Yep, I have now finished writing and publishing twelve books. I have reached a dozen. And the fascinating thing to me about my stories is that, even though they are pure fiction, they are about my life, especially my inner creative life.
All of the books have a connection to my home town. Rowan, Iowa, is portrayed in the books as Norwall (Rowan with the letters remixed and two L’s added for Love and Laughter). The two science fiction books are connected not so much by place as by characters. Stardusters and Space Lizards begins with aliens and humans fleeing the failed invasion of Earth from the site of the defeat with Norwall residents now a part of the alien space-ship crew. AeroQuest 1 has an ancestral connection through Orben Wallace, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. His descendant is Googol Marou, the story-teller of the AeroQuest saga.
So, here’s a picture of the 12 books in time order (more or less).
And just to make matters a bit clearer, here’s the time-ordered books with approximate times indicated;
I do have more novels to write if I am given enough time and life to do them, but they will be fit into this timeline after 1974 C.E. and before 5541 C.E. That’s only a space of about 3,400 years to fill, so I will have to work hard to squeeze it all in.
In Japanese the name Gaijin means
“foreigner” or “gringo”. It denotes a
barbarian who is too close to nature to truly ever understand the ways of the
celestial culture of the dragons. It was
an appropriate name for the planet. All
who came there, even the dolphins and whales, were foreigners and off-worlders. The true culture was a secret deeply embedded
in the planet itself.
Dr. Naylund Smith was an immortal. He had lived on 17th Century Earth and been among the first explorers to leave the planet in a space craft stolen from the invading Tellerons. He had met the original Sylvani, and loved them as a people. He used his vast knowledge and medical skill to help them evolve into the people they were now. He and his young daughter, Sara, were standing outside the Celestial City of Kiro as the spacecraft Megadeath touched down on the plains outside the Dragon Wall. They watched the sleek war machine settle gracefully to the soil where no starship had been for nearly 800 years. It was with a mixture of emotions that Naylund watched it. He knew that the ship carried what his daughter needed most. He also knew that it would bring an end to the peace and unspoiled beauty of the world of Gaijin.
“Daddy, are they
bad men?” asked eight-year-old Sara. Her
blond hair fell golden and beautiful over one eye. Her little-girl body was nearly lost in the
graceful white silk kimono she wore.
“No, Sweet
One. They are good.”
“Why are you so
sad, then?”
“Because they
bring the White Spider back to us.
Things will change here. The
Gaijin I love will be no more.”
“The White Spider
from the stories? That should be
exciting, shouldn’t it?”
“Perhaps.”
The little girl
put her soft hand into the gnarled old turkey claw that was Naylund’s
hand. He was comforted by the gesture.
The starship
touched down in sight of the Dragon Gate.
The town was surrounded by an ornately carved wall that was shaped like
a dragon’s body. The only entrance was
through the Dragon Gate, the open mouth of an ornately carved Celestial
Dragon. The city was secured behind the
energy barrier created by the Sylvani Technology in the wall itself. Naylund would have to escort whoever was
inside the space ship through the Dragon Gate, because he did not wish them to
run afoul of either the Gate Guards or the ancient energies of the wall itself. Only those with proper chi, like himself,
could pass through unchallenged.
He walked out to
meet them.
The first down
the starship’s exit ramp was obviously an Earther by heritage. His skin was pink like Naylund and Sarah’s
skin, not yellow or orange like the Gaijinese.
The boy that followed the man in the fedora hat, though, was a Nebulon,
blue-skinned and yellow-haired. The boy
looked Naylund directly in the eye, and revealed himself as a telepath by doing
so. Naylund was not a Psion himself, but
had come to know them because Sarah was a telepath, born of a Psion mother who
died mysteriously during the birth.
“So,” said
Naylund, extending a hand in a gesture of welcome, “welcome to the planet,
Gaijin, Honored White Spider.”
“Why do you call
me that?” asked the sharp-eyed man in the fedora hat. “I am Ged Aero. I am here because a Psion told me to
come. I don’t know you. Why do you call me by that name that I’ve
been hearing so much lately?”
