Category Archives: NOVEL WRITING

September 11, 2023 · 1:15 am

A Character Reference, Part 2

Yesterday an inconvenient internet outage interrupted my fountain of character gushing. So let me splash a couple more on here.

tim

Tim Kellogg

Tim is a school teacher’s son who is sorta, kinda, based on my own oldest son… and maybe a little bit on me. He’s clever, creative, a natural leader, and only slightly evil part of the time.

Tim is a main character in;

Catch a Falling Star

The Bicycle-Wheel Genius

Magical Miss Morgan

Grandma Gretel

Grandma Gretel Stein

Gretel is a German survivor of the concentration camps who sees and talks to fairies on a regular basis. She also bakes magically delicious gingerbread cookies. And loves to tell stories to those who eat her cookies.

She is a main character in;

Recipes for Gingerbread Children

She is an important character in;

Superchicken

The Baby Werewolf

The Necromancer’s Apprentice

ginger1

The Primary Cast of Recipes for Gingerbread Children (left to right) Grandma Gretel, the cookie baker, Todd Niland, handsome young farm boy and cookie-eater, Sherry Cobble, nudist and junior high cheerleader, and Sandy Wickham, cookie-eater and Todd Niland’s crush.

My Art 2 of Davalon

Farbick

He’s the alien Telleron pilot and good guy aboard Xiar’s spaceship who gets shot during the failed invasion of Iowa and helps save the planet in the near future. He’s a main character in;

Catch a Falling Star

Stardusters and Space Lizards

Davalon (re-named David by the couple who adopts him)

Dav is the alien boy accidentally lost on Earth in Catch a Falling Star, and leader of the young explorers in Stardusters and Space Lizards.

Superchick

Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken

It is possible E-A is really me. He bears my high school nickname. He is a boy trying to cope with being the new kid in a tightly-knit little Iowa farm town.

He is the main character in;

Superchicken

I fear I am still a long way from done with referring to characters in my books. But more waits for another day.

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Filed under aliens, characters, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

August 18, 2023 · 12:43 am

How NOT to Tell a Story – Part Two

Yesterday, in Part 1, I tried to convince you that, “You should never take too long a time writing a story” because I have written some twenty-plus-year-long novels that took me forever to write, and I am an unsuccessful writer. So, you should not do things the way I did. (Some might accuse me of trying to use a little too much irony, claiming I am a bit too obscure about what I am actually telling you that you should actually do… But, remember, I advised you not to take advice from Mickey. And you need irony in your diet anyway to avoid irony-poor tired blood.) Therefore I am going to advise you further that, “You should never make your characters too complex and interesting.”

After all, there are Mickian characters that are literally blue with red patches on their cheeks that absorb harmful gamma radiation and make those characters immune to radiation sickness from exposure in deep space. You don’t want to make readers so curious about a character that they waste time reading more and more closely to discover more about that character.

Junior Aero, the alien Nebulon boy in the AeroQuest stories is just one example. Not only is he a member of an alien race that are belittled as “Space Smurfs” and treated to racial bigotry based on skin color and not being able to speak English at first, but he is also gifted with mental “Psion powers” that allow him to telepathically read computer minds, even the sentient and intelligent ones.

And some of my characters are green with shark-like fins on their heads. They were born on Starships and orbiting artificial satellites like the one going around Barnard’s Star. They are like George Jetson here, named after his father, Xiar’s, favorite Earther cartoon show character from the 60’s. Not only is he a green-skinned amphibious humanoid life-form from a different star system, he learns a lot about himself in the adventure he has in the novel Stardusters and Space Lizards. He goes from being a narcissistic space-pilot wannabee into becoming a humble crash survivor and expedition leader who helps save an entire planet from ecological disaster. And he even gets a girlfriend out of the deal in Menolly his nestmate and fellow survivor.

Characters like that are far too interesting and developed to be good for your reputation as a serious producer of money-making fiction stories. And you certainly don’t want to waste time on developing the same characters in multiple books.

