I have been struggling with my goals for this week. I wanted to publish my novel, The Wizard in His Keep. I also wanted to go get my vote in at an early-voting polling place. But I had to get my phone repaired because the battery was failing. I needed a reliable phone if I had to wait in a long voting line, which it seems we are actually having. My health has been poor. I didn’t want to pass out in line and cause an emergency without a working phone. I had to get battery power to pull this off.
Last weekend my computer crashed and it turns out my Google account may have been hacked… again. I had to recover the account and change a ton of passwords. I have had to check accounts repeatedly without using my computer. But, even though it delayed my final edit and publication by a couple of days, I got the manuscript and cover submitted last night. The e-book is already live on Amazon. The paperback will also be available soon.
I managed to order and receive a new phone battery online before the computer crash. But I discovered that my arthritic fingers couldn’t handle the battery installation.
So…
I was able to get the phone working by taking it to the nearest AT&T Store. The guy behind the counter put the battery in my phone for free.
And then today, as I was planning to go vote, I passed out about five times after breakfast. I took what medication I have that is relevant. Early voting is every weekday until the 30th of October. I will have to wait for a better day when I have more physical power to do it.
So, I have overcome all of my goals except for voting. I did it by marshaling power. Battery power by buying a battery. Finger power by relying on the empathy in an AT&T employee for an arthritic old man whose fingers fumble. And I will overcome the voting issue with healing power and will power.
Dana Cole held Trav Dalgoda’s severed head in her hands. The head stared back with lifeless eyes. The crown on the head was pulsating with sickly green lights.
“How could you do this?” she said to the head.
“The evil power of the Tesserah,” the head answered.
“You can still talk. Are you alive or something?”
“Trav Dalgoda’s life spark is still in here,” said the head, “preserved by the power of the crown.”
Dana’s heart turned over in her chest. “You mean he could be brought back?”
“Yes. We possess the power.”
The feelings that poured through her ample bosom were a terrible, painful mix. She hated the stupidity of the man and all the death and suffering he had caused on Coventry. She felt like the fool deserved what he had gotten out of the adventure. Still, she loved him. There was something oddly attractive about the goofy-sweet fool with the charm of a naughty little boy.
“How can I do this awful thing?” she asked the head.
“As long as we remain attached to the head,” said the crown, “we can speak to you and direct you, as well as keep the life spark alive. We will help you to build an artificial body to allow the man to return to full mobility and control over his life functions.”
“He’ll be a Mechanoid?”
“Not in the sense of the crude beings your own people make of dead bodies. He will actually be alive. Everything but his head will be artificial, but we can make him better than he was.”
Dana couldn’t help but imagine Trav naked with the body of a Greek god. He could be enhanced in that special area… Well, yes. She would do this for her Goofy man.
“How do I go about it? Especially the penis…”
The crown gave her hours of instruction. She took extensive notes, filling three note-computers. She diagrammed the whole thing out holographically. She then located the best materials available on the ruined warship. Assembly took her a week while the rest of the surviving crew worked to restore the ship to flying trim without the specific parts she needed for her project.
When the task was done, Trav stood before her, looking at her with sensory enhancements in his goofy brown eyes. She had replaced his Donald Duck hat with a more manly-looking cowboy hat. He was buff and handsome in ways he hadn’t been before.
Dana Cole leaned over and kissed her resurrected fool. “I love you, Trav. Welcome back.”
“Thanks, old Dana Jester,” he said. “Now how about we make me two more arms? One will have a built-in machine gun, and the other a flame thrower.” Dana smiled. She definitely had her Goofy back.
He sat down to write something for the day. He rolled a fresh sheet of typing paper into the typewriter. Then he sat back to look at it. It was a totally horrifying stretch of cold, blank nothingness. There was nothing there. It left him feeling completely and hopelessly alone.
How do you connect with that person who is going to pick up and read the final copy of this thing once it is finished? His brain hurt thinking about it.
He knew that he needed to get started. And he wanted to start with something colorful.
So, he typed a word; RED.
“Well, that’s a start, at least…” he said, talking foolishly to the inanimate typewriter. “But what do I really mean by saying RED?”
Well, of course, red means emotional things, anger, love, shed blood, tomato sauce on Chicago-style pizza…
…But how do you make an actual idea out of that? It needs to be stretched some and pulled a lot. Bent out of shape, maybe even smashed by a hammer.
