I was going to tell you a lot about my novel Magical Miss Morgan today. My computer had other ideas. I was almost done with the post and working on the final edits when the computer suddenly burped and wiped it all out. Nothing was saved but the title. Well, I signed a contract for the novel. I will tell you more about that as time goes on. The computer doesn’t want me to do more today.
Filed under Celebration, humor, novel, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, publishing
I have made up my mind to risk investing more money in getting another book published. Being an author, especially an unknown Indie author, is really just an expensive hobby. Even investing in professional editorial services and print-on-demand publishers can’t help you make any money at it, even if you are talented and good at story-telling. The best I can really hope for is to get my books in print and pray that people will discover them and like them after I die, beaten to death for a crust of bread in debtor’s prison.
So, why would anyone in their right mind want to be a writer?
It is entirely possible that I was simply born that way. I have been drawing cartoons and telling stories since I was about five years old. Maybe even before that. I don’t have many clear memories of my pre-school years. It is possible that I was lost in a library once… or dropped on my head… or in a library and having a book dropped on my head… something set it off if it wasn’t simply in my genes.
I am planning to publish Magical Miss Morgan with Page Publishing. They are a pay-to-print publisher who are slightly more affordable than I-Universe that I used to get Catch a Falling Star into print. I feel like I have to get it published before I die because it is the distillation of my entire life as a classroom teacher. Books like this are important to me. In the Bible, there are prophets and holy men who are filled with the Word of God, men like Jeremiah, that claim the Word is burning within them, and will burn its way out of them if they don’t speak it. My stories that I am working at turning into books are like that. They are consuming me from the inside out. I have to get them written and printed if I possibly can.
I have recently tried and failed to get novels like Snow Babies, Magical Miss Morgan, and Superchicken published with publishers that don’t charge for their services. I got several rejections and one contract that came to nothing because of the economic failings of the publisher. I have tried being infinitely patient. It doesn’t work.
I will try to bargain for the most affordable deal I can to get Magical Miss Morgan into print. They will apparently let me input artwork into the final cover. I understand that successful writers tend to starve for at least fifteen years before they see any success and profit. At best, I have six more years of that to go. But this, after all, is my life now. I need to write books and I need to get them published. I am, unfortunately, a Writer.
Filed under humor, illustrations, novel, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, publishing, writing, writing humor
Once again my computer betrayed me and wiped out three paragraphs in this article, instantly saving the changes so that I had to start over with nothing but the title and a lower case letter “u”. Soon the danged machine will probably explode scattering my words all around the bedroom and getting random punctuation in my chicken soup.
I was trying to write a post about the difficulties of becoming an “author” when my computer decided to ironically make it harder. And this goofy notion that I know anything at all about the topic came about because of a random WordPress comment that appeared on one of my old posts. I was told by the commentator that I had several posts that were good enough to go viral, and that if I wanted to make that happen and improve my “brand”, then all I had to do was Google “Jemensso’s tricks”.
Challenge accepted. I know how to Google stuff. I learned by being a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nutcase. (Did you know that you can not only find numerous well-argued sources that indicate we never actually went to the moon, and only faked the moon landings in Hollywood, but also visual confirmation that we actually did land with high resolution photos of the various landing sites taken from space telescopes this month? And those photos even show the tracks where the moon buggies traveled through the sands of the moon.) So, I first discovered that my blog is not the only blog that got this message. I found a plethora of them, some in the exact same words. And then I located this informative page HERE.
It would seem to indicate that any benefits you can get will cost you at least some money. And that is the biggest irony of being a writer who foolishly imagines that he can become something called an “author”. You end up having to pay money instead of earning it. Each of my two published novels were done with different publishers. The first was a squirrelly print-on-demand company that doesn’t charge you to print your novel. They don’t employ any editors or marketers either. It is a good way to get student work into book form, and parents will gleefully shell out the money for a copy of their darlings’ writing in book form, but it is no way to get a novel published. I could have sent them a 200 page manuscript of monkey-typing, and they would have put it in book form.
