every day for 42 years.

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There are days in the past where I only wrote a word, or a sentence or two.  But there were a lot of words besides the words in my journal.  I started my first novel in college.  I completed it the summer before my first teaching job in 1981.  I put it the closet, never to be thought of again, except when I needed a good cringe and cry at how terrible a writer I once was.  I have been starting, stopping, percolating, piecing together, and eventually completing novel projects ever since… each one goofier and more wit-wacky than the last.  So I have a closet full of those too.

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It would be wrong of me to suggest that my journals are only for words.  As a cartoon-boy-wannabee I doodle everywhere in margins and corners and parts of pages.  Sometimes the doodle is an afterthought.  Sometimes it precedes the paragraph.  Sometimes it is directly connected to the words and their meaning.

Sometimes the work of art is the main thing itself.

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But always, the habit of writing down words and ideas every single day takes precedence over every other part of my day.  That’s the main reason I am stupid enough to think of myself as a writer even though I don’t make a living by writing.

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But I did put my words into my profession too.  As a teacher of writing, I wrote with and to my students.  I did that for 31 years as a classroom teacher, and two years as a substitute.  I required them each to keep a daily journal (though they only got graded for the ones they wrote in class, and then only for reaching the amount of words assigned).  We shared the writing aloud in class, making only positive comments.  I wrote every assignment I gave them, including the journal entries.  They got to see and hear what I could write, and it often inspired them or gave them a structure to hang their own ideas upon.  And often they liked what I wrote and were surprised by it almost as much as I liked and was surprised by theirs.   Being a writer was never a total waste of time and effort.

So am I telling you that if you want to be writer you have to write every day too?  If I have to tell you that… you have totally missed the point.

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October 28, 2016 · 2:57 pm

Tricks With Lazy Goals in Mind

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As a writer, my goal is to create wisdom and new ideas and stuff that makes a reader feel happy, or sad, or angry, or even slightly insane.  But thinking is hard when your head hurts and your body aches and your sixtieth birthday is just around the corner.  (Yes, this Mickey is nearly 60, but can you believe that that Mickey is going to be 88 on the day after I turn 60?)  Sometimes you just want to say, “Never mind that I wanted to post every single day for the past two years.  Just curl up in a ball and go to sleep.”  But there are ways to get something done even if your mind is full of the Sandman’s leavings and old, rotted dreams.

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You can always get by with posting somebody else’s wisdom… somebody else’s thinking.  You don’t have to work too hard to paste things together.  After all, why else did you have to look at so many cut-and-paste essays over the years in middle school and high school?

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And you can rely on the work you have already done collecting computer files full of colorful crap and stuff you like enough to steal to complete your cut-and-paste scrapbook post.  You don’t have to feel like you erred and are about to have your head cut off by an angry Groo.

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And you know you can get a lot of cheap likes on Facebook with some of the stuff you have available to put in this post.  You have been working at the “Be funny!” thing for a long time, and have gotten almost good enough at it to be funny on the fly.  And when you’ve gotten more than halfway to the goal, you can rest a bit.  Take a nap.  Regenerate the crazy things in your head so you can do this all again another day.

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And if you can have a laugh before you are finished, even if no one else in the world gets the joke… well, at least you will feel a little bit better yourself.

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Filed under battling depression, blog posting, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, healing, humor, illness, self pity, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism

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October 20, 2016 · 3:34 pm

The Gallery of Goofiness

Looking for stuff to organize into a post today led me to realize that I currently exist swimming in a tidal wave of goofy images that I myself have created.

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So, lazy and goofy old me will now show you some of these things.

I don’t even remember why I drew some of these things.

Some of it, is obviously because I was a teacher.

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But some of it is merely wacky.

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Though some might be considered inspirational.

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While some of it is just meant to be appealing.

But all of it provides me with an easy post that you can read fast, but still get plenty to think about from.  It is even good for a re-post if I add something newer.

 

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October 16, 2016 · 4:13 pm

The Irony of Regular Blogging

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This is an old artwork I have never shared before.