The typewriter became concerned and alarmed at the mention of the hammer.
But the writer was only thinking about the hammer. And the typewriter didn’t read minds. Heck, it wasn’t even electric yet. It was a typewriter that the writer’s grandmother bought in the 1940s. And writer loved it because it reminded him of her. And it reminded him of her letting him type his very first story on it when he was six years old. He wrote a story about a skeleton chasing a dog. And when the skeleton caught up to the dog, the dog ate him. Because he was bones. It was a short story. Very short. Less than a page. Because grandma only had one page of typing paper left on her desk.
And the story wasn’t red. So, why was he even thinking about it now?
Well, it was read. By his grandmother. And she laughed.
And he hadn’t thought about it until right now. But it was the moment he knew he wanted to be a writer some day.
And, so… Right now… This very moment… He realized… The real story is ready to begin,
I have spent a lot of time reading and reviewing other people’s books. And at the same time I have invested some of my free-reading time in re-reading my own novel, The Baby Werewolf. The thing about all of it together is that it represents the actual life-force of the author. We all do it. Authors put their own experience, their own heart, and their own precious world into their work. We do it at different levels of confidence, competence, and creativity. But we all do it. And because we do it, someone needs to read it.
A story…
contains the characters that the author has known, the author has loved, and especially the people the author has lost over the course of his or her life.
At least, the competent authors do that. They put real people into their work. You can tell, even in really awful, poorly written novels, that flashes of what the authors really observed, really hated, or really fell in love with about the people in their lives are there to be read and absorbed.
Places
are also crucial to the story. Fiction or nonfiction, you will be taken to other homes, other cities, other worlds than the one you yourself inhabit.
What more can you truly say about your life than where you lived it, where you are from, and what background defines you as an author?
And plot…
that which happens in a story, is probably the most important thing of all. Because reading gives you a share in someone else’s life, in someone else’s experience. A chance to walk about in someone else’s shoes.
You can comfortably learn what others have learned before you. You can share in their ups and downs and all-arounds to experience the same chills and thrills and sadness as they have lived, and loved, and laughed about.
So, in this essay, I contend that human life on the planet Earth is a very good thing. And you multiply its goodness a thousand-fold if only you will only pick up and read someone else’s book.
It is said by somebody who wasn’t basically me that any time an artist draws a picture of someone, or paints a picture of someone, or twizzles a twizzle-snoot of someone… they are basically making a picture of themselves.
So, this Paffooney that I paffooned of a purple mouse in a Don Martin-esque style, is supposed to be Mickey the cartoonist. And Mickey is supposedly, basically me.
And here I am as Muck Man, the superhero. It is me because the super power he has is his horrible, non-adorable, and unrelenting stench. The horrible smell of him renders villains and bad people unconscious or worse… sometimes straight to the hearse. And using his olfactory assaults on evil as a way to make something terrible into something with a -someness of awe, makes him indubitably, indelibly basically me.
“Long Ago It Might Have Been”
And here is a picture of a boy who might’ve been my son if only I had been given enough good sense to fall in love with that first blond young lady who first had thoughts about making babies with me. I didn’t. I’m stupid. And now she has only girls. That makes it a picture too of basically me.
And this little not-me was me all along, and as the boy who sees colors, it’s really not wrong. Synesthetic they call it in a name that’s not long, but is resoundingly deep like the words of a song.
And you might argue this one and say that it’s true… “This one is too pretty to be a picture of you.” But you would be wrong on this basis, you see…
The monster inside me is basically me
And here I am all magic and purple, and I just blew the rhyme again, so this isn’t another danged verse. I drew this picture of Milt Morgan from an old school picture of me.
I often say the character in the stories is based on the Other Mike, the other boy I grew up with who was named Mike in my little home town.
But he thought like me, he acted a lot like me. He even looked like me, at least a little bit. So, if I am portraying him, I am depicting basically me.
And this is the naked me, as a nudist back in childhood in Rowan, Iowa, which I never was… not like this… but still am. Because I am a writer. And writers always write about their naked selves, showing the whole world what saner and more prudish people keep secret. If they were truly smart and wanted to keep their secrets to themselves, artists would never draw or paint or write about or twizzle about themselves. In fact, they would make no art at all.
The best writing advice Idiot Mickey can give is… don’t take writing advice from idiots!
Honestly, I am in no position to give out sage advice on having a writing career. Of course I was a writing teacher for more than three decades. I know how to help you pass the Texas State Writing Test, as long as you are taking the version of the test from more than six years ago. I am an author who has won a couple of awards and published seventeen novels and a book of essays and has an eighteenth novel almost ready to publish. But I have not yet earned more than a hundred dollars total over my entire writing career. Still, I can discuss the principles I use to help me mindlessly pursue my fictional career as an author.
1. Always keep writing.
There is no substitute for practice. Whether you are telling a story full of lies, writing bad poetry, or making an essay filled with mindless talkie-talkie, the more you do it, the better you get at it.
2. Write what excites the brat in your brain.
I always write with only one reader in mind, twelve-year-old me. That was two years after I was sexually assaulted, a year before the first man walked on the moon, and four years before my first kiss and the slapping I got for not going about it right.
I know there are other people who will eventually read it. But the messages in my writing are always the ones I needed to hear after I knew how terrible the world could be, but before I knew everything I needed to know to deal with it.
3. I’ve made peace with the fact that I don’t write for money.
I am not a hobbyist. I do, in fact, need to write to live. But I write to satisfy spiritual needs and leave my words behind me like breadcrumbs for whatever Hansel and Gretel are following, hoping to learn from me and avoid the witches while eating at least the frosting from the gingerbread houses they encounter along the way.
I pay the mortgage and buy food with the pension I earned as a teacher, at least until the Republican overlords of Texas decide that retired teachers are basically parasites getting fat off the money that rightfully belongs to stock brokers and businessmen who earned it away from me by having super-rich daddies and mommies. I don’t write for money. I write for the frosting from witch-houses. Oh, and for book reviews.
4. I try all the tricks I learn from reading good books.
Dracula by Bram Stoker is an epistolary novel. That means the story is told through letters, notes, and journal entries. So, I wrote one. The Boy… Forever is a book about a kids’ gang battling an undead Chinese dragon in human form. I based the style of writing the novel on that idea stolen from Bram Stoker.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel. It follows the adventures of Huck Finn, the picaro, as he drifts from one adventure to the next. I wrote one of those too. In Superchicken, Edward-Andrew Campbell, more commonly known by his superhero nickname, is the picaro who goes from one episode where he has to prove his bravery to the next where he has to prove it all again.
I could give you more examples of that, but I need to move on to the next butterfly of being a writer and finish this goofy advice column.
5. And Finally… I constantly reread my own writing and fix it when I find any of those things that i know to be bad writing.
As a writing teacher I have seen all kinds of terrifically terrible mistakes. Run-on sentences. Sentence fragments. Weasel words. Paragraphs with no bones, and hence, no structure. Using archaic words like “hence.” Suddenly changing to tiny red letters for no apparent reason… As you can see, it takes a while to get rid of superfluous meta-foolferfollies.
Anyway that’s Idiot Mickey’s idiotic advice about a career as a writer. Don’t believe any of it… Unless you really want to.
Ham sat at the pilot-seat controls aboard his safari ship, looking out the main portal into the cavernous docking bay of the Bregohelma. It was depressing. Trying to suicidally destroy his enemy, he had become a mere prisoner instead.
Admiral Tang didn’t see him as anything more than a flea that needed to be slapped. He was glad he and his crew were not dead, but he was irked by the fact that he had been far less of a factor in the Battle of Coventry than had his friend the Goofer. And worse, now Goofy and all those potential allies on Coventry were all dead too. What step comes next?
There was activity in the docking bay. Armed men in combat armor were filing in, keeping together in highly organized tactical formations. Dang! Imperial Marines! There would probably be little hope of surviving this encounter.
“Boss! Yo, Boss!” Sinbadh came stumbling into the bridge of the ship with an armload of unattached plasma gun parts. “We gots plenty o’ buccaneers ready to board us!”
“Yes, I know. Stow the guns away. We are gonna meekly surrender and hope they don’t kill us.”
“Blimey, Cap’n! We surrender without a fight?”
“Yes, my friend. The Madonna is pregnant. Sahleck is a little boy. Professor Marou is really, really old…”
“Not that old!” I said as I revealed myself from where I had secretly been watching Ham from behind the bulkhead.
“Hey, Professor, what were you doing hiding back there?” Ham asked.
