I was born an artist. It has to be developed and nurtured and practiced over time to become what it can truly be, but artistic talent is something you are born with, and there is a genetic aspect to it. Great Aunt Viola could draw and paint. She produced impressive art during her lifetime. My father can draw. He has demonstrated ability a number of times, though he never developed it. Both my brother and I can draw and have done a lot of it. All three of my children can draw and paint. My daughter, the Princess, even wants to pursue a career in graphic design and animation.
One of the factors that weighs heavily on a career in art is the starving artist factor. To be a serious artist, you have to study art in great detail. You need lots of practice, developing not only pencil-pushing prowess, but having an artist’s eyeball, that way of seeing that twists and turns the artist’s subject to find the most novel and interesting angle. It takes a great deal of time. And if you are doing this alone, you are responsible also for building your own following and marketing your own work and creating your own brand. You need to be three people in one and do this while potentially not being able to make any money at all for it. I have taught myself to do the art part, but I paid the bills with something else I loved to do, teaching English to hormone-crazed middle-schoolers.
An important part of art is what you have to sacrifice to do it.
Many artists become alcoholics, drug users, or suicidal manic-depressives. There is an artistic sort of PTSD. Doing real art costs a lot because it alters your lifestyle, your mental geography, and your spiritual equilibrium. Depending on how much of yourself you put into it, it can use you up, leaving no “you” left within you.
I am not trying to leave you with the impression that I mean to scare you into not wanting to be an artist. For many reasons it is a great thing to be. But it is a lot like whether you are born gay or straight… or somewhere in between. The choice is not entirely up to you. You can only control what you do with the awful gift of art once it is given to you. And that is a serious choice to make. Me, I have to draw. I have to tell stories. My life and well-being depend on it. It is the only way I can be me.
Today, being ill, I resorted to doodling in bed to make myself feel better. No, I said doodling, meaning drawing things without a plan for where the pencil goes next. Get your mind on better things. I ended up with a nightmare of a school bus. And I inked it, scanned it in four pieces, puzzled it together, and posted it, cussing at the computer for every glitch that interrupted my work. And now I give you Dullwhittler’s Skool Bus. I hope it doesn’t disgust you to the point that you have to scour your eyeballs with unwashed sweat socks to get the offensiveness out of your mind’s eye. But I acknowledge that it might. Forgive me, but I have ridden on school buses with students who were very similar to these.
People are not really vegetables… even though I have seen IQ scores as a teacher that might say otherwise. But I often use the pun of calling them Human Beans.
Your basic human bean.
Western style beans
Of course, being a Texan means having a healthy appreciation for beans as a staple food. Cowboys used to live off of beans and beef jerky, and if Louis L’Amour is to be believed, they even made tea from mesquite beans. That makes your average cowboy made up of over 50 per cent beans. Of course the rest of him is mostly gas caused by the beans in his diet, whether it comes out as a fart or as a Texas tall tale… And yes, I admit it, I get a lot of my writing ideas from eating beans.
A Boston baked bean
We must also be aware that Texas has no corner on the beans market. We all know Boston baked beans by reputation. They, like the ever-hapless Cubs, had a habit of never winning the World Series. And now, in the last two decades, it has actually been difficult for the other teams to keep them from winning it all. But we shouldn’t mix up beans with baseball metaphors. Baseball is like life. Full of long and boring parts punctuated by intense moments of hitting, scoring, committing errors, and player versus player individual drama. And concession stand food! Beans, however, can taste good in chili draped over the ballpark hot dogs which cost more than a restaurant meal at most reasonable restaurants. And I promise you, you will never hit a home run over the fence by hitting it with a bean.
A Mexican style re-fried bean
And I wish to point out that this last human bean is not a racist cartoon. Beans are not part of the human race. They only have legs in cartoons and would come in last even when racing a snail. And all beans are created equal in the sight of God. Kidney beans, butter beans, navy beans, string beans… all beans are just beans, no matter what the color of their skin is, and no matter how they add flavor to a casserole. All beans are just in it to live life the best they can, and if that’s not enough… they can be planted as seeds to raise the next generation of human beans.
Spring has sproinged on us, and springy-sproinged hard. We have had a wet March and a wet April so far. Pollen is heavy in the air to a record degree, and guilty of making my head ache blisteringly for the third day in a row.