The second book, Catch a Falling Star, was done with I-Universe, a publisher that is now a branch of Penguin Books. But it is basically an Indie publisher. I had to invest my own money in the creation of the book. I had to pay the editors, proofreaders, and marketers that I got to work with. I ended up with a product that made me proud, but that I really couldn’t sell. I am still more than $6,500 short of recouping my investment. I do not recommend that path, unless, like me, you really crave the experience of working with competent, professional editors. It was worth it to me to do it once.
But now I am out of money and out of options. I led with a banner that shows I have four complete and unpublished manuscripts that I want to do something with. I am busy with three more that are past the 15,000-word threshold… where you have to consider the work for completion because it is, at that point, almost half done. Where will I go with them? What will I do with them? The answers will, I hope, eventually appear here in this goofy blog. And I am sure they will probably surprise us both.
Wisdom from Pogo by the Great Walt Kelly
I get down and depressed when things continually go down hill and life becomes a depository for piles of disappointments, busted plans, and reversals of fortune. I recently got rejected again by a publisher. They told me they didn’t want my work, and subtly hinted that they really didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to submit any more to them. And this, of course, was not one of the big five. They don’t even accept submissions from a goof as lowly as me who thinks he can write stories.
I take things like that with a grain of salt anyway. Twenty years ago I was told by a published writer that my writing was good enough to be published, and that all good writing eventually gets published. But I chose the coward’s path back then, continuing to invest my time in teaching hormonal and homicidal brats to read and write English in a poverty-pocket of South Texas where they barely pay teachers anything. I chose that cowardly path because it challenged my abilities and seemed a fulfilling life… and besides, I loved working with kids. Now, my life is winding down. I am retired on a full pension which is surprisingly good compared to what most teachers get nowadays, earned at a time before the Grinch became Emperor of Texas and declared the teaching of Science and making students think were acts of pure evil. My health is failing now, and getting published in the age of the internet is now a much more iffy sort of thing where hacks can make fortunes and good writers are ignored. Even small publishers aren’t interested in my work.
Yes, I tend to say “Gork” a lot because it doesn’t matter where I go from here. I have lived a good life. Now, as I dissolve in illness and pain and disappointment, I have no regrets. I fought the good fight and did good work. If the writing thing doesn’t do anything more for me than let me entertain myself in my last days, then that is good enough. I have one book published, and I mean to continue banging away at stories that I have always intend to tell, they will continue to exist after me, at least for a while, and will represent me well when I am gone.
So, I am bound to die, and fairly soon, and we are going to have the racist Orange King as our next President, so the economy will collapse into the pocketbooks of a handful of billionaires. Doom Looms… a phrase I borrowed from a Walt Kelly strip that cut to the heart of the matter long ago. While we live, we are all together as passengers on Spaceship Earth, and we are the only enemy available to contend with. So, instead of being bummed out about bad fortune, I choose to count my blessings and seriously contemplate what I can do to make things better… whether it is in a big way, or just a little bitty one.
Filed under autobiography, battling depression, comic strips, education, health, irony, novel plans, Paffooney, publishing
I may have found my Granny model. There are certain requirements to make a proper German grandmother. She has to have a face as sweet as Apfelstrudel (that’s German for apple strudel), and yet, be a typical square-headed German. This is an illustration model sheet, meaning it will be used as a guide for later illustrations. But I intend to take it a step further and do a colored-pencil version on top of this pen and ink base.
You may have noticed the little person in the picture. He’s a little too small and too oddly dressed to be an ordinary child. In fact, he is General Tuffaney Swift, a Storybook fairy who got his immortality from the stories of Tom Thumb. He is a gifted warrior and is one of the primary defenders of the fairy kingdom of Tellosia which is hidden in plain sight in the midst of my little Iowa hometown. He’s a character that I have been developing since I was in high school. There is evidence of this claim in this old colored pencil drawing from the 1970’s;
You see, the story of Recipes for Gingerbread Children involves the fairies of Tellosia and a sweet old German lady who likes to bake sweets and cookies and tell fairy stories. And it is a novel project that is swiftly absorbing my whole life. It’s funny, but that’s pretty much what happened with Snow Babies and Magical Miss Morgan. My best writing seems to come from brain bursts of inspiration that force me to put aside scheduled projects and spend all my efforts, even my blog posts, furthering the story. Soon I will be all in. I just need the right picture of a cute German grandmother.