“Well, I…” I tried to think of a quick excuse. It suddenly wasn’t necessary.
“Ham Aero! Han Ferrari! Come out!” came the strangely compelling voice. We all felt a deep black fear swelling in our guts and pulling us painfully toward the voice like a nose ring attached to a chain being pulled by a steady, relentless strength.
“Good Lord!” swore Ham. “It’s Admiral Tang, and he has us in his power.”
Ham was right. It was Tang’s special Psion power. He could manipulate us with our own fear. He controlled us completely.
“Don’t shoot! We’re coming out!” I heard Duke Ferrari saying it from the exit ramp beneath us. And there was no choice. We filed out of the Shadowcat like puppets on strings.
Admiral Brona Tang was not only the scariest being I had ever met up to that point in my life, he was also the biggest. He was easily six foot eleven, and encased from head to toe in powered battle armor. The armor was even a bright red color, as if to emphasize the blood he had spilled and the blood he still intended to spill. His face was a red mask with black eye portals, an alien, evil sort of face. He also wore a hat on top of the helmet, a wide-brimmed red hat that looked vaguely like the kind of hat worn by Catholic friars in the long-ago Dark Ages, the fourteenth century. In fact, as I thought of it, images of the Inquisition and power-mad Cardinals leapt to mind.
“Good. You have decided to relent and surrender.” The voice was electronically enhanced and almost sounded like three voices in one to me.
Ham, Duke Ferrari, and I stood in front, as if to shield the others. Sinbadh stood behind with the poor Nebulon Madonna on one side, and the trembling Lupin boy, Sahleck Kim on the other side. The wolfman put a hairy paw around the shoulders of each.
“Neither you nor your brother can escape me, Ham. I have you in my possession, and one of my most trusted agents is by Ged’s side, reporting his every move. Your brother is even now beginning the quest that will dispose of that Ancient device that proved to be such a thorn in my side here at the Battle of Coventry.” Tang laughed. “I couldn’t ask for a sweeter vengeance.”
“Who… who is the agent?” asked Ham, against the force of Tang’s terrible will.
“Ah, no! It’s not that easy! How do I know you haven’t manifested some terrible Psion power too by now? It runs in our families. Mine comes from my father. Your brother’s is from Mammy Aero, a powerful Psion as well known to my father as Ged. My mind is shielded, and I will tell you nothing.”
“Aren’t villains always supposed to brag about their evil plots to take over the galaxy?” I asked sarcastically.
Tang laughed again. “I know you too, Dr. Marou. I learned of you from those accursed Time Knights. You are the one person here that future history books guarantee had to survive this encounter. The same is not true for the rest. Most of you will live no longer than the coming battle against Tron Blastarr at Outpost. Oops! Did I give something away? How about this; I am committing what remains of the entire Imperial Navy to that battle. I am going to win it and put an end to any possible time line where your so-called good guys can win. The Imperium has kept order for hundreds of years. It will last for thousands more.”
Sinbadh winked his doggy eye at me. “Clever how ye got him to spill the ol’ soliloquy there, Doc.” he whispered. “Tip o’ me hat to ye.”
“What will you do with us, then?” asked Ham.
“You will sit right here in the docking bay, prisoners aboard your own ship. I am told I cannot destroy you tonight. It has to wait for the battle. But if I can outthink and kill a Time Knight, I can kill you.”
Yes, she was a real car. My dad bought her in the 60’s as a used car. But she was a hardtop, not a convertible. She was the car he drove to work every day in Belmond. We called it the “Pink and White Pumpkin”, my sisters and I, referring to the pumpkin in Cinderella which the fairy godmother changes into a coach. But it would only later become the car of my dreams.
You see, she was killed in the Belmond Tornado of 1966. Her windows were all broken out and her frame was twisted. So the pictures of her, though they look exactly like my memories of her, minus the rust spots, are not actual pictures of the car in question. Our next door neighbor, Stan the Truck Man, was a mechanic always on the lookout for salvage parts. He took her apart piece by piece while she sat in our driveway. We continued to sit in her and play in her until all that was left was the bare frame. My friend Werner told me for the first time about the facts of life and where babies really came from in the back seat while she was being gradually dismantled. Of course, I was nine at the time and didn’t really believe him. How could that grossness actually be true?