I will also have to take a while recovering from my tax headache. I owed money again either because the overworked retirement system representatives didn’t figure the withholding tax correctly… again, or because Trump’s tax-cut bill required more money from pensioners and poor people… again. Either way, I have no emergency funds in the bank once again, one of the perils of bankruptcy and a source of headaches..
Another of the perils of bankruptcy is the lovely way the court treats me, sending me letters in the mail that suggest they are about to drop their bankruptcy order and allow creditors to swoop in and skeletonize my bank account like piranhas, just as they do to James Franciscus in that crappy man-eating-fish movie of the seventies. (Piranhas, not creditors, I mean, though the differences are small,) The skeletonization will strip meat off the bones of my financial health for about ten months at this point. And why are they suggesting such a personal Armageddon for Mickey? Because mortgage-payment-verification paperwork wasn’t confirmed for two days. Now there is another plan-adjustment hearing scheduled for the end of May. My lawyer says it is all routine. Don’t worry. But I still worry that I have tastier flesh on my bones than James Franciscus had on his in the seventies. (Never let it be said that Mickey doesn’t know how to flog a simile to death!)
Three Caballeros from Oz whom I rescued from Goodwill, repainted and restored.
So, I could potentially starve to death in the coming months, have my bank account skeletonized, and have my head explode from allergies. Somehow I must deserve all of that, right? And, meanwhile, Trump has survived the Mueller Report with the help of his criminal friends. He may even get re-elected to the Presidency, because there is no accounting for voter stupidity.
It is a springtime full of various headaches, and they have all got me down.
Some writers make tons of money for sharing their made-up fantasy worlds. Steven King, JK Rowlings, and James Patterson have made it to the limelight where few authors ever stand. Some of us get by on smaller rewards.
Me, I intend to give myself some grins by sending a copy of my book Snow Babies to a girl who was in my class in grade school, and I may have had a huge crush on her at some point in that past. And because of me being a lazy writer, this post consists mostly of the letter I am sending with the book.
Dear Valerie,
Remember me? I have
lived more of my life in Texas now than I did in Iowa, but my heart is still living
in Iowa. The part of me that turns into
fiction books has always been an Iowan.
You are probably wondering why I am sending you a copy of this
book. Well, to be honest, I owe it to
you. You are the person out of everyone
I have ever known that the main character is named after. This is not a best seller and may never make
much money. But this copy represents the
share of this book that I owe to you.
If you are worried that I am writing stories about you, don’t
be. The character of Valerie Clarke is
based on a student that I taught for two school years. She did remind me of you in some minor ways. But the girl in this book is really based on the
story of Sofia’s girlhood as I came to know about it. I would like to tell you a little bit about
her.
Sofie was, just like the character in the book, short a
parent. It was a struggle for her to be
the cheerful, aggressively positive girl that she was. She was in my largest class of seventh
graders when she was 13, a rather rowdy group of mostly Hispanic kids. She loved almost every story we read in
class. She enjoyed every group activity
and task we did in class, often leading the group she was in, and even
sometimes disciplining misbehavior that I hadn’t called the student out for,
simply because she felt they should be appreciating my class more.
By the time she was an eighth grader, she had developed a
large crush on me. The year before I
married my wife, she actually asked me to wait for her to grow up and marry her
instead. It wasn’t the kind of love that
gets a teacher fired and put in prison.
Really, she was looking at me as the father-figure she needed in her
life. Telling you that fact reveals which
character in the story actually most resembles me, if you decide you actually
want to read this book.
The book is a comedy about a blizzard. But like any good comedy, it will try to make you love characters enough that parts of it will make you cry as much it makes you laugh. It is a book I submitted to the 2014 YA Novel contest called the Rosetti Award Competition from Chaunticleer Reviews. It didn’t win, but it was a finalist. So there is some reason to believe it is not a bad book.
Of all the people I feel compelled to share this book with, your name is at the top of the list. Partly because I borrowed your name to write it with. But also, because of the fact that Valerie in the book, and in other books I have written about her, is often known as, “The most beautiful girl ever born in Norwall (Rowan), Iowa.” It was something the boys in the Rowan school said about you in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. I don’t know if I am telling you something you didn’t already know or not, but it explains your connection to this story. And why I felt the need to give you a copy of this book.
