I do draw some pictures from models, photos, or other illustrations… but fantastical things that you can’t find a model for are what occur most often in my stupid head.
Category Archives: imagination
Pictures In My Head
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, illustrations, imagination, Paffooney
More Saturday Art
I don’t believe my art will ever be gallery quality. I don’t know how long any of it can survive my own demise. My family is not overly concerned with preserving my piles of drawings and paintings. And I am not Van Gogh.
What I am is a hoarder of the things I have created. And one hope I have is that posting these things online will extend their existence at least for a little while.
I would remind you that I am a surrealist by choice. I generally juxtapose things and ideas and images that ate opposed in their interpretive import.
Filed under artwork, imagination, Paffooney
Creating Covers on Computer
My daughter the Princess often disses my cover designs for my novels. The one I created for my half-written manuscript, displayed above, is really too yellow by about 500 degrees. I wanted to write a yellow book about sea stories and island magic set in Iowa, a State about as far removed from an ocean in any direction as a State can be (Well, maybe tied with Kansas and Nebraska). But yellow is not the right color. In fact, the green accent color makes me a bit nauseous next to the yellow. So, I vowed to my critic I would try again and do better.
Take a look at these alternative designs;
Will this one attract woodpeckers, do you think? Or is that too racy an idea for a novel about a young girl growing up. Woody Woodpecker is a sex symbol, isn’t he? No? Whereever did I get a fool notion like that?
I could really use your input. If you wanted to vote, you could choose a cover name from this list to tell me about it in the comments;
Banana
Maroon
Woody
Purple
Purple and Wood
Something better, Stupid!
I promise not to get mad about any commentors who choose the last one. But I don’t promise to make any new ones either. It is, however, quite easy to make changes using computer programs. I don’t have to redraw anything. Although I could be slightly worried that the Tiki totem could be viewed as racist, even though his race is “little men made out of wood.”
Filed under artwork, daughters, illustrations, imagination, novel plans, novel writing, Paffooney
Flying the Magic Flying Carpet
There are many ways to fly. Airplanes, bird wings, hot air balloons, bubble-gum-blowing goldfish… well, maybe I am really talking about flying by imagination. The more my six incurable diseases and old age limit my movement, my ability to get out of bed and do things, the more I rely on reading, writing, and the movie in my head to go places I want to be.
Sometimes the wings I use to fly come from other writers. I get the flight feathers I need not only from books, but also from YouTube videos, movies, and television shows.
This magic carpet ride in video form is by the thoughtful creative thinker Will Schoder. In it he carefully explains how Mister Rogers used the persuasion techniques of Logos, Ethos, and Pathos to talk to elephants and convinced a congressman intent on cutting the budget to actually give Public Television more money for educational programming. This is a video full of warmth and grace and lovingly crafted magic flight feathers that anybody can use to soar across new skies and blue skies and higher skies than before. I hope you will watch it more than once like I did, to see how beautifully the central explanation spreads its wings and gives us ideas that can keep us aloft in the realm of ideas.
It is important to stay in the air of fresh ideas and new thinking. The magic carpet ride that takes you there is the product of vivid imagination, cogent thinking, and the accurate connection of idea to better idea. So instead of falling from the sunlit sky into the darkness that so easily consumes us on the ground, keep imagining, keep dreaming, and keep flying. You won’t regret having learned to fly.
Word Salad and Idea Casserole
In a world filled with interesting and engaging ideas, I get frustrated with the constant barrage of word salad on social media tossed at me by conservative friends. As Trump seems to be coming closer and closer to ending his administration with his own chaotic behavior, those who supported him are tossing more and more flavorless lettuce and rotted vegetables in the mix. I have to resist the urge to throw the same thing back at them. I do not resist such salad-making well. Witness my attempts to alter this stupid meme from a friend;
I admit, I kinda barfed half-digested word salad all over this one. I get tired of debating the issues only to be insulted like this and then accused of only insulting Trump and avoiding what they call the “Real Issues”, like Hillary giving a gazillion per cent of our uranium wealth to the Russians and Obama being the one guilty of colluding with Russians.