But she still lives, that old dream car… She is the reason that I objectify my imagination as a ship with pink sails. My daydreams, my creative fantasies, and those long, lingering plays in the theater of my imagination as I am drifting off to sleep all start in the three-masted sailing ship with pink sails. And that dream image was born from the Pink and White Pumpkin. I have sailed in her to many an exotic place… even other planets. And when I die, she will take me home again.
Yes, I have reached a snag in the novel-writing process. I am definitely at the end of the story. The crisis point is past. The characters who have to die to resolve the central conflict are dead. The characters who needed to be rescued are already rescued. I have probably less than a thousand words left to write. But I still have to tie the knot in the end of the plot to keep all the main ideas and themes from pouring out and floating away with the wind. I need the final scene and a memorable end line.
And, I am ill. My chest hurts. My head hurts. And I have needed to sleep every time I have settled down to write it. What happens if the old Grim Reaper shows up again with a sharper scythe than he had on his last visit?
I don’t know
what comes after the last chapter. I don’t know it for the book I am writing, nor for the life I am living.
I freely admit that I have no confidence whatsoever that after I die I will wake up in Heaven. Baptists have told me I will go to Hell for not believing what they believe. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have assured me that there is no Hell for me to wake up in and be eternally tortured in. But they also tell me I get no Paradise forever because I stopped believing what they believe. I have repeatedly said in writing and conversations that I am a Christian Existentialist. And I have explained that I think that makes me an atheist who believes in God. That leaves me, more or less, as an agnostic, not knowing anything until it’s proven to me, and realizing that nobody can prove it besides the God that I believe in but who doesn’t exist.
Our lives are like a book.
Things happen before the book is opened and you begin to read, but they are not technically something that the book contains within it. And when the book is finished and you close it, the story is complete. But the book still exists even when it’s closed.
I am not concerned about the fact that my story will end. But with both the book I am working on and the life I am living still unfinished… well, I hope both stories will be finished.
Slaying a blue dragon wasn’t the biggest event at the cardboard castle, but it was among the most memorable.All sorts of people show up to parties I hold there. Of course, the guests don’t really have a choice in the matter.Celebrities make an appearance if I can afford them. Mickey and Minnie cost me less than five dollars.The place isn’t actually Hogwarts. It’s made of cardboard. I believe Hogwarts was made of polystyrene.All sorts of heroes try to save the day in the cardboard castle.Heroes at the cardboard castle are made, not born.Sometimes the cast is a bit crazy.’It is possible to take the Snowball Express from the castle to Toonerville. Mickey and Minnie are always ready to jump in front of the camera.Of course, a few evil wizards are essential to the game.Voldemort may have mistaken the place for Hogwarts too.Sometimes I question the prevailing religion at cardboard castle. But Princess Jasmine seems to be fine with it.But the old castle is a bit run down in parts of it. Maybe Princess Aurora can convince the Prince to invest in a few wall repairs.
Catch a Falling Star 
Reading is Life
I have spent a lot of time reading and reviewing other people’s books. And at the same time I have invested some of my free-reading time in re-reading my own novel, The Baby Werewolf. The thing about all of it together is that it represents the actual life-force of the author. We all do it. Authors put their own experience, their own heart, and their own precious world into their work. We do it at different levels of confidence, competence, and creativity. But we all do it. And because we do it, someone needs to read it.
A story…
contains the characters that the author has known, the author has loved, and especially the people the author has lost over the course of his or her life.
At least, the competent authors do that. They put real people into their work. You can tell, even in really awful, poorly written novels, that flashes of what the authors really observed, really hated, or really fell in love with about the people in their lives are there to be read and absorbed.
Places
are also crucial to the story. Fiction or nonfiction, you will be taken to other homes, other cities, other worlds than the one you yourself inhabit.
What more can you truly say about your life than where you lived it, where you are from, and what background defines you as an author?
And plot…
that which happens in a story, is probably the most important thing of all. Because reading gives you a share in someone else’s life, in someone else’s experience. A chance to walk about in someone else’s shoes.
You can comfortably learn what others have learned before you. You can share in their ups and downs and all-arounds to experience the same chills and thrills and sadness as they have lived, and loved, and laughed about.
So, in this essay, I contend that human life on the planet Earth is a very good thing. And you multiply its goodness a thousand-fold if only you will only pick up and read someone else’s book.
Leave a comment
Filed under artwork, commentary, humor, novel writing, Paffooney, reading