I need to figure out marketing if I am ever going to make a dent as an author. So I got together $11.75 and hired two stuffed celebrities to endorse my books. Fozzy comes from Goodwill for $4.75, while $7.00 on E-Bay netted me Alf.
Okay, I guess it’s a start. Maybe not a great start, but a start.
Yeah, maybe Alf needs an attitude adjustment… with a brick.
Okay, money poorly spent… but it is a good idea. I need somebody who doesn’t have sawdust in their heads. How much do you suppose Angelina Jolie charges per endorsement? Yeah, I’m pretty sure it would be too much for my budget. Maybe I could get Bette Davis. She’d be cheap. But how persuasive are dead people?
Yes, there is very definitely a possibility that there is more than one me.
If you look carefully at the colored pencil drawing above, you will see that it is titled “The Wizard of Edo” and signed by someone called Leah Cim Reyeb. A sinister sounding Asian name, you think? I told college friends that my research uncovered the fact that he was an Etruscan artist who started his art career more than two thousand years ago in a cave in France. But, of course, if you are clever enough to read the name backward, you get, “beyeR miC haeL”. So, that stupid Etruscan cave artist is actually me.
It turns out that it is a conceit about signing my name as an artist that I stole from an old episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show and have used for well over two decades through college and my teaching career.
And of course, the cartoonist me is Mickey. Mickey also writes this blog. Mickey is the humorist identity that I use to write all my published novels and blog posts since I published the novel Catch a Falling Star.
Michael Beyer is the truest form of my secret identity. That was my teacher name. It was often simplified by students to simply “Mr. B”. I was known by that secret identity for 31 years.
Even more sinister are my various fictional identities occurring in my art and my fiction. You see one of them in this Paffooney. The name Dr. Seabreez appears in Catch a Falling Star as the Engineer who makes a steam engine train fly into space in the 1890’s with alien technology. He appears again in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius as a time-traveler.
The young writer in the novel Superchicken, Branch Macmillan, is also me. As is the English teacher Lawrance “Rance” Kellogg used in multiple novels.
So, disturbing as it may be to realize, there is more than one name and identity that signifies me. But if you are a writer of fiction, a cartoonist, an artist, or a poet, you will probably understand this idea better. And you may even have more than one you too.
I am now in the final phase of publishing The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. I am merely waiting for Amazon to object to whatever ridiculously minute formatting error I may still have going. And I once again had to publish without benefit of a beta reader or an editor of any kind. You learn things about yourself that you really don’t want to know.
What I have learned;
I can’t depend on my wife to be a beta reader and comment on my work. She tried once and told me, “Your writing is like dog poop. It is full of weird stuff, smells bad, and is impossible to get off your shoe once you step in it.” To be honest, I ironed out that metaphor just a bit. She was actually quibbling about my proofreading style and basically ignored all the content of the story. That’s the way English teachers are about prose.
I can too easily fall into the habit of introducing characters on a fashion model runway. The first time the character enters the narrative I tend to give a head to toe rundown of how they look, what they are wearing, and how they have done their hair. I know better than that, but I still do it.
I… use… ellipsis… marks… toooo… much…!
My creative spellings tend to drive the spellchecker insane. In this novel I had trouble over the spellings of blogwopping, interbwap, and dillywhacking. To be fair two of those words are from the language of the Tellerons, a space-faring race of frog people who happen to ineptly invade the earth. (Oh, and the other is a euphemism used by young boys for something very private. Don’t tell anybody about that one.)
Time travel plots can be laboriously difficult to follow through mobius-strip-like contortions of time, space, and history.
Sometimes my jokes are not funny. Seriously… that can be a problem.
And my characters often act on weird impulses and do things for no rhyme or reason… or rhythm either for that matter… see what I mean about ellipsis marks? Of course, one can always explain that that is exactly how people really are. I myself never do that. There is always a rhyme to be snatched from the ether in the very nick of time… randomly.
And at the end of the novel, when I am tying up the loose ends of the plot in a Gordian Knot, I have strings left over. Maybe enough to knit a shirt with. So I end up picking them up and starting another novel with them.
It is basically heck to be a divergent thinker. You try to make a list of things, and by the time you get to number 9, you have forgotten what the list was about, and you even forgot to number things, so you have to go back to the first one and count. Now what was I talking about?
