I identify as a humorist, writer, cartoonist, and certified fool (Yes, I have a certificate from the Children’s Writer Institute that proves I once foolishly believed I could learn how to make money as a writer). But my current novel project is a horror novel, The Baby Werewolf, which I twice before tried to turn into a completed rough draft novel. This time I mean to follow through to the bitter end.
Torrie Brownfield, hypertrichosis sufferer and possible werewolf.
In order to reign in the goofiness enough to deal with the issues in this novel I have been doing a lot of horror reading. I have also undertaken the reading of a very good author examination of the life of Edgar Allen Poe.
Poe’s life was highly instructive. You may not have realized this, but most of the giants of American Literature prior to and contemporary with Poe did not make most of their money as writers. Emerson was a clergyman. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked as a customs clerk. Poe, the first to try to make a living solely on work as a writer, editor, critic, and poet, was subjected to the horrors of poverty, illness, and want. His wife was chronically tubercular and ill. He never made the money he was obviously worth as a creator of popular horror fiction, poetry, critical essays about other authors, and as an editor for profitable magazines of the day. Other people made loads of money from his work. Poe, not so much.
It is instructive to a writer like me who can’t seem to land any sort of income from my own creations. There is no demand because there is no recognition of my work. I have come close, having my work praised by editors and fellow authors, and being a finalist in novel writing contests twice. The goal is good writing. I will probably never see a return on my investment in my lifetime. My children may not acquire anything by it unless one of them really devotes a lot of effort to it. Like Poe with his drinking problem, chronic depression, and ill wife, I face physical limitations and poor health, grinding financial issues, and family factors that make it near impossible to put marketing effort into my literary career.
And this novel is a hard journey for me. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy when I was ten. A lot of the fears outlined and elucidated in this particular story leap right out of that iron cage in my psyche where they have been contained for fifty years. Fear of nakedness. Fear of sex. Fear of being attacked. Fear of the secret motivations in others. Fear of the dark. And, most of all, fear of what fear can make me become. Fear of being a monster.
But I have not become any of the dark and terrible things that fear can make me into. Instead I became a school teacher, mentor to many. I became a family man, father of three children. I became a nudist, hopefully not a dark and terrible thing in itself. I became Mickey.
stuff, and doing some of it naked.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Muffin Man Goes Uber-ing
I have been retired now for nearly four years. It has not been an easy thing to adjust to. I am used to hard work and constant thinking on my feet. Yet I have been mostly confined to the house and unable to do much beyond write and drive my kids to the many places high school kids need to go. I don’t really have trouble keeping busy, but I need to do something to reconnect to the outside world beyond the bedroom door.
I have been teaching myself to cook. These muffins are strawberry flavored and only require milk added to the mix, no eggs to crack and shell pieces to pick out of the batter. I have also been learning the hard way how to burn the crap out of pans and muffin trays. And… learning how to clean burned pans… but obviously not very well.
I have been getting to know the oven quite well. We talk about life and muffins and heat and baking times, and she is constantly beeping at me to warn me when things are about to burn.
She has also been giving me writing advice. She got me talked into not burning my bank account any further by investing in publishing services. Those goobers are mostly just money-grubbers in a dying industry. My novel Stardusters and Space Lizards was thoroughly baked on this blog over the last sixty eight weeks, and so I needed to finally take it out of the oven. This I did through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. The book was formatted and put together in publishable form in a matter of days. You can find it here on Amazon… My Book. Page Publishing still has my novel Magical Miss Morgan in page formatting after over a year and a half of working with them. No way are their services worth the money I paid them. They work slowly and dangerously incompetently. I would sue them to get my money back, but it would cost me more for a lawyer than what I paid them. So far with self-publishing I am only ten dollars in the hole, the amount I spent on copies of my own book.
But as the stove pointed out heatedly, the kitchen and computer are not actually getting out of the house and meeting the world again after three and three quarters years. And the chances of income from muffins and writing are slim. So I also made a plan to be an Uber driver. I got carefully signed up and prepared. I was finally able to download the Uber driving app last weekend, and this weekend I finally felt well enough to try driving for money. So last night I got in the car and connected with a potential passenger, my first ever Uber drive.
Of course, this is Mickey we are talking about here. Nothing in my little life ever goes smoothly, especially at the start. If things were perfect, I would definitely be worried that something was seriously wrong with the universe. So, my first passenger was a guy who needed to be driven to the 7-Eleven to buy beer. And naturally, I couldn’t find the place to start with. The Uber computer-voice lady kept wanting me to download something in the middle of giving me directions. She also wanted me to turn left and drive through a fence. But when I finally did turn in to the apartment complex and realized that I was in the wrong section of the complex to pick up my passenger, I quickly corrected my error and found him. Computer-voice lady kept telling me to turn the wrong direction, so I listened to my passenger to make the proper turns and got him there on time. My car, however, overheated in the parking lot. Now, that isn’t entirely accurate. It has a faulty heat-sensor that registers overheating whenever the car is idling and heat is reflected back up from stationary pavement under the car. I had the thing in to the dealer for the recall fix twice, and the replacement chips are just as defective as the original chips. And, of course, I have been notified about the class action lawsuit, but because it is not a life-threatening malfunction, it may be some time before that is resolved. So, I rolled down the windows and turned the car heater up high and reduced the heat the defective detector detected. The drunk guy got back in the car with his beer and I successfully took him back to his apartment, his girlfriend, and his party. I got a five star rating for the trip. But I cut the night short. I earned $4.oo total for the evening. It wasn’t perfect, but I was finally out in the world again. I was earning money again. And I got to discuss the perils of diabetes with a drunk guy whose brother had juvenile diabetes. Life is good… some of the time.
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