Yes, Mickey is thinking about the Autobiography of Mark Twain and the upcoming autobiography that James Patterson is threatening to publish. (Patterson, if you don’t recognize the name, is the very prolific author who dominates the shelves in Walmart, Target, and convenience-store book racks everywhere.) Is it an important thing for an aspiring literary pretender like Mickey to write an autobiography? Of course, not! So, that is precisely why he is thinking about it.
So, what would this threatened autobiography be about? Do you really not know what an autobiography is? Or am I just being abominably impatient and not waiting for you to provide the answer in the comments?
It would be about Mickey’s awful, terrible, horrible life. It would be about loving the St.Louis Cardinals, especially the 1960s dynasty that featured the death-ray stare of pitcher Bob Gibson, whom Mickey worshipped.
It would be about the troubled struggle to establish Mickey’s sexual identity because of the assault and traumatic amnesia he endured at age ten. And it would include his struggle to understand his attraction to certain girls. The awkward, pants-wetting episodes of extreme embarrassment included.
It would include the awkward, pants-shedding obsession with being naked in the forest that Mickey had at ages seven through nine. At least, the beginnings of that obsession. Including the read-aloud assignment Mickey heard the fourth graders read aloud when he was in third grade about Greek school being only for boys, and for at least half the day, only for naked boys. And then in fourth grade the next year, after having looked forward to reading that assignment for over a year, realizing the curriculum had been altered to save Miss M the embarrassment of reading that aloud again as she did the previous year.
It would include doing farm work, teaching Mickey the kind of pragmatic problem solving you have to know and apply to farm work if you are the grandson and nephew of actively-farming farmers.
And it would have to include lots of juvenile pipe dreams about cartooning, being an animator, or being a comic-book artist.
That kind of Mickey-Mouse enthusiasm for Woody-Woodpecker characters would be the “Terrible” part of the working title of this autobiography.
And there would also be a long part that is the teacher part. This would be the part that most makes this autobiography into slapstick comedy… and slap-student comedy that is swiftly followed by fire-teacher comedy… but that would be fiction, that makes it no longer strictly an autobiography.
And once the endlessly-droning teacher-time stories are done, it would move into the retirement years in which Mickey yields to the delusion that just because you have become a published author with 21 books published, one of them by a publisher that is an imprint of Penguin Books, you are not necessarily assumed to be a successful writer.
And of course, it would come to an end with Mickey retrieving his obsession with nudity that was really a life-long thing that would transform him into a nudist at an advanced age… marking, perhaps, the onset of his angry, misguided old-coot years. Ah, the horror… the horror…
Yes, in this time of elderly people making irreversible bad decisions, like Trump running for President, Mickey becoming a nudist, and Joe Biden trying to accurately remember stuff from the ’70s… the 1870s, writing a literary autobiography might be the most impossibly idiotic decision of all. But once Mickey’s old coot brain gets infected with such an idea, something truly horrible will ensue.
Catch a Falling Star 
326 and Counting
Twice before I have gone through a year posting something on this blog every single day of the year. And not just by scheduling the publication wisely to cover every day, but by writing something and publishing something every single day. At this point, I have now written something and posted it for 326 days in a row, and being past the holidays and funeral for my mother, I am probably going to make 365 again for the third time.
This is a man who also wrote something every single day. He was a former journalist who worked as an ambulance driver during World War I, for the Italian Army, where he was wounded and won a medal for his service to the Italian government.
He developed a writing style with no author commentary, sparse but crucial details, and a reliance on the reader’s intelligence to figure out the themes of his writing.
His best work is the Novel, The Sun Also Rises.
I hold that opinion because I have not only read it, but I have also read and compared it to For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, and several of his short stories. His writing is fiction, but highly autobiographical which makes his stories so realistic and accessible to all readers.
This is also a man who wrote every single day. He started out writing for newspapers, but starting with his first major success as a fiction storyteller, The Pickwick Papers, he began writing mostly comic stories for monthly magazines.
He is noted for long paragraphs of vivid and plentiful details, and especially relatable and memorable characters.
His best work is the novel, A Tale of Two Cities.
I make that judgement after reading it three times, and also reading Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and The Old Curiosity Shop. There are also autobiographical features in the Boz’s works but he was a wonderfully astute people-watcher, and that dominates his narratives far more than his own personal story does.
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This writer is known particularly for his sense of humor. It should be mentioned, however, that his fiction is not only filled with humor, but was very keenly realistic. His use of author commentary probably makes him the opposite of Hemingway, but he still carries that journalistic quality of writing it exactly how he sees it… full of irony and irrationally-arrived-at truth.
I don’t know for a fact that he wrote every single day. But he probably did. He always said, “The writing of the literary greats is like fine wine, while my books are like water. WIne is good for those that can afford it, but everybody drinks water.” You can’t have writing that is as plentiful as water without writing fairly often.
His best book is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I am not the only one who thinks so. Hemingway wrote, “All American Literature began with one book, Huckleberry Finn.”
I have also read, Tom Sawyer, Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain.
So, what’s the point of all this literary foo-foo? Hemingway would expect you to figure that out for yourself. But I’m addicted to topic sentences, even if I wait til the end to reveal it. If you want to be a writer, you need to read a lot of really good writing. And even more important, you need to write every day.
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