Here is the link to the complete Chapter 1https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2018/11/24/hidden-kingdom-chapter-1-complete/
Category Archives: humor
Hidden Kingdom… Chapter 2 Complete
Filed under comic strips, fairies, Hidden Kingdom, humor, Paffooney
AeroQuest 5… Canto 151
Canto 151 – Harlequins
Smoky Hardretter and the synthezoid Sorcerer 27 stood over the operating table with a Mechanoid stretched out upon it. Mechanoids, of course, are deceased humanoids that have been reanimated by robotic implants and electronic reconstruction to make of them what are basically cyborgs, except for the fact that they have not merely been enhanced while still alive, they have been dug up out of graves and zombified by the Mechanoid-making process.
“This body in life was one of the best Imperial Guardsmen we ever had. He defended three different Triumvirs while he was alive. He had 500 clones that also served as guardsmen.” Smoky looked questioningly at Sorcerer after explaining the guardsman.
“This body will be perfect for our needs. He has been put through the tissue-regeneration protocols that I set up as an automated process?” Sorcerer grinned, something previous Sorcerers were not capable of doing.
“The nanobots are transforming the flesh now. It seems he is growing huge muscles as we watch.”
“Oh, yes. He will be an unbeatable warrior. He is not only going to be more powerful and more agile than any existing Mechanoid, but he will also be unkillable. His flesh is natural armor and quickly repairs itself when he is wounded. He will also be nearly impossible to hit because of his agility and camouflage.”
“Camouflage? He’s dressed in multicolored clown clothes!”
“That’s also why he’s called a Harlequin. He’s acrobatic enough to dodge bullets and plasma streams. And his combat dress produces strobing and flashing colored lights that will make targeting nearly impossible when the energy dampers are working at full power.”
“So, he will be like an acrobat? Flipping through the air to avoid being shot while firing his weapons from midair?”
“Now you’ve got the core idea,” said Sorcerer. “He will be capable of putting on a real show of power. And imagine how effective an entire squad of these troopers performing in unison will be.”
“I am impressed,” Smoky said.
The Mechanoid suddenly sat up. His face mask, obscuring the skull-like corpse head underneath, was a grinning, white clown mask.
“I can’t believe I’m alive again. What are your commands, Lord Hardretter?”
Smoky smiled contentedly. “I think we need to run some tests.”
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction
In Defense of Corny Jokes
It will probably be clear that I am writing this post because I am currently reading 1941 daily strips from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner.
But I am definitely going to talk about corny jokes, not cheesy jokes, because I grew up in Iowa, not Wisconsin.
And, yes, that is example number one.
There is a certain way of telling a joke or tall tale that is unique to the farmyard. And it does not contain chicken poop, but rather, corn.
Of course, as you can see by this corn-colored definition of what corny means according to Collins Online Dictionary, the word is supposed to be an insult to corniness in jokery. That doesn’t sit well with the people of Iowa, where the tall corn grows. We are also obvious, sentimental, and not at all original. And we are proud of it. 
To tell a corny joke right, you have to set a simple scene, and make it clear what happened, and give the audience a simple cue for when to laugh.
For instance, there was the time that Cudgel Murphy had a cat problem with his car, the 1954 Austin Hereford that he has driven since dinosaurs walked the earth. It seems there was this time in 1988 when he kept having engine trouble. The engine would sputter and cough and die, and when Cudgel opened it, he would find a half-eaten dead pigeon or other random bird carcass gumming up the works. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out how dead birds were getting into his car engine. But his grandson Danny happened to see the neighbor’s big tabby tomcat carrying a pigeon he had killed under the front of Grampy’s car, apparently enjoying a fowl meal in the dark with a nice warm engine to lay the food on. Sure enough, when they checked the engine later, there was the half-eaten dead bird laying across one end of the fan belt.
So Cudgel set up a vigil, assigning times for himself, Danny, and his younger grandson Mike to watch for signs of that damned cat taking another bird under the hood of the Austin. With only two day’s worth of watching under their belts, Mike came running into the Murphy kitchen with the news.
“Grampy! I seen that damned cat taking a dead bird under your car! He’s in there right now!”