But, enough of that. It is time to make something healthier out of words and ideas. I have a lot of things on my mind, and I want to get a lot of them said before I die. So let me make some idea casserole, cooking a whole lot of very different ideas into one multivitamin dish.
- Trump, for all the damage he’s done, will end up being good for us if we can just survive his administration to the end. Scar tissue is always tougher than the surrounding flesh when the wound heals. Repairing the damage he has done will leave us stronger, wiser, and more able to cope with the root causes of the Trump phenomenon.
- My friends and family who supported the whole Trump mess primarily to hurt people whom they feel are smarter than them and so more stuck-up and self-important than them, will eventually get back to leading more productive lives than they did before. And they will continue not to credit the ones who actually made that happen the way they didn’t credit Obama for healing the blunders of Bush.
- I will get back to writing gentler, non-political-type humor novels.
- I have my novel Superchicken half-way through the final edit to publish it on Amazon Kindle. You can see I have been playing with cover ideas. I plan to write Sing Sad Songs next. Also I have two more novel ideas that I will add to this casserole as separate ingredients. And I have The Bicycle Wheel Genius, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, and The Baby Werewolf finished and ready to edit as well.
- Here’s new idea number one; The Boy Who Lived Forever is a fantasy novel about Icarus Jones coming to stay with the Jones family of Norwall. He has survived a house fire that killed his parents and now must evade the dragon that pursues him while trying to figure out what is wrong with him health-wise. Could he be dying? Or did he survive the fire because he somehow can’t die?
- Here’s new idea number two; Kingdoms Under the Earth is a fantasy novel about Blueberry Bates, a troubled young girl, falling seriously ill, and the measures her boyfriend, Mike Murphy, and her friends have to take in a realm made of magic and fever dreams to save her.
The truth is I really can’t do anything about politics and government beyond expressing my beliefs and voting my conscience. I need to concentrate on telling stories. It is the one thing that still gives my life meaning through the pain, illness, and suffering. I am not dead yet. And, not being dead, I need to be writing.
Monster Mashing
One of the side “benefits” of having diabetes is that it often comes with an extra helping of diabetic depression. I had the blues really bad this week. I am not the only member of my family suffering.
So, what do you do about it?
Or, rather, what does a goofy idiot like me do about it?
Especially on a windy day when the air is saturated with pollen and other lovely things that I am absolutely, toxically allergic to?
Well, for one thing, I used the word toxically in this post because it is a funny-sounding adverb that I love to use even though the spell-checker hates it, no matter how I spell or misspell it.
And I bought a kite.
Yes, it is a cheap Walmart kite that has a picture of Superman on it that looks more like Superboy after taking too much kryptonite-based cough syrup for his own super allergies.
But I used to buy or make paper diamond kites just like this one when I was a boy in Iowa to battle the blues in windy spring weather. One time I got one so high in the sky at my uncle’s east pasture that it was nothing more than a speck in the sky using two spools of string and one borrowed ball of yarn from my mother’s knitting basket. It is a way of battling blue meanies.
And I bought more chocolate-covered peanuts. The chocolate brings you up, and the peanut protein keeps you from crashing your blood sugar. I have weathered more than one Blue Meanie attack with m&m’s peanuts.
And I used the 1957 Pink and White Mercury of Imagination to bring my novel, The Baby Werewolf, home. I wrote the last chapter Monday night in the grip of dark depression, and writing something, and writing it well, makes me a little bit happier.
And I have collected a lot of naked pictures of nudists off Twitter. Who knew that you could find and communicate with such a large number of naked-in-the-sunshine nuts on social media? It is nice to find other nude-minded naturists in a place that I thought only had naked porn until I started blogging on naturist social media. Being naked in mind and body makes me happier than I ever thought it would.