Read it if you want.
Share it, if you want. Use it to
put a voodoo curse on me if that’s what you want. But I hope you enjoy it and understand that
you do have some part in the fact that it now exists.
So, I just finished reading this book from my leftover pile of classroom reading books that represent my time as a public school reading teacher.
This is book six in the best-selling Charlie Bone series. I didn’t read the previous five books. I have a copy of book one somewhere, but this one is one I picked up for my reading fix last week.
Let me begin by saying, as an obvious Harry Potter imitation, it is a very inventive and enjoyable story.
I read the whole book even though I had difficulty with several things that I have come to recognize as glaring, reader-tripping problems.
Now, to be completely honest about my assessments, Jenny Nimmo, the author of the Charley Bone books, has an impressive resume. She has not only been an English teacher, but she worked for the BBC as well as an editor, director, and other creative endeavors. And her books, unlike mine, are best-seller enough to be picked up by Scholastic Books, a major publisher. She has undoubtedly made a lot more money with her books than I have with mine. And, I confess, I find the story entertaining.
But the story is guilty of writing sins that I am familiar with by having overcome them in my own writing.
Most noticeable is the lack of a sense of a focus character. It is done as a third-person omniscient narrative that goes in and out of different characters’ heads telling what they think and feel. It will go from Charlie Bone’s main-character-thoughts to his nemesis Dagbert Endless’s feelings to the thoughts of the dog that lives in the school and then veers into the bird that is actually Emma, one of Charlie’s female friends with special “gifts of magic” handed down from their common ancestor, the Red King. You end up, as a reader, trying to keep things separate in your awareness about too many characters with too many mental reveals to keep straight. And who all knows what about whom? In one scene a character seems to know already what another character said and did in a previous scene that the knowing character wasn’t present for and hasn’t been told about.
This focus problem is compounded by having too many characters with too little development in the current story. I get it that we are supposed to have met the characters in previous books in the series. But it has to have a more stand-alone quality about it to even work as a separate book. The writer has to keep in mind that readers won’t know everything about every character in previous books because they have either forgotten, or the author has only assumed they would know without being told.
And the scenes and chapters in this book are way too ranging and free-form. A scene that begins in the end of chapter two rambles across to the beginning of chapter three without really concluding and then morphs into another scene entirely when the narrative follows a single character from the conversation in one room into an encounter in the next room. There is a lack of chapter structure to rationalize why those words belong in that chapter rather than the next.
And numerous plot lines are just left hanging at the end of the book, seemingly forgotten rather than set up for the probable sequel. The book does not end with a sense that it is the final end of the saga.
So it is a book that both Hemingway and Dickens would’ve cringed to have written. Never-the-less, I did like this book. The old uncritical critic, you know. I would’ve neither finished reading it, nor written this essay about it if I didn’t find merit in the story. I learned things by reading it. Things to avoid, things to correct when I find them in my own stories, and things that make me go, “Hmmm… I’d like to try that myself.”
The meeting at the library hadn’t happened on the day
originally planned because Alice Stewart sometimes had to close the library
when things came up. Her daughter,
Alicia, was a single mother raising a child alone, and some days the library
simply had to be closed when the baby developed a mysterious cough and had to
go see a doctor in Belle City. All of
this was explained to Mary, Pidney, and Valerie, and apologized for, by Val’s
Aunt Alice as they arrived at the finally open Norwall library on Main
Street. The library was a thing of some
pride to several Norwall families, the Clarkes and the Stewarts and the Duffys
prominent among them because they had raised the money and remodeled the old
butcher shop and bought all the books.
The place was a literary miracle for the small town, as most towns of
that size did not have anything equivalent to it.
“I swear to you, Valerie,” said Aunt Alice, “I will make it
up to you for having to put you off for a couple of days. I will certainly help you three find whatever
important research you are looking for.”
“I think we are looking for Tiki idols, Auntie,” said
Valerie.
“Show her, Pid,” said Mary.
Pidney sat the backpack on the librarian’s desk and opened
it. He pulled out Valerie’s ugly little
wooden man and sat it down on the desk.