Oh, yeah. I edited the book all by myself. And now it’s done. Time to start a new novel and make all the same mistakes over again.
I find alliteration to be a useful poetic tool to use for comedy purposes. I like to use it to the point of ridiculousness… as in apt alliteration’s artful aid. The repetition for repetition’s sake in spite of meaning is in itself chuckle-worthy. But when alliteration can further the meaning of the writing itself also… I liberally laugh out loud.
L-Words (a Lousy L-Poem)
Lovely little lambs lament
Little lambs lament the loss of love
Lambs lament loudly and long
Lament the loss of lovely love
Lovely little lambs laugh loudly
Little Lambs laugh at life lived lovingly
Lambs laugh long and loudly
Laugh long and loudly in lieu of love
Life and love and laughter
The three L’s
Laugh lovely little lambs!
Okay, I know… I am the king of bad poetry. But perhaps the alliterative excess makes you laugh a little bit… at my poor poetry skills if nothing else.
Alliteration always awards awesomeness on authors… or not.
Mickey is hopelessly addicted to writing. He keeps writing and publishing these story-things we refer to as novels. We are searching for some kind of five-step program to cure Mickey, but we have been forced to conclude the disease is probably incurable.
The book has now gone live on Amazon in its Kindle e-book form. The paperback version is still pending.
In an attempt to understand Mickey’s addiction problem from a diagnostic perspective, we intend to present evidence here to arrive at a conclusion about what’s fundamentally wrong with Mickey.
Superchicken, the main character of the book, bears the same nickname that Mickey himself was called repeatedly and without mercy when he was in junior high school and high school. Mickey claims that Edward-Andrew Campbell is not him in fictional form, but we find that generally hard to believe, and we can point to considerable evidence that the character has many of Mickey’s own characteristics. It is disturbing to note that on the cover picture, the derby-hatted character called Milt Morgan in the book, is a self-portrait of Mickey himself drawn from an old school photo. Milt Morgan in the book is highly imaginative, obsessed with magic, and a creator of truly insane and somewhat wicked plans. It is disturbingly reminiscent of Mickey himself.
And then there is the whole nudism connection. The Cobble Sisters in the book are dedicated nudists and manage to talk the Superchicken into going to a nudist camp with their nudist family, though he didn’t know what they were signing him up for until he gets to the campground and sees all the naked people.
It is not a coincidence that Mickey had a girlfriend whose sister lived in a nudist apartment complex, and he was himself taken by surprise when she took him to visit there. Besides, Mickey has even confessed in his goofy blog to visiting a nudist camp himself in recent times.
So, as you can plainly see, we now have new evidence that Mickey is in need of some kind of intervention to help him get over this sinister malady of the mind. One thing we can do is suggest you find the book on Amazon and read it for yourself. Maybe, just maybe, you will be the one who comes up with the solution to Mickey’s endless novel-writing nonsense. This is a problem that may well turn out to be terminal if something is not done about it soon.
I think a lot of thoroughly thoughtful thuggish thoughts that build and build and build up an idea, and then turn around and knock it all down. Let me demonstrate by knocking down that title right off the bat. Rene DesCartes in the early 1600’s said, “Cogito Ergo Sum”, and he thereby totally disrupted the world as we knew it. Didn’t get that? Let me translate. He said, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Still didn’t help? Okay, here’s the English, “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, the one thing that I know for sure is that I am thinking this particular thought at this particular time. If I am thinking, and I know I am, I must be here and I must be real. So there is one thing I know for certain. But do I know anything else for certain? Uh-oh. How do I know anything? I have to rely on my senses. And my senses lie to me all the time. I am partially color blind, so I don’t see the world the same way you do. I don’t see things in black and white, like Great Grandma Hinckley did in her 90’s, but the colors look different to my eyes than they do to yours and I will never know what things look like to you. Forget politicians and all other people who tell lies, my own eyes lie to me constantly. So can I know anything for sure? Of course not. All I have are firm beliefs based on imperfect senses and best guesses at what is true. So what I am actually talking about is a list of potential essay ideas that I am merely asserting as true based on my imperfect goofy thinking of thoughtful thuggish thoughts.