There are many things that I have noticed about being a blogger that are the opposite of what you might expect.  Let me list a few…

  • Listing stuff makes a daily post easier.
  • I have posted something on WordPress as a blogger ever day for twenty two and a half months.  I will soon hit two years without missing a day.
  • Writing every day makes the ideas flow more easily rather than running out of ideas.  The well refills faster than I can drink its waters.
  • My most popular post is Be Naked More , which gets views practically every day, but including artistic nudes randomly in a post does not increase its views and popularity even when I put “naked” and “nude” in the tags.

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  • Reproducing artwork on a blog is difficult when you draw things too big for your little scanner/printer.  No matter how good the camera and how bright the lighting, white becomes gray and the sparkle and luster of good colored pencil color is lost.
  • Good writing becomes more about writing less.  But it also has to be more carefully crafted.  The more I brew prose in my black cauldron of a blog, the more it seems to boil down to poetry.
  • Readers don’t seem to object to metaphors and purple paisley prose as much as editors and book reviewers do.
  • I like writing purple paisley prose (over-complicated grammatical structures with alliteration, metaphor, and asides that interrupt the flow like this one… taken to the extreme for humorous effect).

  • Art pieces can be manipulated and re-used or re-combined to make something new out of something old.  Computers make art-editing infinitely easier.
  • Most people don’t actually read your blog all the way through.  Some just like it for the pictures.  If you actually read this far, you can let me know with a smiley face in the comments.
  • There are many, many good writers on WordPress… as I am sure there are on other blog sites as well.  I despair of being able to find and read them all.  If you are reading this bullet point, you are probably one of the ones I have found and read and liked.  Blogging becomes a mirror that shows you your own self more naked than naked… not just what is under your clothes, but what you look like to yourself in your own head.  And the more you walk around WordPress naked like that, the more you want to show it all off.  (How’s that for an idea that will pull in the readers from the lonely parts of Siberia?)

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September 23, 2016 · 2:37 pm

My Post for Today

My computer is wearing out.  It blew up the WordPress posting sight on my screen to where the letters in the title are once again an inch tall.  The chances that it will suddenly wipe out everything I have typed and save a blank post over the whole thing almost instantly is making me tired.  To combat the problem, I must constantly keep a back-up copy on Microsoft Word which may also grow or shrink for no apparent reason.  It gets frustrating, and I am old, ill, and quite tired.  But I am also only a month away from two entire years of posting every single day, a feat I am not ready to fail at this close to the end.  So let me show something from my cartoon collections stolen from the internet at large.

From the Lola Bunny file;

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From Movie Art;

From Hanna-Barbera Toons;

And these are all things I could’ve written a 500-word post about with unique and possibly yawn-inducing Mickian insights, but today I would rather not.  Today I take the “picture is worth a thousand words” thing and give you 17,000 thousand words worth of not having to listen to me.

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September 15, 2016 · 4:01 pm

Twits and Wits Tweet on Twitter

Unlike Donald Trump, Twitter is a complete mystery to me. I was told by a publisher that to sell my writing, I need to create a writer’s platform.  And  to do that I had to blog and create a presence on Twitter.  So somehow, goofy little Mickey needs to learn how to tweet.

“Like a bird?”, asked Mickey innocently.

“No, you feeb!  Like a true Tweet-Wit like Ricky Gervais!”

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So I gave it a try.

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Basically I spend my Twitter-tweets on tweeting my blog posts.  It makes me happy, though I don’t notice any affect on the flow of the Twitterverse.

I get lots of followers like this one who appears a little over-friendly.

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I’m not sure what to make of tweeting twits on Twitter.  They all seem to want something from me, and I have no idea what it is… unless they want money… which I have none of…

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Disney cartoon characters trick you into following them because they seem to be cute little Disney things, but they only tweet stuff about sex and women with big baby-feeders.  What is up with that sort of mixed-hormonal nightmare?

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The political stuff all seems to be conservative in nature.  Twitter, just like Facebook, wants me to vote Republican and forswear my wicked communist-democratic leanings that make me think terrible un-American thoughts, like “maybe Colin Kaepernick is not entirely wrong-headed about his protest.”

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Some of them just want to gross me out.

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A lot of it, however, looks amazingly like Facebook stuff.  And if you look hard enough, there are funny and insightful things too.