“I hate to be the
one to break it to you, Ged Aero, but by stepping out of that starship, you
have fulfilled an 800-year-old prophecy.
The people here will hail you as a god reborn. You are like Jesus Christ to them. You are here to teach them, and lead them out
of their millennium of isolation.”
“Perhaps you are
mistaken. What if I am not the White Spider
you seek?”
Naylund
laughed. “Shan’s Prophecy tells how you
would speak those very words when you arrived here. The people would not follow a White Spider
that never doubted himself and acted without reserve. Those are the qualities of a Black Spider. We have too many of them all ready.”
Ged looked the
old man in the eye. Naylund could see
something there he had never seen before. This man was a different sort of Psion. He was a changer, one who could change himself,
and by doing so, change the worlds around him.
“Exactly who are
you, old man?” asked Ged.
“I am
Naylund-sensei. Naylund Charles Smith,
Doctor, Adventurer, and Scholar. I am
from Earth, but from long, long ago.
Ged-kun, I will help you in your new role as leader of this planet. I pray that you will learn to love it as I
do.”
“Naylund-sensei?”
said the little blue boy, “who is this lovely girl?”
Naylund looked at
the bright-eyed boy. He was a handsome
child with the beautiful powder-blue skin of a superior race of beings. Naylund felt attraction to him immediately,
though he had no idea yet why.
“This is my daughter,
Sara Smith. I pray that you both will
learn to love her too, just as I do.”
If you were fool enough to become a fan of my political humor, then you probably noticed that there has been very little of that in this blog for some time. And have you sensed the reason why yet?
Basically the problem is, politics is no longer funny. It is soul-suckingly horrible and robbing me of my ability to laugh. The idiotic moron criminal with tiny hands that we elected President is transparently corrupt and obviously guilty of numerous crimes, especially the obstruction of justice.
The idiotic moron criminal continues to get away with everything he does. He has packed the courts with appointees that don’t have the qualifications to do the job. They were chosen based on their stated agreement with the erroneous and criminal beliefs of the idiotic moron criminal. He depends on them to stay in power and rule his way.
He fires, pursues, and undermines the people who are supposed to protect us from lawbreakers so they won’t accuse and incarcerate him.
He doesn’t understand the first thing about foreign policy. And so, the idiotic criminal morons who are in charge of other countries can take advantage of their stupid little American brother-in-dictatorship.
And nobody is capable of changing anything, especially not minds. All the decent Republicans are resigning and leaving the corpse of the GOP to whatever Frankensteinian uses the idiotic moron criminal has for it. There seems to be no one left to turn to.
And so, I will proceed without pursuing political humor anymore. I am tired of scratching through piles of political chicken-poop to find anything worthy of real satire. The idiotic moron criminal always seems to win, no matter how much clever irony I throw at his orange head.
And I know there are readers out there who will say I am a hypocrite because I say I don’t like insult-humor, yet I routinely call the idiotic moron criminal an idiotic moron criminal. What else am I going to do? Call him a criminally moronic idiot? Respect needs to be earned in this world. And to earn it, he needs to pay me, and all the other American voters, reparations.
I wish to thank all the cartoonists represented in this blog whose work I blatantly stole for the purposes of illustrating this blog. I hope they can forgive me. I cannot pay out anything through lawsuits because the idiotic moron criminal with tiny hands has stolen all my money and left me bankrupt.
He was the “Fox” that no authorities could ever catch or unmask. In Spanish, Zorro, the fox.
He was the intrepid pirate/adventurer Captain Sinbad, in the 1963 movie of that title.
He was Professor John Robinson in the 60’s TV series, Lost in Space.
And he was briefly Cartwright nephew Will on Bonanza.
All of those were shows I adored as a boy in the 60’s (Though I really only saw Zorro as an after-school syndicated show in the early 70’s.)
Guy Williams was, in many ways, the character I myself truly wanted to be.
Guy Williams as Captain Sinbad
He was the swashbuckling hero, never afraid to take the leap into danger, to face any monster, or take any risk to save his town, his family, his people, or his crew.
His character led from the front and took a bullet or a sword wound now and then to protect the weak. And he got the chance, as Disney’s Zorro, to romance Annette Funicello in a few episodes.
And I particularly wanted to be the kind of explorer he was as the head of the Space Family Robinson in the Lost in Space TV series. Those were still the days of my astronaut-and-rocket-ship daydreams.
Guy Williams as John Robinson
But my hero worship was never about the actor, Armand Catalano, whose screen name was Guy Williams. He was a TV and film actor who started out as a fashion model. He made himself famous with good looks and acting ability. He was, I suppose, a decent hardworking fellow with dreams of being a movie star, a goal he came close to, but never quite reached. It was not him I wanted to be. I wanted to be the real-life embodiment of the characters themselves that he played.
I could probably end this essay by saying something sappy, that by becoming a public school teacher, I became the swashbuckling hero I always wanted to be. Sure, teachers do have to be swashbucklers to do the job right. But that claim is an argument for another day… another post. My point for this essay is that this is what constitutes a hero in my book; a brave person who can smile in the middle of a sword fight, even if he is losing, a man or woman willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of others, and a hero for whom the chance to be a hero is the real reward. And I learned that romantic, idyllic crap from TV in the 60’s and 70’s, when I was but a boy.
Hop aboard the Mickian Paffooney school bus. We are headed for a bit of loony-time wacky weirdness and other things to learn sponsored by the letter “W”.
The cast of characters is somehow almost recognizable in spite of spots and stripes and clownish clues.
And dangers like tygers are hidden in every jungle mile of the cartoon landscape.
And one never knows how the physics of the situation will play out in the science of the basic script.
And heroines quite formidable present themselves confident, competent, and ready for battle.
And of course, there are villains, introducing chaos, messing up our lives, and becoming President of the United States.
But life is a wild car chase complete with alligators and flying saucers.
And it is difficult to determine what is actually true, and what is nothing more than hoo-haw.
Friday the 13th is a bad luck day… for superstitious and stupid people. Of course, it is never a good day if you are truly stupid.
I had a bad week last week with all the toilet explosions and the car accident and my daughter’s epic lost-ID freak out.
Today could not possibly get worse than the week prior.
Except that it could. I am now in bed ill with a slight fever and a probable sinus infection.
But I will not blame it on superstition. The stupidity was all mine.
The toilet repair went so badly because I was trying to match really out-dated metal plumbing parts with modern plastic cheap stuff and PVC. Nothing matches, nothing fits, I had to piece together a jury-rigged repair with putty and tape and as much ingenuity as my stupid little brain could manufacture.
It’s not as if I can write my way out of my house-repair woes, or my physical ailments and short-comings. I might be able to make a dent in the stupidity factor by means of this essay. But can a collection of paragraphs ever really cure being stupid? The natural state of all mankind?
The car accident was not my fault. I was hit from behind going around the corner by a motorist who did not stay in his own lane of traffic. And I didn’t suffer any real visible damage. We didn’t call a cop for an accident report. My diabetic blood-sugar drop didn’t kill me. So, I guess everything is all right. But stupidly, I am probably allowing my insurance rates to go up because of another accident that was not my fault. And the blood-sugar drop probably lowered my immune system’s defenses during the height of pollen season and the beginning of flu season.
Of course, I am sure you know that Friday the 13th is historically not an ordinary day. You can Google up the information on it’s connection to Jesus’s last supper (13 people gathered on the 13th of Nisan the night before Jesus was crucified on Good Friday.) Or what the King of France did to the Knights Templar on a Friday the 13th. But that is all irrelevant to me, as I am not superstitious, only guilty of some measure of stupidity.
I told my daughter during the heat of her meltdown that we would soon be able to laugh about the whole bad week. Well, what better day to begin the chuckles than Friday the 13th?
When I was a child I often had to fight on school nights to shut down my brain and get to sleep so that getting up the next morning wouldn’t be torture. The bedroom door was always left open and the single light in the upstairs hallway made it possible to get to the bathroom safely in the middle of the night. I would often find myself staring at the wood grain of the door with all its knots and spots and flowing wiggles. That low-light and wood-grain combination was enthralling.
And as I stared, my over-active imagination would find pictures there. There was a werewolf looking out of the wood grain at me with knotty eyes and wiggly fangs. Boy, that really helped me get to sleep.
But I could conjure other things too. I always longed to see Annette Funicello naked. I worked long and hard to make the naked lady in the corner of the door’s wood grained panel into Annette. It never truly worked. The naked lady had two grossly misshapen boobs that formed the central feature of her character, and that was nothing like perfect and sweet Annette from the Mickey Mouse Club.
But the point in all this is, a boy has to examine the wood grain of his life if he is going to develop into the kind of person he wants to be in the future. The things you see when you look into the knots and spots and flowing wiggles of a nearly infinite set of possibilities is limited only by your powers of imagination. There is truth to find there. There is often also deception. Sometimes the truth and the deception are the very same thing. But you have to follow the lines and make sense of the patterns.
Now, as I am old and have less to look forward to than I have to look back on, I am still looking at the wood grain. I am still looking at the patterns of my life and love and laughter. I try to trace the lines into fiction stories based on all things I have experienced in a life of humble service to the gods of education. And I have to look carefully. Is that a demon face on the left? Grinning at me with a crooked smile? Or is it a fox looking at me through a hole in the door. And on the right… Is that a hooded man standing next to a barber pole? Or is it a meadow lark reaching his stretched neck up to the top of the panel so that his bill is out of the picture at the apex of his reach?
You don’t see what I see? I fully understand. The wood grain of each person’s life is different. And not even his or her own interpretation can be called either “right” or “wrong”.
But the wood grains straight ahead are the pictures of the end of me. So, I must study the wood grains of the past to be sure of all the good that I have had, and I attempt to get it all down to hand onward to my children and the world to come. What else can I do? I see the patterns. Some are terrible… The werewolf of my bedroom door. Some are beautiful… Annette Funicello naked. And I get choose what they mean.
After a week of bathroom trips to Walmart, exploding toilets shooting water across the bathroom, and cuss words from me each time the antique fossilized pipes spring a new and different leak, we finally have the water back on in the house, relatively dry bathrooms, and a useable toilet (provided the cutoff valve is shut when the toilet refills).
I like older homes because they tend to be well-built, stately, and relatively free of the breakdowns attendant to plasticized and computerized new-fangledness. But when age mandates rust-repairs to the plumbing, it causes no end of expenses and hassles due to antique pipes needing to be replaced in a modern, PVC world.
I suppose the root of the problem has really been that I, as a do-it-yourself-er, am well past my own prime and now somewhat out-dated and probably past my expiration date.
But now, as the crisis winds down, we have a dry place in the house for relieving ourselves again. We have a renewed appreciation for the importance of the same in the over-all arc of our lives as a family. Peeing and pooping has to be dealt with as a part of life.
One never knows where the next family crisis will occur. We now know the bathroom is one possible location of life-impacting disasters.
It
is said that life in space exists on a spider’s web of invisible star
lanes. A photon drive can propel a starship
only through certain well-defined mathematical probability arrays to a new
location in geometrically-and-gravitically-folded space. They work basically by popping in and out of
reality, though you can only precisely describe the physics of it in mathematical
terms. So, of course, there are those
who claim that if space is filled with spider webs, then God himself must be
the Great Spider who spins it all.
The Megadeath
roared into orbit around the bright blue planet that filled the life zone of a
star listed on the charts as The Old Yellow Man. It had been identified as a habitable system
before, but no one had dared to come this far beyond the Imperial Borders to
colonize before. At least, no one these
spacers knew about.
“This is a
spectacular world,” said Vince Niell.
“Yeah, man,” said
Nikki Sixx. “Like a toatally gnarly
hammertime world!”
“Wha…?” answered
Cold Death.
Ged chuckled at
the verbal density of his crew. You have
to be happy with the pick of the litter even if the dog pound only has mutts.
“What do your
sensors pick up, Cold?” Tkriashav asked Cold Death.
“Wha…?” the white-skinned
bone-man responded.
“Your instrument
panel, you thick…” grumbled Ged.