Idea #1 that I think is certainly possibly maybe true; My brain was taught and I was raised to adulthood by the movies I saw when I was young. I want to talk about this at length in another post. The video is by a guy who was a kid in the 80’s, and he has some really awesome movies to offer as a way to delineate his rise to adulthood.
My list includes the movies of my boyhood seen in the Belmond Theater and on our old black and white Motorola TV. My list of movies that raised me includes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, and The Wizard of Oz.
Idea #2; Animals are people too.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
I mean, as a writer for young adults, I know for a fact that animals are relevant as characters. They have a point of view, feelings, reactions, and complex lives that people rarely pay attention to. I have to write about this some time in the future too.
Idea #3; The worst things that happen to us in our lives, are also the best things that happen. Wow! What a difficult essay topic. But I not only think it, I can prove it… at least to myself. But can I write about it? Time will tell.
Idea #4; Silly thoughts and serious thoughts are two sides of the same coin. And this will be particularly difficult to think about if thoughts are literally coins. That would mean that my head is full of metal, and I know several people who would read that sentence and shout, “I knew it all along!” Fortunately they are all too sensible to read this far in one of my blog posts.
So, at 600 words I still have lots more to say. But people with metal in their heads often talk way too much, so my concluding sentence will be simply; “I promise to shut up for now.”
I am trying to cut down on political notions and noodling in this blog. It is like sugar to a humor writer. The easy laughs are sweet, but if you are diabetic, they will eventually build up and kill you.
But between Twitter-tweeting twit-wits and Facebook false-fact fools, I keep getting drawn back in. The gang of kids I grew up with in Iowa are seriously infected with Tea Party propaganda now that they are old coots like me, and continue to vote for Teabagger trolls (And I mean literal trolls. Steve King, Congressman from Iowa, has green skin and lives under a bridge… and maybe eats foolish children when they try to cross) for public office. And of course, I live now in Texas where gun-toting cowboys look at you intently to find any possible reason to shoot you and then thank Jesus if you are fool enough to give them one (like admitting to be mostly a Democrat in your political persuasion). They want to argue anything and everything I post on Facebook. Apparently even my bird pictures and cat videos politically offend them.
Oooh! This one really offends Teabaggers… especially the ones who make $25/hr or less.
Can you pick out the Trump voters in this line? All of them maybe?
And I am not suggesting that people who voted Republican in the last election aren’t as smart as my side. I waited until now in this essay to say that, because the childhood friends and family members in that group who read my blog will have all stopped reading by this point. I really don’t need to give them any more ammunition for Facebook and dinner table arguments.
But my side of the table are not wholly guilt free.
I regularly tweet or post things like these, innocently believing these heroes of the heart and mind have universal appeal because they champion truth and science and facts. But I become alarmed when I learn how much Bill Nye offends them. They tell me, “That guy is not a scientist! He has no right to argue for climate change issues or the non-existence of God. He’s just a TV guy.” And, I suppose they have a point. I mean, his extensive education and background in engineering, or his years in television promoting science to kids in research-based creative ways, doesn’t necessarily make him an expert on all science. And Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist. He doesn’t have a degree in EVERYTHING. And when I point out that their so-called experts on climate-change denial from Fox News cannot even claim to be TV weathermen, they are further put out by my brain-bashing bullying way of using my superior knowledge of science to put them down. Okay, I get it. I am not being careful enough of your feelings. (Oh, I forgot, you stopped reading this a while back.)
But the point of this is, we have to stop listening to and electing stupid people, while at the same time being a bit nicer to each other. We have to approach the discussion with the notion that you yourself may not be totally right about everything, and you may actually learn something by talking about it. (Which is, of course, no problem for me since I really don’t know anything for certain and need to learn practically everything as if I were still four years old.)
Okay, Bill, I get it. I am probably wrong about that too.
Okay, I guess it’s a start. Maybe not a great start, but a start.
The Joys of Editing Yourself
I am now in the final phase of publishing The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. I am merely waiting for Amazon to object to whatever ridiculously minute formatting error I may still have going. And I once again had to publish without benefit of a beta reader or an editor of any kind. You learn things about yourself that you really don’t want to know.
What I have learned;
Oh, yeah. I edited the book all by myself. And now it’s done. Time to start a new novel and make all the same mistakes over again.
Leave a comment
Filed under commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, humor, novel, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, work in progress, writing
Tagged as novel writing, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius