I remember a time when you could get a card with a cut-out paper doll on it, and pages and pages of doll clothes with the little tabs all over them. On the internet you can find all sorts of old paper-doll doobiddies that somebody copied or scanned. There was a time when, growing up with two sisters old enough to play with and a baby brother who wasn’t good for much but crying at night and pooping on stuff, I have to make a confession, I did girly things. Back then I often resorted to playing with dolls and making dolls by cutting them out, and making them less naked by cutting out clothes with the little tabs, and often pasting them on because we forget the little white tabs were not supposed to be separated from the clothing.
This Annette Funicello paper doll, just like one my sister once had, was made from a scan of the back of a box of 1950s Cheerios. I borrowed the thing from Pinterest, printed it out in color with my printer/copier/scanner, and then pasted it to cardboard before cutting it out.
The clothing, mostly dresses, I left on mere paper and then cut them out to dress and re-dress Annette. For instance, I like this cowgirl get-up because I saw the episode where Annette and Darlene were working jobs for teens at a dude ranch. That was fascinating to me at age thirteen. Yep. And you could take the clothes off the paper doll again, though you couldn’t actually make the doll naked, since she had yellow gym bloomers under her clothes.
I decided that if I was going to make art from paper dolls, that I wasn’t limited to pre-made dolls from other artists. I took some of my own drawings, copied, cut out, and pasted them to cardboard. Here you see young Prinz Flute, Mandy Panda, and little Henry.
This little cutie is Luz from Owl House on Disney+. But don’t sue me, Disney. She is borrowed from fan art on Pinterest, so it’s fair use of copyrighted material that actually gives you free advertising.
Where this anime nudie cutie actually came from, I do not know. But she fits Annette’s striped skirt.
As much as I would like to make a paper doll of this Shirley Temple doll, I cannot in good conscience do it since I traced this image to a site where the paper dolls are advertised for sale.
Still, it might be worth the money. My sisters had one of these too.
I will just have to be satisfied with whatever I can make from this little guy/girl? public-domain character from the 30’s. You can make wonderful things out of something like that.
This novel, my new work in progress, was not the original choice to fill this space on Tuesday’s NOVEL WRITING posts. It is not like novels I have written before. It will be longer, deeper, and probably more controversial. It will also probably not be a stand-alone story/ It will be deeply intertwined with When the Captain Came Calling, Snow Babies, and Sing Sad Songs, my previous Valerie-Clarke novels. The Cantos will not be short and will be titled with Classical music. An emphasis will be placed on thematic development and character development. And I may not do more than a few Cantos here.
Prelude and Opening Movement
Just because you cannot see someone knocking on your front door anymore, it doesn’t mean they are totally gone from your life. In fact, sometimes the most important people in your life are the ones that you can’t touch anymore… the ones who don’t sit down at the dinner table with you anymore… the ones you can’t talk to and have them actually give you an answer anymore… the ones who will never actually kiss you ever again.
That’s why Valerie Clarke was crying in her bedroom. It was why she was awake with her eyes closed early into the wee hours of the morning. It was also why she hadn’t really been aware when the racing thoughts and weepy sighs turned directly into a conversation with her angel. It was as if Michel Volant was a part of her every-day living world.
“Why are you crying, Mon Cher? What solace can I give to thee?”
He flapped his large white wings only once, and the swirl of cool night air helped draw away some of the heat on her face because she had been crying, and cooled her body down just enough to drain away the tightness and stress.
“Because they’re all gone, Michel. I have nobody left.”
“Who has gone? You mean Mary and Pidney because they have gone to College in Cedar Rapids?”
“Yes, my two best friends from high school are gone far away. But not just them.”
“Danny Murphy because he has fallen in love with the Bates girl?”
“Yes. He was never my boyfriend. But he made me laugh. And he doesn’t have time for me anymore because of Carla. He’s deeply in love with her, and won’t risk making her jealous. I had no closer friend when I was twelve and he was thirteen.”
“But surely there are others…”
“No. Really, there are not.”
“You mean?”
“You I know. But…” Valerie’s eyes were open, but seeing only the darkness of the bedroom. “I was in love with him too. And he was… he never got to… Oh! I can’t even say it.”
“But I was him and he was me… for a time. So, I know he was deeply in love with you. But he had no choice. A hematoma in the brain that the doctors had missed…”
“And before him it was Tommy. He came with the blizzard, and left with…”
“But you knew he had a mission in life. He had to go. And perhaps he will return one day.”
“He never asked me if I would let him go. Or if I wanted to go with him. Now, I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
“He is. That boy was made of iron. He was stronger than any adult you ever met. At least, stronger of heart.”
“And I have lost so many adults in my life too.”
“Your mother is still here. And Uncle Dash.”
“But there was Catbird.”
“The old hobo from the blizzard? The man with the crazy-quilt for a coat?”
“He was so wise and so good. But when the blizzard was over… he was gone.”
“And who else did you lose?”
“My cousin Stacy. I could talk to her about anything. And Uncle Dash drove her away because…”
“Because she fell in love with the Toad, Brom Brown.”
“Yes… And don’t forget Ray Zeffer. He simply disappeared. Remember how he saved me when the Voodoo Guy was tricking everybody?”
“The first boy who ever saw you naked.”
“Well, the first non-cousin boy.”
“And before that?”
Valerie’s eyes were blurry with tears. Did that mean this wasn’t a dream? Do you get blurry vision in a dream?
“Daddy…”
“Yes. You found him in the barn…”
“And the gun was still there…”
“Oh, Ma Belle, I’m sorry to make you remember.”
“Why did he do it? Was it because of something I did wrong? Was it my fault?”
“This I do not know. But I think not. And you must remember, the pain of losing someone is caused by their value to you. If it hurts that much…”
“…Then that’s how much you loved them. I know. The pain will never go away. He left me without ever even trying to tell me why he had to go.” She could say nothing more. Her whole mind was full of tears. She laid her head on his soft bare shoulder, and he folded his wing around her. And then she realized that she was awake. It was not so much a shoulder as it was a damp pillow. And she desperately needed him to come back. Her heart was broken. Even her angel had left her behind.
Can I do this? This is going to be the hardest novel to write that I have ever yet written. I had to write it to answer critical questions I have about my own life. But reading this through for the fifth time, I still had to stop and cry three times. It’s worse now that both my mother and father have died. But if I can mend Valerie’s broken heart before this story is over, then it will more than be worth it.
My writing has generated some bad reviews of late. Things I am not sure have very much validity, but are a part of public opinion you have to learn to live with. I recognize as an experienced public school teacher, there are always going to be people who automatically hate you for no reason, and will be motivated enough to find a reason, and even get you fired if they can.
The critics are not going to get me fired in this case, since I am a retired school teacher and no longer teaching. And I live on a pension, not the money I make on my novels (currently between $2.50 and $5.00 a month) so getting them banned from Amazon has no financial consequences.
My book The Baby Werewolf got a two-star review from a lady who claimed to have worked in publishing and editing. She said she hated to give a bad review, but my book was so unprofessional and bad that she had no choice but to recommend that nobody else ever reads it. She said it had too much telling rather than showing, an unprofessional cover, and a story that doesn’t have a coherent plot.
But she also says that my book, a horror comedy, is too creepy. And she qualifies that in that she thinks it’s creepy in ways that a horror story shouldn’t be creepy. She objects to humor involving Sherry Cobble, the nudist character. She says that she has no problem with the idea of nudism, just the way I use it.
So, I think, what it boils down to is she is not so much shaming the novel for being a bad novel, but she is saying that I, as the author, am either too stupid to effectively write a novel like this, or that I am a bad person with evil motives for writing a novel like this. So, she got me! Curses! Foiled again!
I do take note of the fact that this novel has also gotten glowing reviews from some other readers. So, I guess my evil plan worked on them. Whatever that evil plan was supposed to gain me, it must be working more often than it is foiled.
That happened again this week with my novel The Wizard in His Keep. It is due to get a two-star review via Pubby review exchange. I don’t know what the reviewer has found so offensive and wrong about my book, but it must be pretty serious in that Amazon has not yet approved that review after almost a week.
I have a fair amount of confidence as a writer. I have written things that won awards from editors. I have made the final round of judging in a novel-writing contest twice in the last decade. Whatever bad thing they are going to throw at me next, I can take it. There are no writers, even the great ones, that don’t get at least some unfair criticism. It can really hurt when the bad review is one of only eight total reviews. And bad reviews can make me depressed. But, I promise it won’t kill me.
This is a character from the novel The Boy… Forever. Icarus Jones is based on a kid I mentored back in the 1980’s. His real name was Jose. He was incredibly curious and good at skateboarding. He went to college at Notre Dame.
This picture was inspired by a piece of pottery I saw in 1994 in New Mexico on my way back to Texas after visiting my sister in California. The background is an imitation of the glaze on the pot. The Native American Boy is drawn from a model in a Sears catalog, one that was wearing a polyester t-shirt and narrow jeans.
These are all students I taught my very first year as a teacher. Teresa would even get a teaching degree and come back to teach in the same school district as me, though in the elementary school, not the middle school where I taught.
This is a picture inspired by a dream of being alone on a tropical island with a native island girl. Fifteen years after drawing this picture, I married a girl from the Philippines.
This began as a doodle while watching Max Fleischer’s animated movie Hoppity Goes to Town. I turned it from a pencil doodle into a pen-and-ink illustration that morphed into a comic fairytale.This was a classroom rules poster illustrated with a portrait of Hilda, a very quiet and intelligent student who was the first of a family of eight kids of which I taught the youngest seven. The only one I didn’t teach joined us as an English teacher a decade later. Hilda never told me if she recognized herself in the picture even though she sat in my class for a second year while it hung on my wall. (I taught both seventh and eighth graders for a number of years.)
Dilsey Murphy is a character based about 85% on the older of my two sisters. The 81 is the number of Minnesota Vikings defensive end Carl Eller. My sister and my father were rooting for the Vikings as I rooted for the Kansas City Chiefs in Superbowl IV after the 1969 NFL season. I am still not allowed to gloat over who won.
This is a portrait of the main villain in the Disney version of Treasure Island. That book is the one that really hooked me on reading novels in the winter of 1966. I read Grandma Aldrich’s copy of the book illustrated by N.C. Wyeth that February while I was sick with the flu.
The background of this picture is my last actual classroom at Naaman Forest High School in Garland, Texas. I used it for this illustration of Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates in my novel Magical Miss Morgan.
The Necromancer’s Apprentice is now finished and being edited for publication. So, the chapter by chapter serialization is now ended. The previous work AeroQuest 4 : The Amazing Aero Brothers is also finished and awaiting final edits for publication.
So, I need a new book to put on this Tuesday blog-spot.
Most of the novels I have put through this Tuesday process have been like AeroQuest 4, novel projects with big problems that require a lot of rewriting and editorial work.
Since I finished AeroQuest 4, I have been using Tuesdays for my main writing project, the first two being relatively short novellas. The most recent one was intended to be a novella, but turned into a short novel. If I follow the original plan, the next book I will use here is AeroQuest 5 : It Ain’t Over Yet.
The second choice would be to use my next main work in progress. That would be some version of this book;
But this novel is going to be a lot longer than any of the things I have been using for this purpose. Cantos or Chapters are a lot longer than is wise to use as a daily post. Do I use smaller chunks of chapters?
I have doubts about this method, but the post for next week would already be written if I do that.
Living the life you were born to live makes you beautiful.Being happy and positive makes you beautiful.Differences accepted and even celebrated are beautiful.Living close to nature makes you beautiful.Accepting yourself for what you are makes you beautiful.Expressing yourself by dancing makes you beautiful, even if you are a terrible dancer.Carrying your girlfriend’s books at school makes you beautiful.Having a big imagination makes you beautiful.
Loving others makes you beautiful.
Working through your fears and sadness makes you beautiful.Being intelligent and motivated to use it makes you beautiful.Realizing everybody else is beautiful too makes you beautiful.
Being a really old and foolish child can make you beautiful too, if you don’t spoil it by being all ugly and stuff.
On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in. (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.) And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people. Rabbits are people too. So, I have been walking among the rabbit people. Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people. They are not trying to profit off you. They are not trying to get everything they can off you. They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.
I often see myself as a rabbit person. In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.
As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students. If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”
“Oh, no, thank you sir.”
“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight. You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”
“Oh, no sir,” they say. “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”
And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody. Teaching is like that. You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.
And so life goes on like that. Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.
I have recently run a free-book promotion on The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis. During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident. He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person. He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.
So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit. That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you. You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul. (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup. Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)
Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island, the actress Dawn Wells, died of Covid. Today is the seventh day of my illness with what I believe was Covid Omicron, and it seems very likely I will not die of it. Of course, I was triple-vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine. And she was 82 and arguably in worse shape health-wise than me.,
Is it fair? Should it have happened this way?
When I was twelve and she was 29, I worshiped her. Of course, it was the Mary Ann in syndicated reruns I really loved. She was even younger than 29 in that context.
So, how do you balance existential equations like that?
Would I have traded my life for hers? Yes, probably. But what would it really matter? I don’t know what to think.
The Cardinals football team lost again in the first round of the playoffs. They had their best start of any year this football season, and they were being talked about as a favorite to reach the Superbowl. Then they collapsed and won significantly fewer games than they lost in the second half of the season.
Why did their winning engine go so dead at the worst possible time?
Well, I have been thinking since the St. Louis Blues finally won their first Stanley Cup that if the Arizona Cardinals ever won the Superbowl, as they came within minutes of doing in the 2009 Superbowl, I would probably die because all my sports-team wishes would’ve come true. Does that mean I owe my continued existence to the Los Angeles Rams for defeating them? I don’t know what to think.
Uh oh! Does that mean that since, “I Don’t Know What to Think,” Therefore I am not?
Doing the philosophical-thinking thing can be deadly serious.
**This is a classic post from January, 2015 that is still somewhat relevant… Unless I’m lying.**
There are limits to what people will believe. No really, there are, I promise. You can believe me because I’m a fiction writer, a story-teller, and I therefore tell lies all the time. I was a teacher for thirty-one years, so I not only tell kids how wonderful they are in order to get good behavior and real learning out of them, but I have been told some of the most convoluted, inside-out, purple-in-the-face hoo-haws that are ever told anywhere in human culture throughout human history, and told them by a child with a straight face, perfectly seriously, and with little red horns holding up their crooked golden halos. We are taught to misrepresent the truth from early childhood on.
“Do you have to go potty, sweetheart?”
“No, mommy, I jest like to dance.”
“Do you love me, Mortimer? Or do you just want to get me alone in a car after the prom?”
“Oh, I love you, Alicia. Really I do!”
“So are you in favor of taxing the oil companies at a fair and balanced rate, Senator, so we have more money to spend on Education and public works?”
“Why, I most certainly do, young voter. Ignore that man with the “I Love Exxon” button trying to bash me over the head with that Tea Party campaign sign. Let me kiss that darling little baby of yours.”
This post was inspired by all the lies told in the State of the Union speech last night by President O’Bama (He’s Irish and a conservative like Bill O’Reilly, isn’t he?) Now, I am well aware of the white lies the President buttered our bread with. The economy has actually improved, but not nearly as much as was claimed. And not nearly enough for someone like me, a white male retired educator with significant health problems living in a Red State under Republican-Nazi governor/emperors who want to privatize education and spend my pension money on tax breaks for billionaires. But those lies are nothing compared to the damn lies told by the Republican response lady, Ernst from Iowa. She laid out a plan for undoing everything that’s been done to improve my life by the government since 2008. The Affordable Care Act is to be repealed. Tax breaks for “job creators” are going to be re-instituted. We are going to heal the middle class by deregulating industry and predatory banks and by giving more benefits and goodies to the rich folks who will treat us better than those horrible Democratic liberals who want to turn us all into socialists. This is coming from the Iowa Senator who won her seat by promising your average pork-eating Iowan to use her “hog-castrating skills” to motivate Democrats in congress to see things her way. Iowans (of which I once was one of) know good fertilizer when they smell it. It makes you want to shout, “Hoo-Haw!” (Yes, it’s true, I once knew an old farm hand that, when he heard a ridiculously contorted lie, would shout “Hoo-Haw!” as a sort of derisive laughter to hear such a funny truth-twister.)
Lies are our way of life. We lie about what we think. We lie about what we feel. We lie about how we view the world. We lie about whether or not we tell lies. Could we live a life without ever lying? I hate to tell you this, but if I say, “yes”, then it might not be entirely truthful of me.
I am sick of a lot of things. Right now, Covid Omicron is probably one of those things. Oh, it doesn’t seem like it is going to kill triple-vaccinated me. But it is not making my life easy right now.
It bothers me that States with idiots in charge of the government are trying to legislate school curriculum in ways that eliminate books about black culture and black experience, life experiences of gay authors and trans people, and anything else historical or factual that makes white guys feel guilty or uncomfortable about not feeling guilty. (Notice I haven’t mentioned any particularly stupid red States like Texas or Iowa or the evil kingdom of Florida, nor have I specifically insulted moron governors like Greg Abbot or Ron DeSantis. I am behaving myself just as I learned to do from FOX News.)
It also bothers me that States with rabid monkeys in charge of the government are rewriting voting laws to seriously make things more difficult for certain people to vote, and rearranging vote certification so that the Republican party does not have to put up with people winning elections when they don’t like them. Voting is easy for me because I live in a mostly white-guy voting district and I look like somebody who might vote for Republicans. But even I could get into serious trouble if I tried to give a bottle of water of to an elderly black woman waiting in line to vote. And my side probably can’t win in the upcoming election because the majority of the voters who vote for my chosen side don’t look like me, or more obviously think like me.
And I am definitely disturbed by the fact that somebody who looks like a badly fermented mango and used to be the President of the United States, obviously, and in front of the world, incited a riot at the Capitol which resulted in violence and death for some rioters, but more Capitol Policemen. He literally tried to overthrow the US government. And a year later, he still has not been arrested and imprisoned, in spite of the fact that in many other countries he would’ve been executed for his traitorous, failed attempt at a coup.
But what good does it do to be angry about these things? Evil, greedy crooks have been running the ov er-all show since at least the 1980’s, and maybe longer, since before then I thought and spoke and acted like a child. I probably wasn’t mature enough to recognize how easily evil comes to mankind. Perhaps we were always doomed to eventual extinction by the excessive evilness rampant in the human species.
If mankind is going to be inventive enough and resourceful enough to survive nuclear proliferation, human-caused climate crisis, and de-evolution into fascistic. authoritarian, criminal empires, it will be the positive, creative, and good-natured among us that will find the solutions. Not the angry men that dominate politics and television.
I have done my part already. I taught kids to read, and a few of them to write. I hope I taught the right ones how to think. And I didn’t give them reason to become hateful. And I tried to teach them lessons on higher morality.
I finished a novel yesterday. That means Aeroquest 4, and The Necromancer’s Apprentice are both only a good proofreading away from being published.
Will I have time before the end to finish another? This I do not know. But there exists enough published stories by me to secure my right to call myself an author. Still, it is a task that makes me happy and leaves more positive than negative behind me when this life is over. It is a better, more-useful thing to do than being an angry man.
I hope you will help me, when the time comes, to vote the evil out of the government… if they let us do so. But I also hope you worry far more about being happy and fulfilled rather than angry.
Catch a Falling Star 