“I know a book that might help,” said Aunt Alice. She went directly to a shelf that contained
the 200’s from the Dewey Decimal system and pulled down a large old book called
Treasury of Maori Folklore by A.W. Reed. It had “Tiki” listed on a number of pages in
the index. So Aunt Alice handed the book
to Pidney who soon found a picture that somewhat resembled the ugly little wooden
man.
“It says on this page that Tiki was the very first man,”
read Pidney. “Apparently he found the
first woman in a pond… somebody called Marikoriko… they became the first
parents of all men.”
“Well, he’s found in most Polynesian cultures as a large
piece of wood carved in the shape of a man.
And, um…” Pidney’s voice trailed
away.
“What, Pid?” asked Mary.
“Well, um…”
“Let me see,” said Valerie.
She grabbed the book out of Pidney’s hands. The picture of a Tiki idol in the book seemed
to wink at her as she tracked down the page to find where Pid was reading. “Oh, here it is…” Val began to giggle almost uncontrollably.
“What?” said Mary.
“Read it aloud.”
“In New Zealand, some Maoris contend that Tiki represents
the penis of Tane, the god of forests and birds. He is strongly associated with the
procreative act.” She read that and then
broke down into a laughing fit. One of
those painfully embarrassing laughing fits that happen when something is entirely
too personal to talk about with the boy you have a crush on and you can’t help
but nervously laugh.
Pidney, red as the ripe tomatoes in Mrs. Clarke’s vegetable
garden, wandered over towards the encyclopedias and began looking at the volumes
of Collier’s.
“What else does it say?” asked Mary.
“It says that in the Cook Islands, at Rarotonga, Tiki is
credited with being the guardian of Avaiki the Underworld. Magical idols of Tiki can be given
offerings to smooth the way for those who fear they are dying. The idol maker is said to have magical powers
and can in some cases bring the idol to life as a servant by chanting and
touching the painted tattoos on the idol’s body in the correct order.”
“You’re kidding,” Mary said.
“No, really! It says it
right here.” Valerie pointed to the
disputed passage and Mary read it for herself.
“Well, it does say that.
But it doesn’t have any mention of the proper chant to use or anything.”
“This ugly thing does appear to have painted tattoos,” said
Aunt Alice, looking at the idol’s protruding buttocks and arched back. “Swirly patterns with little spots in the
center like bull’s-eyes.”
“What was Captain Dettbarn’s ship called?” Pidney asked.
Mary looked over at the Polack who was thumbing through the
“M” volume of Colliers’ Encyclopedia.
“The Reefer Mary Celeste. Why,
Pid?”
“This encyclopedia says it was a ghost ship.”
“A ghost ship?” gasped Valerie.
“Good heavens!” swore Aunt Alice.
“What does it say?” asked Mary in a skeptical voice.
“It says the Mary Celeste was an American merchant
brigantine that was found sailing near the Azores on December 4th,
1872. No crew was aboard. A lifeboat was missing. And they never found any trace of the
crew. Not the Captain, either. Captain Briggs, his wife, and their infant
daughter, Sofia simply vanished at sea and were never heard from again.”
“Pidney, that was a sailing ship more than a hundred years
ago. That was the Brigantine Mary
Celeste. Not the Reefer Mary Celeste. Captain
Dettbarn’s ship was a modern cargo ship with refrigerated cargo capacity. They are not the same ship.”
“Oh,” Pidney said softly.
He closed the book.
The ladies all got a chuckle at Pidney’s expense. But Valerie noticed that Pidney was still
uneasy about the spooky connection. She
thought it was something that might later prove to be significant after all. At least to Pid.
I am now approaching the end of a manuscript that completes a journey that began forty years ago. The novel is built from my own experiences as a survival of childhood sexual assault. But it is not about sex. It is about communicating when speaking to others. The main character is autistic and unable to speak aloud to others. Because he does not talk, people treat him as a moron, a possessor of vast levels of stupidity. But he is really quite bright.
The narrator of the story is a zebra sock puppet that the main character uses as a ventriloquist’s dummy. Either he is miraculously able to talk when using the zebra puppet, or the puppet is magically alive and independently intelligent.
To further build on the idea of how difficult it can be to communicate, the main character has an adopted little brother who can’t hear because of ear damage from child abuse. He can read lips and use sign language, but his communication abilities are limited to a best friend who knows sign language and can hear and speak normally too. He can write messages, but he doesn’t write or spell well. And when the serial killer moves in and kidnaps the boy’s best friend, the difficulties of communicating with others hits a critical level.