Filed under artwork, blog posting, humor, illustrations, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
I have developed a need to create a portrait of a grandmotherly woman whom everybody loves and who exudes “Have-a-cookie”-ness. You see, my newest novel project, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, has as a main character a lovely old Holocaust survivor named Gretel Stein. And she is a talented baker of gingerbread cookies. She has, in fact, a magical ability to create symphonies of joyous triumph over evil in her little oven in her very small house. So I need to do a portrait of that very same old woman. I have to have a picture in my head of the person the story is about, and I have to translate that picture down onto the page by drawing it first.
So I began that process by trying to find the right combination of wrinkle patterns and granny smiles on the internet. I tried a Google image search for “cute German grandmother” which inexplicably yielded numerous photos of internment camp war criminals, who were also old ladies, and cartoons of Adolf Hitler. Talk about the proper context for “What the French-fried Fricka-see-see!” So, I took the word “cute” off the search. I found a wealth of German grandma pictures that ought to fit the bill if I can just tweak the portrait in the right ways to bring to life Grandma Gretel.
Grandma’s School pic from 70’s
I then selected a picture of a German grandma taken in the 70’s because my story is set in the 70’s and the glasses appealed to me as German-grandma appropriate. So, I started drawing.
And, of course, it turned out completely wrong. This granny picture will probably remain forever slightly unfinished, because as I drew it, I found I was transforming the portrait into a picture that was not Gretel Stein. Instead, it was my own Grandma Beyer that it was beginning to look like. Don’t get me wrong. I loved my Grandma B deeply, vastly, eternally… but she is not the same as the grandma in my story. Well, not completely. Therefore I must try and try again until I find the old woman I really want to portray.
Life is hard here in the Kingdom of Paffoon where you labor hard at a labor of love and try to give birth to something eternal that ends up going nowhere… stacks of old writing litter my closets, and the prospects of being published grow dimmer and dimmer. My book Snow Babies has a contract with a publisher, but, apparently they are not going to be able to publish it after all. I am at the very least going to have to find another publisher for the rest of my books, both finished manuscripts and works in progress.
I do intend to follow through and get published, though. I can no longer teach, but I feel a powerful force pushing me towards the sheer precipice of authordom. One way or another I am going to make it over the edge and plummet to the bottom of that cliff. I am compelled by the need to tell stories, and I have a captive audience every school day no longer.
I used to tell my classes that doing impossible things was like trying to pull chicken teeth with pliers. You know, impossible things like getting a book published or teaching a mostly Spanish-speaking student how to read in English… every-day-sort-of impossible things.
“But, Mr. B, chickens don’t have teeth,” some bright-eyed student would say after realizing that “chicken” was the English word for “pollo”.
“Exactly!” I would say. “That’s what makes it so challenging!”
And now I must put on my chicken-catching socks, find my tooth-pulling pliers, and get ready to make more novels happen. After a brief bout of consternation and depression, I actually feel a bit better about the whole fiasco. There are other publishers, and publishers seem to like my writing, even if they can’t publish it. And I have waited two years to get Snow Babies published, all apparently for nothing. It is time to stop wasting time. And maybe to stop repeating repetitions too.
Filed under humor, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, publishing, self pity, writing, writing humor
I am trying to bounce back. Yesterday I survived the possible end of the world. No heart attack. No asteroid hitting the Earth. But also no writing contest win. A huge delay in the publication of my novel. My writing world is in danger of expiring because my life is winding down to its finale, and I’m running out of time. I can still do it, though. I have come back from down and out before.
In 1983 I had a mole removed from my face. It wasn’t a vanity-type thing. Removing it wasn’t going to cure ugliness or anything. But it had gotten larger and had a strange color change. So, my ancient and doddering Czechoslovakian doctor removed it just to be sure. As with any such removal, the excised tissue was sent to the lab for analysis. Malignant melanoma in the very first stages. At the time, the survival rate for such a cancer in Texas was less than fifty per cent. But most cases were not discovered so early in the crisis. I went back in for more surgery. They ended up cutting a hole through my right cheek and stitching it back together again. The new tissue underwent very close scrutiny and it was determined that all the dangerous cells had been removed during the very first surgery. No evidence anywhere of creeping metastasizing cancer death. It was decided that chemo-therapy would only do harm and would not help anything. So I got to keep my hair. It did eventually mean the removal of two more moles and three lumps, but they were all benign. Cancer was fought off and beaten 33 years ago this month. I am a cancer survivor.