So Cudgel rushed out, turned the engine on, and stomped on the gas.
There were some worrisome thumps and bangs under the hood, and then the cat shot out from under the front of the car spewing howls and cat curses all the way up the nearest tree.
Cudgel laughed hard and finally caught his breath to say, “How about that, Mike? I’ll bet James Bond doesn’t have a car that can shoot angry cats out the front!”
Now, before you chastise me for enjoying cruelty to cats, I hope you will remember that Cudgel Murphy is a fictional character, and I am merely illustrating the idea behind corny jokes. And, besides, that cat really had it coming to him.
Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, Iowa, Paffooney, satire, Uncategorized, writing humor
A Little Bit .Gif-fy… Not Goofy
Sometimes life gets a bit tough when you are old and diabetic and grumpy all the time… and your kids are still teenagers… and you have to spend four hours a day driving them to two different schools in two different Dallas suburbs… and it rains one day and swelters you in Texas heat the next… and the drive home occurs during rush hour… and you just can’t think beyond loud thoughts like; “Why does that stop light turn red right before I get there?” and “Why can’t somebody teach teenagers how to drive in a high school parking lot?!” and “Why is the sun so bright and in my eyes going BOTH DIRECTIONS?!?” and “Why is the worst driver in Texas always the one right in front of me?!?!!!”
And then you realize, you can’t think any more to make a decent post for your blog. You are dead tired and out of ideas, though still able to type… even though you are apparently dead according to this sentence. So what do you post? You need some chocolate and iced tea for your brain. And you decide it is better to come out of the closet for being .gif-goofy and collecting .gif’s. You heard right. I mean .gif’s. I am not talking about peanut butter. And I didn’t misspell goofs. I mean those crazy moving things on the internet where the motion is repetitive and the promotion of the motion is mindless. Yes, those moving-picture things called .gif’s.
Like this one;
Rainbow Dash is really going after that guitar riff in this guitar-riff .gif! And I didn’t steal this from Deviantart. I stole it from somebody else who stole it from Deviantart.
And then I have an audience for her solo;
And these .gif’s make me happy. Happy like a frog;
And why do these minor miracles of motion make me happy? I don’t know. But they do.
And I must not be the only one. Somebody went to a great deal of work to create some of these:
And one might wonder if it is an evil thing to be happy about being .gif-goofy. But in my experience, they only fascinate the eyes for a short while and alter my mood in goofy weird ways.
So now that I’m all goofed up, let me end with one more.
So, now, these .gif’s have tamed me, and I am unique in all the world.
Filed under artwork, humor, memes, strange and wonderful ideas about life
The Creature I Have Become
I identify as a humorist, writer, cartoonist, and certified fool (Yes, I have a certificate from the Children’s Writer Institute that proves I once foolishly believed I could learn how to make money as a writer). But my current novel project is a horror novel, The Baby Werewolf, which I twice before tried to turn into a completed rough draft novel. This time I followed through to the bitter end. I published it on Amazon.
Torrie Brownfield, hypertrichosis sufferer and possible werewolf.
In order to reign in the goofiness enough to deal with the issues in this novel, I have been doing a lot of horror reading. I have also undertaken the reading of a very good author examination of the life of Edgar Allen Poe.
Poe’s life was highly instructive. You may not have realized this, but most of the giants of American Literature prior to and contemporary with Poe did not make most of their money as writers. Emerson was a clergyman. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked as a customs clerk. Poe, the first to try to make a living solely on work as a writer, editor, critic, and poet, was subjected to the horrors of poverty, illness, and want. His wife was chronically tubercular and ill. He never made the money he was obviously worth as a creator of popular horror fiction, poetry, critical essays about other authors, and as an editor for profitable magazines of the day. Other people made loads of money from his work. Poe, not so much.
It is instructive to a writer like me who can’t seem to land any sort of income from my own creations. There is no demand because there is no recognition of my work. I have come close, having my work praised by editors and fellow authors, and being a finalist in novel writing contests twice. The goal is good writing. I will probably never see a return on my investment in my lifetime. My children may not acquire anything by it unless one of them really devotes a lot of effort to it. Like Poe with his drinking problem, chronic depression, and ill wife, I face physical limitations and poor health, grinding financial issues, and family factors that make it near impossible to put marketing effort into my literary career.
And this novel is a hard journey for me. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy when I was ten. A lot of the fears outlined and elucidated in this particular story leap right out of that iron cage in my psyche where they have been contained for fifty years. Fear of nakedness. Fear of sex. Fear of being attacked. Fear of the secret motivations in others. Fear of the dark. And, most of all, fear of what fear can make me become. Fear of being a monster.
But I have not become any of the dark and terrible things that fear can make me into. Instead, I became a school teacher, and mentor to many. I became a family man, a father of three children. I became a nudist, hopefully not a dark and terrible thing in itself. I became Mickey.
This novel will become my Halloween free-book promotion later this month. Probably next weekend rather than Halloween.
Small Town Inspirations
I grew up in a small rural town in North Central Iowa. It was a place that was, according to census, home to 275 people. That apparently counted the squirrels. (And I should say, the squirrels were definitely squirrelly. They not only ate nuts, they became a nut.) It was a good place to grow up in the 60’s and 70’s. But in many ways, it was a boring place.
Yes, there were beautiful farmer’s daughters to lust after and pine for and be humiliated by. There was a gentle, supportive country culture where Roy Rogers was a hero and some of the best music came on Saturdays on Hee Haw where there was a lot of pickin’ and grinnin’ going on. There were high school football games on Friday nights, good movies at the movie theaters in Belmond and Clarion, and occasional hay rides for the 4-H Club and various school-related events like Homecoming.
I lived in a world where I was related to half the people in the county, and I knew at least half of the other half. People told stories about other people, some of them incredibly mean-spirited, some of them mildly mean, and some of them, though not many, that were actually good and actually true. I learned about telling good stories from my Grandpa Aldrich who could tell a fascinating tale of Dolly who owned the part of town called locally “Dollyville” and included the run-down vacant structure the kids all called the Ghost House. He also told about Dolly’s husband, Shorty the dwarf, who was such a mean drunk and went on epic temper tirades that often ended only when Dolly hospitalized him with a box on the ear. (Rumor had it that there were bricks in the box.)
And I realized that through story-telling, the world became whatever you said that it was. I could change the parts of life I didn’t love so much by lying… er, rather, by telling a good story about them. And if people heard and liked the stories enough, they began to believe and see life more the way I saw it myself. A good story could alter reality and make life better. I used this power constantly as a child.
There were invisible aliens invading Iowa constantly when I was a boy. Dragons lived in the woods at Bingham Park, and there were tiny little fairy people everywhere, in the back yard under the bushes, in the attic of the house, and building cities in the branches of neglected willow trees.
I reached out to the world around me as an artist, a cartoonist, and a story-teller and plucked details and colors and wild imaginings like apples to bake the apple pie that would much later in my life feed the novels and colored-pencil pictures that would make up my inner life. The novels I have written and the drawings I have made have all come from being a small town boy who dreamed big and lived more in stories than in the humdrum everyday world.
Novel Writing in Novel Ways
There are many ways to tell a story. I have yet to try them all. But I don’t intend to stop trying until I either get a lot nearer, or I am fertilizing the flowers.
So let’s start with the Snoopy way.
We start with a cliche, and goof it up to make it more interesting.
It was a dark and stormy night…
And that was because the lights went out at George’s house while he was arguing with Mabel. There was lightning involved. Mabel got so mad about George watching football that she stabbed the toaster in a fit of uncontrolled anger. Unfortunately, she stabbed it with a metal fork and it was plugged in. Her hair never stood up so high and never glowed that particular color before. Her eyes shown like car headlights. And she was the main reason it went dark.
Okay, maybe not. Let’s try again.
It was a dork and smarmy knight…
Sir Jiggs Giggly was a knight from King Percy’s Royal Court, but his manners were so bad that he drove all the women away from the court. The other knights all decided that their choices were limited. Either they had to reform Sir Jiggs, or they all had to become gay. So, they went to the wizard. The wizard’s name was Wizzyfritz. And Wizzyfritz had a boy working for him who also happened to be his legal ward. So Wizzyfritz the wizard assigned his Wizzyfritz ward to be the watcher over the wastrel Jiggs. And so, well… that wizard ward was a dork.
Yeah, not this one either.
It was a stark and dormy night…
At Tilbury College in the women’s dormitory, there was a party. There was lots of beer. And the local fraternity decided that when they attended the party, they would show up as streakers and be stark naked. Unfortunately, the Sigma Frakka Pi fraternity were all skinny geeks who wore glasses and had no body hair. So a large number of women in that dorm died laughing.
Nope, that isn’t it either.
Hmmm…. maybe there’s a good reason this particular story-telling method is always shown in a cartoon as part of a joke.
Wielding the Big Pencil
The guy holding the big pencil used to be me. I know you are thinking, “But, Mickey, you are not a rabbit!” Well, that’s true, but it is also true that the whole thing is a metaphor, and metaphorically I was always Reluctant Rabbit, pedagogue… teacher… the holder of the big pencil. It is a writing teacher thing. The best way to teach kids to write is to have them write. And the best way to show them what you mean when you tell them to write is to write yourself. You learn to read better by reading a lot. You learn to write better by writing a lot, reading what you wrote, and reading what other people wrote, especially if those other people were holding the big pencil in front of the class.
I was recently reminded by people who know me that once I held the big pencil in the front of the class. They both asked me, “Really? You were a teacher?”
I suppose it is hard to believe when once you’ve gotten to know me, at least a little bit. I don’t strike people as the sour-faced, anal-retentive English-teacher type. I smile and laugh too much for that. They can’t believe that someone like me could ever teach.
But over the years, I got rather good at holding the big pencil. I learned, first of all, that anyone can be a good teacher. You only have to be competent in the subject area you are trying to teach, and open to learning something new about teaching every single day for the rest of your life.
Here’s something you have to learn about teaching to be any good at it; Discipline is not about making kids behave. You can shout, stamp your feet, and hit them with a ruler and you will never get them to do what you want to them do. It has to be about limiting the choices they have for what they will do. Yes, one of those choices is to be removed from the classroom to go have fun sitting in the uncomfortable chair next to the assistant principal in charge of discipline’s desk, but the good teacher knows you should emphasize that they can either sit like a lump and imitate a rock, or they can participate in the activities presented. And in my classroom, activities led to jokes and laughing and trying new stuff… some of it hard, but most of it easy. Kids don’t end up having a hard time making the right choice.
Here’s something else you absolutely have to learn to be any good at it; You have to like kids. Not just the well-behaved teacher-pleasers, but also the class clown who’s too smart to sit still for stuff he already knows, the shrinking violet who is a wonderfully complex well of deep thoughts who is only a little bit too scared to actually speak in class and share her thoughts, and the dark snarky demon who is quietly plotting the next outburst that will make your life a living hell so he or she can spend time with their old and dear friend, the chair in the assistant principal’s office. If you don’t like them, you can’t teach them, and driving dynamite trucks in war zones is an easier job. It pays better too.
I often try to picture Donald Trump teaching English to seventh graders. What a slapstick comedy that would be. The man doesn’t know anything. He is always angry. And he hates everybody except his daughter Ivanka. My fourth period class wouldn’t merely eat him alive, they would skeletonize him faster than a school of piranhas could ever hope to match. And it might be entertaining to watch (assuming it was metaphorical, not literal).
And I sincerely wish I could hold the big pencil in front of class again. It was the act that defined who I was and what purpose I had in life. But it isn’t gone since I was forced by ill health to retire. I held the big pencil for over two thousand students in the course of thirty-one years. And I will always hold the big pencil in their memories of it. It is a sort of immortality for teachers.
AeroQuest 5… Canto 150
Canto 150 – Trav Goes Hunting
The reanimated thing that had been Trav Dalgoda was still tinkering with repairing himself using what computer pieces he could acquire in Castle Orpheum’s under-water dome’s marketplaces.
“This goop percolating in the terrarium-thing is actual Trav-Dalgoda flesh being cloned?” asked Dana Cole, staring at the amorphous blob of Traviness as it wriggled with life and growth.
“That’s right, old Dana jester. I need actual living tissue to create the new me. But I need some other things as well that I can’t get on this planet without getting wet.”