“Oh,” Death said. “Signal from the third moon of the big gas
planet, man. Like, ancient dudes put a
scout base there. Dead zone, dude. No life.”
“Other signs of
civilization?” asked Tkriashav.
“Stellar observatory
in the third orbit. Also, dead
zone. One moon around this planet. None around the planet in the first
orbit. Also, dead zones, dude.”
“What about the
planet below us?” asked Ged, beginning to grow impatient with the brain-dead
zombie stoner at the sensor panel. “Are
there people or signs of civilization on this planet?”
“Whoa… Like two
billion people. Not human, man. Humanoid, but definitely not human.” Cold death shook his green Mohawk hair-do
like a horse shakes flies off its mane.
He was definitely not human either.
“Vince? Do you think you can land safely?” asked Ged.
“Yeah, boss
man. I can put her down on a dime. I’ve never had such a sweet girl under my
control before. Yeah, baby!”
Ged ground a
frustrated fist into his temple. He knew
there was something important about this mission because of Tkriashav’s
damnable clairvoyance, but he felt he needed to know what. Was it something for his own good? Or something for the greater good that would
mean sacrificing his own life? He wanted
to be able to make those choices himself.
“Cold Death? I’m gonna hate myself for having to ask this,
but do you find any signs of a starport down there?”
“Wha…?”
“A landing
field! A flat patch! A place to put down where we don’t go
CRASH! BOOM! And blow up!”
“Oh, yeah,
man. Major city with walls, flat all
around, dude. Gnarly!”
“You see it,
Vince?” asked Ged.
“I’m swoopin’,
Daddy-o!”
“Ugh! What does that mean?” Ged looked at Xavier Tkriashav. Tkriashav merely shrugged.
We have been using Walmart’s restroom for an entire week now, including late-night trips. The toilet’s shut-off valve has exploded with water twice. My daughter lost her school ID badge and missed two days of school feeling terrible. She also dropped and shattered her favorite sculpture to make herself feel worse. I had a car accident on Friday. A fender-bump that didn’t damage my car, but made me almost go into shock with a sudden blood-sugar drop. Stress may kill me yet.
It is almost the worst streak of bad luck that I have ever had. It ranks second, maybe. Or possibly third.
Catch a Falling Star 
Friday the 13th
Friday the 13th is a bad luck day… for superstitious and stupid people. Of course, it is never a good day if you are truly stupid.
I had a bad week last week with all the toilet explosions and the car accident and my daughter’s epic lost-ID freak out.
Today could not possibly get worse than the week prior.
Except that it could. I am now in bed ill with a slight fever and a probable sinus infection.
But I will not blame it on superstition. The stupidity was all mine.
The toilet repair went so badly because I was trying to match really out-dated metal plumbing parts with modern plastic cheap stuff and PVC. Nothing matches, nothing fits, I had to piece together a jury-rigged repair with putty and tape and as much ingenuity as my stupid little brain could manufacture.
It’s not as if I can write my way out of my house-repair woes, or my physical ailments and short-comings. I might be able to make a dent in the stupidity factor by means of this essay. But can a collection of paragraphs ever really cure being stupid? The natural state of all mankind?
The car accident was not my fault. I was hit from behind going around the corner by a motorist who did not stay in his own lane of traffic. And I didn’t suffer any real visible damage. We didn’t call a cop for an accident report. My diabetic blood-sugar drop didn’t kill me. So, I guess everything is all right. But stupidly, I am probably allowing my insurance rates to go up because of another accident that was not my fault. And the blood-sugar drop probably lowered my immune system’s defenses during the height of pollen season and the beginning of flu season.
Of course, I am sure you know that Friday the 13th is historically not an ordinary day. You can Google up the information on it’s connection to Jesus’s last supper (13 people gathered on the 13th of Nisan the night before Jesus was crucified on Good Friday.) Or what the King of France did to the Knights Templar on a Friday the 13th. But that is all irrelevant to me, as I am not superstitious, only guilty of some measure of stupidity.
I told my daughter during the heat of her meltdown that we would soon be able to laugh about the whole bad week. Well, what better day to begin the chuckles than Friday the 13th?
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhhaaaaaa!
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