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So, I will try harder to Tweet like a tweet-wit, and make a mark on Twitter that is not hopelessly twit-like.

 

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September 10, 2016 · 3:47 pm

Spitzen Sparken Compu-BOOM!

Yesterday I had to start a post over again that my computer wiped out completely just as I was finishing it.  I had intended to rewrite the post today, but found key parts of it that I really liked were gone from my diabetic old memory.  Life is like that.  We get old and we get all futzed up, and no… the computer did not malfunction and save me from using a bad word there.  I meant to say “futzed”.

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It is a Yiddish sort of word… so I guess you could argue it is not a real word.  Yiddish, after all is a language intended by God to provide Jewish comedians with words that sound like insults but really aren’t… and words that don’t sound like insults that really are.  (Have you ever looked up what “putz” actually means?)

But that is what the Mickian computer has been up to.  It mashes, mangles, impedes, and implodes my writing.  If it wasn’t so handy for coming up with a funny post about fighting with a computer, I might actually become aggravated enough to throw this old computer out the upstairs window and into the sickly, green, unused swimming pool below.

I have used my computer daily and put it through all sorts of contortions and convolutions in the past three years of ill health and bed-ridden retirement.  It is probably no wonder it is wearing out.  I not only write and turn drawings into jpegs on it, I use it to mess with photography, play Facebook games, and keep up with the international clown show that other people generally refer to as politics.  I shed beard hair on my keyboard.  I drop popcorn on it when I am trying to jam too much in my mouth at once.  And I occasionally baptize it with a juicy sneeze or projectile cough.  I confess that I probably deserve the revenge it wreaks upon me.

Besides randomly deleting my posts and instantly saving the changes, it will also shrink the view of the entire page so that I can’t even read what I type with a magnifying glass.  The only way to correct the problem is shift to a different browser for a while until Firefox or Chrome stops hating me long enough to reset.  I have also had problems with the computer blowing things up.  One time I was trying to write on WordPress when only three huge letters at a time would fit on the screen.  That can make it quite hard to pull the old train of thought out of the darker parts of the tunnel of stupid ideas.  (I also just now had to re-type the part in italics when the computer deleted it.  I am making a back-up copy on Microsoft Word, but sometimes I can’t copy and paste fast enough.)

Truthfully, something is seriously wrong with this laptop.  The mouse pad malfunctions and the control key sticks.  I may have to buy a new computer soon.  But this one has given me numerous goofy smiles, and I will miss it when it joins the pile of old dead computers in the garage.

If you haven’t quite figured it out, these are some of the numerous goofy smiles.

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September 1, 2016 · 3:30 pm

Spitzen Sparkin Time Again

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Today I need to take some deep breaths.  My computer betrayed me just now.  I had been working on today’s intended post for a week with pictures and posing dolls and writing dialogue.  Then, as I was one more panel from the end, the computer pulled another one of its malfunctioning fits.  In a matter of two seconds it highlighted everything I had written on the WordPress writer, deleted it, and saved the changes.  This is now the seventh time the computer has done this.  And I have gotten used to it enough that I have bits and pieces of the work saved.  I can re-construct the piece for tomorrow.  But I was almost angry enough to dash the stupid word-munching machine against the far wall.  So I need calming thoughts.

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Here is a recent picture of a visitor to the park across the street.  A snowy egret… well, in Texas, more properly called a cattle egret.  I snapped this picture while walking the dog.  Jade the dog did not even spook the thing, since she is littler than it is and timid of birds with glaring yellow eyes.  I didn’t realize I had a use for this picture until now.

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Calming thoughts are doubly necessary today.  While I was composing my post, and ignorantly being unaware that my computer was about to eat it, I got a phone call from Page Publishing.  They have looked over the manuscript for Magical Miss Morgan, and have approved it for publication.  Of course, this is not only not a publisher that pays anything up front, they also require the author to invest money in the book’s production.  But they did tell me they do consider using the author’s own artwork for the cover.  And I do have credit again for the first time in three years, at least until Bank of America bankrupts me with their lawsuit.  The dawn photos I put into this post are particularly appropriate.  Calming thoughts with a bit of turbulence in the background.  And the computer tried twice to delete this while I wrote it.  But I foiled it each time.

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