Dana was a bit stunned. “You just called me jester?”
“That I did. You know me. I always talk like that because nobody else in the universe does.”
“Am I still talking to Tyrrix? Or is this Trav?”
“Well, now… that’s complicated. I guess you’d have to say that I am a bit of both. The Trav part of this brain is very good at absorbing and taking over the Ancient personality. But that’s because the old brain and the new are so basically compatible. Tyrrix was the trickster mind in the Crown of Stars. And the Trav mind fits into that mind like puzzle pieces made of clay that molds to fit into the spaces where Tyrrix is basically missing parts of his old noggin. I definitely feel as much like I’m Trav as I do Tyrrix.”
“Oh, no!”
“But you love me as Trav, don’t you?”
“Yes, but… my gawd!”
“Yes, I can answer to that too. I have big plans.”
“So, what did you mean about getting wet?”
“Well, Dancer is not only a water planet with no dry land at all, it is also the site of an Ancient library. I am going to have to go out underwater and find the Ancient minds that are archived there.”
“Um… oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. And while I am at it, I need some more robotic-synthetic parts too.”
“…And you’ll get that from the library?”
“No, I will get the parts I need from Sorcerer 13.”
“He’s here in Castle Orpheum? This underwater city?”
“No. He’s out there looking for the same prize I am going after. We will intercept him. Kill him. And borrow his parts.”
“We? You said we will do it?”
“Oh, yes. You can’t survive underwater without a pressurized diving suit. But there are plenty of those in this city.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Of course not. That part of Trav is mostly in control of this body now.”
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction
Catch a Falling Star 
Ghostly Reflections
So, I am probably the last stupid goomer who should be writing this post. But I do have a lot to say on the subject that will more than fill a 500-word essay.
At my age and level of poor health, I think about ghosts a lot because I may soon be one. In fact, my 2014 novel, Snow Babies has ghosts in it. And some of the characters in it freeze to death and become snow ghosts. But it doesn’t work like that in real-world science. My ghosts are all basically metaphorical and really are more about people and people’s perception of life, love, and each other.
Ghosts really only live in the mind. They are merely memories, un-expectedly recalled people, pains, and moments of pandemonium.
I have recently been watching the new Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. It creeps me out because it latches on to the idea that ghosts haunt us through the revisitation in our minds of old trauma, old mistakes, old regrets… We are never truly safe from ghosts, no matter how far under the covers we go in our beds, deep in the dark and haunted night. Ghosts are always right there with us because they only live inside us.
I am haunted by ghosts of my own. Besides the ghost dog that mysteriously wanders about our house at night and is seen only out of the corners of our eyes, there is the ghost of the sexual assault I endured at the age of ten by a fifteen-year-old neighbor. That ghost haunts me still, though my attacker has died. I still can’t name him. Not because I fear he can rise up out of the grave to hurt me again, but because of what revealing what he did, and how it would injure his innocent family members who are still alive and still known to my family, will cause more hurt than healing. That is a ghost who will never go away. And he infects my fiction to the point that he is the secret villain of the novel I am now working on. In fact, the next four novels in a row are influenced by him.
But my ghost stories are not horror stories.
I write humorous stories that use ghosts as metaphors, to represent ideas, not to scare the reader. In a true horror story, there has to be that lurking feeling of foreboding, that sense that, no matter what you do, or what the main character you identify with does, things probably won’t turn out all right. Stephen King is a master of that. H.P. Lovecraft is even better.
But as for me, I firmly believe in the power of laughter, and that love can settle all old ghosts back in their graves. I have forgiven the man who sexually tortured me and nearly destroyed me as a child. And I have vowed never to reveal his name to protect those he loved as well as those I love. If he hurt anyone else, they have remained silent for a lifetime too. And I have never been afraid of the ghost dog in our house. He has made me jump in the night more than once, but I don’t fear him. If he were real, he would be the ghost of a beloved pet and a former protector of the house. And besides, he is probably all in my stupid old head thanks to nearly blind eyes when I do not have my glasses on.
I don’t believe in ghosts.
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Filed under cartoons, commentary, ghost stories, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
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