And besides being bare, I also like butterflies and books and baseball and birds, (the Cardinals have started baseball season remember) and the end of winter. “I just remember of few of my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad!” Oh, and I like musical movies like The Sound of Music too.
The monsters of deep, dark depression are being defeated as we speak.
Writer’s Block on a Thursday
The 1957 Pink and White Mercury of Imagination
I don’t have writer’s block. I can write as long as I can think and move my fingers on the keyboard to crystallize that thinking into words. The Pink and White Mercury of Imagination is always moving, either driving forward in the present and towards the future, or in reverse, rewriting the past. It is never parked.
But somewhere along the way today, the route got sidetracked onto a looping detour.
Hence, this car-themed drive through the idea-capturing process.
A picture of me reading painted long ago and not with me in the picture..
I started reading a new novel. It is a 500-plus-pager by Kate Morton called Distant Hours. It is a Gothic novel, but in a very different way from the one I am writing in The Baby Werewolf. That book starts as a first person narrative, and then flashes back to the past as a series of third person narratives focused on single characters per section. My novel is a first person narrative throughout, though told by three different narrators. It would make an interesting writing analysis post, but I haven’t read enough of that novel nor completed mine to a point where I can compare and contrast them. And those of you who get bored easily have already tuned out and just looked at the pictures by this point.
I also thought about writing a post about Uber-driving conversations and how that impacts the quality of my driver-service. But the best stuff there can’t be revealed without breaking confidences. Doctors, lawyers, bartenders, and Uber drivers are tasked with providing a touch of confidentiality.
I wanted to complain more about Trump and evil Republicans. But that gets far too tiring. And if the collection of my posts on WordPress is like a flower garden, the political rants I do are definitely the garden-choking weeds.
A much better thing for my garden is to chase the flitting butterflies of near-perfect ideas with a butterfly net made of idea lists like this particular post.
So, it is true that I never actually have writer’s block. I do get writer’s detours, writer’s delays, and writer’s just-not-satisfieds- with-those-ideas sorts of things. But not today. I made the problems the topic and the topic wrote itself.
Filed under artists I admire, artwork, imagination, irony, Uncategorized, writing, writing humor
World Building
Part of being both an RPG gamer and a science fiction writer is the need to put together entire worlds and cultures that don’t exist anywhere in the universe outside of my own imagination. It is a big and complicated process. I used to create entire illustrated information pages to capture the world in simple form for future use.
If you can read the small print, you will find that much of the detail about Planet Dionysus and it’s associated planets is very complex. The planet was a home base for the Evil Dr. Nathir, a geneticist who experimented on people and animals to give them chloroplasts and other plant-like organs to remove the need to eat food and add the ability to regrow themselves from cuttings and regrow any missing parts. His evil plant people with a taste for violence and mindless destruction permeated the entire jungle society.
Many of the people are of Arabic Earth descent and have deep ties to the use of psionic mind skills. Shtaraqatl, seen above as a young adult and as a boy, is a good example of that.
Dionysus was also one of the planets involved in the invasion of a negative alternate dimension. The portal opened to invade the other dimension was a two-way doorway that yielded more invaders from the other side than the evil Nathirites sent to take over and exploit the Scion Dimension.
Another important pair of planets were the worlds of Mantua, in the Classical Worlds, and Jargoon, home of the Perfect Knights.
You can see that I not only established the worlds and their cultures, but I had to lay out the entire planetary solar system, including moons, gas giants, orbiting out stations, and anything else going around the system’s sun (or suns).
One of the results of the work I did planning out all these game worlds in the 1980’s is the ease with which I enabled myself to write science fiction stories later in life. I had notebooks full of entire planets, their people, their governments, and a cornucopia of worked-out details to use as settings. I hope to live long enough to make use of them all.
Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, imagination, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction, writing
Teachers in Space
This is another in my continuing series of Saturday night D&D posts, though it was written on Saturday morning and contains no Dungeons and Dragons information whatsoever.