I often marvel at the fact that I am still alive and still able to write. I have had innumerable near misses. Car accidents that didn’t happen by a matter of inches. The skidding truck on the icy street in Iowa City missed the front tire of my bicycle by about three inches. Facing down irrationally angry youths with weapons intending to strike out in anger, and somehow having the right words to calm them and prevent the tragedy. One of them told me it was because he looked me in the eye and saw no fear there that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t strike me down. By rights, I should be dead. It is a supreme irony of life that an almost-atheist like me believes in guardian angels.
I don’t know what the ultimate goal is. I don’t expect to be a wealthy published novelist like Stephen King. I don’t know if it is even important that I break through the bookstore barriers and get my work on the shelves for a few paltry dollars. It is really only important that I write. This blog has become important to me because I have developed a small readership that actually reads and provides feedback. I do occasionally reach the heart of people I don’t actually even know. And I have made friends and relatives a little bit misty. I have written 849 posts, posting every single day of 2015, and every single day of fifteen months in a row. I have written six complete novels and gotten two actually into print with an ISBN number and everything. My writing, like me myself, exists, and it will survive. I am a survivor.
Filed under autobiography, healing, health, humor, novel plans, writing
By golly, I finished it. It may not look like it, but this map of a place that really only exists in my memory and imagination took a lot of work. I surveyed the town and made a set of rough map sketches back in 1994. Some of the places on this map don’t exist any more, while a few never existed at all in any real sense. I finished drawing it out in pen and ink yesterday, February 15th, 2016.
This map is Norwall, Iowa, population 275 (If you count the squirrels… and we had a lot of squirrels in this town… in more ways than one). The map is attributed to Bill Stuyvessant, known to the locals as “Cherries Bill” because he loved cherries more than any other fruit and it was the exact same color of red he had on both his cheeks and nose. For the last decade of his life, the 1960’s, he lived alone. His wife died in 1958. His only son, Christian, died near Bastogne in December of 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge. He lived alone with a house full of stacks of old newspapers. It is believed by many that he was a sorcerer and knew practically everything. Some even said he was God. The map probably had to originate with him because it shows the locations of key settlements in the Faery Kingdom of Tellosia, which of course is known only to practicers of magic and those with vivid imaginations.
Norwall is the setting for my hometown novels series. They are not exactly science fiction and not exactly fantasy, but have heavy doses of both. They are actually about real life as it can be warped by imagination and dreaming. You can make the argument that they are surrealism. The four pictured above are completed novels, except for When the Captain Came Calling on the right. It is undergoing a complete rewrite and is only about 50% complete. I have one published novel in this series through I-Universe, an imprint of Penguin Books.
I also have a number of novel projects in the planning and rough-draft stages that are also set in this little imaginary Iowa town. I am continuing to write and expand it all as time continues relentlessly forward.
Filed under humor, maps, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, surrealism
2015 is a year in which I have been furiously writing. I made a pact with myself that I would write a blog post every single day. I am now only 10 more posts from finishing that goal after today. I have pursued my vow to increase my published novel accomplishments by taking Snow Babies through the editing process with PDMI publishing. Soon it will be a real book. Then I will have three published novels, two of which are actually worth something. I have submitted another contest novel, and made the final judging round in the 2015 YA Novel contest at Chanticleer Book Reviews. Winning a prize could mean landing a literary agent and becoming somebody who actually gets help from others to tell my goofy little surrealistic stories. I really don’t have to push all that hard to complete my 2015 goals now. They are within reach. I just have to keep plugging a little and coast when I can.
I need to spruce up The Bicycle Wheel Genius and submit it to a publisher. PDMI has a back log, and as a small independent publisher, they move slowly. I don’t even have a decision about Superchicken yet. But therein begins the plans for 2016. So today’s post is a little short and somewhat content-free because I am coasting. The final kick in this race is about to start.
Filed under humor, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Uncategorized