I have, as of this writing, written within a hundred words of 30,000. I have passed the climax, the parts that make me cry and the parts that make me cheer. It will be done before I reach 35,000. If finishing a novel is like giving birth to a child, then the baby is nine tenths delivered already. All that is left is the sweating, the recovering, and the clean-up. Oh, yes, and the baby novel’s first squall and cry.
Suppose being grumpy was a super power, and we could, as a grumpy old brotherhood of geezers, coots, and conservative uncles, could change things just by complaining about them.
No woman would ever leave a toilet seat down again. The Dunkin’ Donuts on Frankford Road would magically reopen and never run out of donuts again. And liver spots and wrinkles would suddenly be attractive to beautiful young women whether they were linked to fortunes or not.
But what if, in order to make better use of this unexplainable super power, we start telling old coots like the fool in the picture that they have to prove they will use this super power only for good, or we will raise their taxes? Or we would forbid them from ever eating bacon again? Either of those things would definitely motivate them.
Of course, the biggest problem with geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles that no one wants to sit next to at Thanksgiving is that they don’t generally get smarter and nicer with age. It is probably not wise to give them a super power that can alter reality. Yes, they are generally quite literally mean-spirited and unqualifiably dumb. And it isn’t really a matter of whether they could ever actually have a super power like that. The real problem is that they already have it. They proved it in 2016 when they elected a gigantic orange-faced Pillsbury Doughboy with mental flatulence to lead our government. And it wasn’t the dumb part that did it. It was the literally mean part. Trump is a walking, talking old coot-complaint given to us by mean old men to tell us, “We are unhappy geezers, coots, and conservative uncles who would rather blow up the government than lift a single tax dollar (especially from a rich dude) to try and fix it”.
What we truly need to do is harness a bit of that grumpy-old-man complaining power, a truly misunderstood and misused super power, to tackle problems like making public schools better, cleaning the environment, and electing smarter leaders (not the stupid ones who actually represent the majority of us). But of course, we will first have to turn off the spigots in the brewery of prejudice and ignorance that is Fox News, and brand all the greedy and stupid people with a red letter “R” for Trumpian Republican. That way, knowing who to vote for to make things better will become easier to the point that even us geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles can do it right.
Old and Grumpy
Suppose being grumpy was a super power, and we could, as a grumpy old brotherhood of geezers, coots, and conservative uncles, could change things just by complaining about them.
No woman would ever leave a toilet seat down again. The Dunkin’ Donuts on Frankford Road would magically reopen and never run out of donuts again. And liver spots and wrinkles would suddenly be attractive to beautiful young women whether they were linked to fortunes or not.
But what if, in order to make better use of this unexplainable super power, we start telling old coots like the fool in the picture that they have to prove they will use this super power only for good, or we will raise their taxes? Or we would forbid them from ever eating bacon again? Either of those things would definitely motivate them.
Of course, the biggest problem with geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles that no one wants to sit next to at Thanksgiving is that they don’t generally get smarter and nicer with age. It is probably not wise to give them a super power that can alter reality. Yes, they are generally quite literally mean-spirited and unqualifiably dumb. And it isn’t really a matter of whether they could ever actually have a super power like that. The real problem is that they already have it. They proved it in 2016 when they elected a gigantic orange-faced Pillsbury Doughboy with mental flatulence to lead our government. And it wasn’t the dumb part that did it. It was the literally mean part. Trump is a walking, talking old coot-complaint given to us by mean old men to tell us, “We are unhappy geezers, coots, and conservative uncles who would rather blow up the government than lift a single tax dollar (especially from a rich dude) to try and fix it”.
What we truly need to do is harness a bit of that grumpy-old-man complaining power, a truly misunderstood and misused super power, to tackle problems like making public schools better, cleaning the environment, and electing smarter leaders (not the stupid ones who actually represent the majority of us). But of course, we will first have to turn off the spigots in the brewery of prejudice and ignorance that is Fox News, and brand all the greedy and stupid people with a red letter “R” for Trumpian Republican. That way, knowing who to vote for to make things better will become easier to the point that even us geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles can do it right.
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