The Space Bear was a travelling space ship/school.
You see, in the early 1980’s, I got in trouble with Baptists for playing Dungeons and Dragons with kids from school because… well, demons and dragons are evil, right? Apparently even the imaginary ones in games and illustrations. So I turned my attention to science fiction games. Traveller was my rule system, and all science fiction was my campaign. And then in 1986 Ronald Reagan and NASA decided to blow up the first teacher in space aboard the Challenger shuttle mission. So, my Traveller game became less about “explore and conquer” and more about “teachers in space”.
Ged Aero was the player character of one of my favorite kids. He was a psionic shape-changer who could transform into other animals, space creatures, and alien beings. He became so powerful that he naturally inherited the job of leader of the Psionics Institute, a criminal teachers’ union that taught psionic skills to psionically talented kids. It was a criminal organization because the semi-fascist government of the Third Imperium had made psionics illegal. He gathered students and taught them to use their powers for good. The students were all non-player characters to start with, but as new kids from school wanted to play the game too, and player characters were needed, the students of Ged’s psionics dojo became player characters.
Junior Aero, a former student and the adopted son of Ged’s deceased brother Hamfast, grew up and became a player character himself. He taught psionics, being a telepath who could talk to computers and robots that were self-aware. His wife, Sarah Smith Aero, also became a teacher. She and Junior had twins, a boy and a girl, both genetically Nebulons, and both destined to be students aboard the Space Bear.
Of course, you may have noticed a K’ung Fu sort of thing going on in the illustrations I am showing you. That was because one time as Ged was in dinosaur form and fighting with a ninja swordmaster, he won the fight by eating the ninja. His shape-changing power then absorbed all the muscle memories and martial arts training of the ninja he ate. So, his students would not only become psionic masters of mind manipulations, but ninja warriors as well.
So, whether they liked it or not, my Traveller players had to learn to teach their skills to others, lead students through complex adventures and problem=solving situations, and basically do themselves a lot of the same things they saw me doing in school all as part of a role-playing game. You see, that was one of the main dangers of playing role-playing games on Saturdays with that kooky English teacher in South Texas. The danger was, you might actually have to learn something. Although, most of them probably didn’t realize that that was precisely what they were doing. They thought we were just playing games, or junk like that.
Filed under characters, Dungeons and Dragons, education, high school, humor, imagination, kids, Paffooney, science fiction, teaching
True Treasures Take Time
I now have six good books and one embarrassing one published. They represent stories I have been crafting, revising, telling, and retelling for over 40 years. They represent things that happened to me in real life and people I have known and loved in real life that have all been transformed in the wizard’s crucible and witch’s cauldrons of my bizarre imagination. They contain some of my best magic spells and some of my most worthwhile wordsmithing, by which I mean writing in ways that give the spellchecker fits.
I tried to tell you this story about telling stories yesterday, but my computer glitched and burped and spontaneously deleted more than half of what I wrote just as I was finishing it to publish it. So the complex part I had planned to explain this Paffooney was lost and the resulting tantrum I threw kept me from remembering and rewriting.
But it was fortunate that I delayed the repair of this post until today. Because last night my daughter finished her end-of-the-year art project for school, and the snafu-demons have inadvertently given me the opportunity to include it here.
It is a soft sculpture dragon made of felt and hand-sewn. She didn’t tell me what his name is, or even that it is a him, but one can imagine that it must be something like Rumple-Tum Sneezer, or something equally awkwardly foolish like that. One can imagine it because one has a slightly off-kilter and Disney-demented imagination. But the whole project took a boatload of time, and you can see she crafted it with great care and skill.
Treasure takes time to create. We who attempt to create it in the red-hot forges of our stupid little creative heads put all the skill we have acquired over time into it. And the endeavor renders something of value almost every time. Time… time… time… Treasure takes time. And now I need to hurry and publish this before the computer tries to fart it all away again.
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Filed under artwork, Celebration, commentary, daughters, humor, imagination, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life