I used the character of Valerie Clarke in the book When the Captain Came Calling as an eleven-year-old protagonist who loses her father and has to rely on older kids and good friends to save herself from depression and the trash-pits of despair.

I used her again as a main character in Snow Babies where she befriends a mysterious stranger and also finds a runaway boy who makes her think seriously about life and young love, all in the middle of a deadly blizzard.

She’s also in the book Sing Sad Songs where she learns to negotiate love with a boy who also lost a parent, in fact, both parents and a twin sister, in a car crash that made him a lonely orphan. She not only has to face the loss of her own loved ones, but has to help somebody else to face the same thing, in fact, more than one other somebody.

She’s also a character in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and Fools and Their Toys.

It is unthinkable to use a character that much and make her grow and change in so many different ways. She should be used only once in a simple and clear way. Like, maybe, Mark Twain’s use of Huckleberry Finn.

Huck, as a character was only used in the books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective… and… never mind. Forget I even said anything about Huck Finn. In fact, maybe this whole post is so ironic it’s making my story-teller gears all rusty. Never-the-less, let me threaten you with a possible part three.

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Filed under characters, goofiness, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, writing teacher

August 18, 2023 · 12:35 am

How NOT to Tell a Story

If you have come to my blog in hopes of gleaning some key advice about how to write novels or tell a story, then the wisest advice I can give you is, “Do not take any advice Mickey gives seriously.” He used to be a writing teacher in public schools. That is true. But he is also the writer of weird surrealistic novels full of purple paisley prose. And he is not a successful novelist like Steven King or J.K. Rowling. His writing advice is probably only worth ca-ca poo-poo.

So, let me tell you how NOT to write a novel.

Each of the novels I have written and displayed here took me more than twenty years from the moment I conceived of the idea, through plotting, rough drafts, revisions, re-plotting, expanding the story, to finally publishing them in 2017, 2018, and 2019. I developed the stories from real people, real events, and real themes that were a part of my life and added to each of the stories as time passed. So, obviously, you should never take too long a time writing a story. It is true that Snow Babies is the best novel I have ever written, and I count Sing Sad Songs, The Baby Werewolf, and When the Captain Came Calling among my best work. And I only spent one year in the writing of Aeroquest, which is, ironically, the worst thing I have ever written. So, you can see that following any advice Mickey might give you about taking your time with writing is obviously worthless. I took too long writing and publishing my best books, and that is why I will die a penniless, unknown writer.

But I admit to having even more bad advice to warn you not to take. More, I think, than I can put into this one post. So, I will Part-Two this particular essay and take up the topic again in the very near future. Or forget all about it completely. It has to be one of those.

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Filed under feeling sorry for myself, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, surrealism, writing teacher

August 5, 2023 · 11:43 pm

Being Old Enough to Know Better…

I am the man from the Setting Sun,

Come to the future to deliver the past.

What does that even mean, that silly little two-line poem I wrote twenty years ago? Am I not old enough to know better than to create a snippet loaded with goofy contradictions? Apparently not. But I am old enough to deliver the past. I have been around long enough that I remember when President Kennedy was assassinated. I saw Neil Armstrong take that “small step for man” on the surface of the moon. I have learned a number of lessons from the past. And as a writer, I can deliver those lessons in the form of stories. I was born in a different century. I have been around for more than half of one… approaching two thirds. I have collected all kinds of wonderful things in my goofy old brain. And make no doubt about it, with six incurable diseases and being a cancer survivor since 1983, my Sun is about the set. So, I have a mission, to open the eyes of people who are too foolish to avoid listening to what I have to say, or to read what I have written.

I saw The Sound of Music starring Julie Andrews in the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa in 1965 when I was not yet ten years old. I heard the song My Favorite Things for the very first time on the old black and white Motorola TV set in the clip I posted at the start of this post. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie was a puppet show I never missed on Saturdays if I could help it. In a world before video games and computers and even color TV, kids still had priorities. And my world was definitely a world of imagination.

Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Moose

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, and then as Daniel Boone

Paul Winchell with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff

So, what kind of knucklehead must I be to think younger folks would want to know about any of this stuff from the time of dinosaurs and black-and-white TV? I write books that are basically genre-breakers and about way too many different things to make sense to adults. As a result, I classify myself as a Young Adult novelist, a writer for children… but not the beginning reader kind, or the early chapter-book kind… the kind like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Light in the Forest, or Dicey’s Song. I write books about what it was like to be a kid in the past… the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s… last century. And I have some knowledge and expertise in this area because I was one of those teachers during that time period that got to know the kids in my classes. I made the horrifying mistake of actually talking to kids, asking them about their lives, and listening to their answers. I talked about all manner of things with all manner of kids… brilliant things and stupid things… with dumb kids, smart kids, smelly kids, charming kids, and the kids everybody else hated. You know… I did all the stupid mistakes that teachers who have no earthly idea how to do discipline would do, and got those kids to learn to behave at least halfway like human beings by being somebody they trusted and respected and… on rare occasions… believed. Right now I am working on Snow Babies. It is set in 1984. And I hope to be good enough of a Sunset Man to be able to deliver it to the future.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, oldies

Tagged as 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, good old days, goofiness, humor, imagination, life as a kid, novel writing, oldies

August 5, 2023 · 1:51 am

Terry Pratchett, the Grand Wizard of Discworld

image borrowed from TVtropes.com

I firmly believe that I would never have succeeded as a teacher and never gotten my resolve wrapped around the whole nonsense package of being a published author if I hadn’t picked up a copy of Mort, the first Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett that I ever encountered. I started reading the book as a veteran dungeon-master at D&D role-playing games and also as a novice teacher having a world of difficulty trying to swim up the waterfalls of Texas education fast enough to avoid the jagged rocks of failure at the bottom. I was drinking ice tea when I started reading it. More of that iced tea shot out my nose while reading and laughing than went down my gullet. I almost put myself in the hospital with goofy guffaws over Death’s apprentice and his comic adventures on a flat world riding through space and time on the backs of four gigantic elephants standing on the back of a gigantic-er turtle swimming through the stars. Now, I know you have no earthly idea what this paragraph even means, unless you read Terry Pratchett. And believe me, if you don’t, you have to start. If you don’t die laughing, you will have discovered what may well be the best humorist to ever put quill pen to scroll and write. And if you do die laughing, well, there are worse ways to go, believe me.

Discworld novels are fantasy-satire that make fun of Tolkien and Conan the Barbarian (written by Robert E. Howard, not the barbarian himself) and the whole world of elves and dwarves and heroes and dragons and such. You don’t even have to love fantasy to like this stuff. It skewers fantasy with spears of ridiculousness (a fourth level spell from the Dungeons of Comedic Magic for those fellow dungeon masters out there who obsessively keep track of such things). The humor bleeds over into the realms of high finance, education, theater, English and American politics, and the world as we know it (but failed to see from this angle before… a stand-on-your-head-and-balance-over-a-pit-of-man-eating-goldfish sort of angle).

Terry Pratchett’s many wonderful books helped me to love what is ugly, because ugly is funny, and if you love something funny for long enough, you understand that there is a place in the world even for goblins and trolls and ogres. Believe me, that was a critical lesson for a teacher of seventh graders to learn. I became quite fond of a number of twelve and thirteen year old goblins and trolls because I was able see through the funny parts of their inherent ugliness to the hidden beauty that lies within (yes, I know that sounds like I am still talking about yesterday’s post, but that’s because I am… I never stop blithering about that sort of blather when it comes to the value hidden inside kids).

I have made it a personal goal to read every book ever written by Terry Pratchett. And that goal is now within reach because even though he is an incredibly prolific writer, he has passed on withing the last year. He now only has one novel left that hasn’t reached bookstores. Soon I will only need to read a dozen more of his books to finish his entire catalog of published works. And I am confident I will learn more lessons about life and love and laughter by reading what is left, and re-reading some of the books in my treasured Terry Pratchett paperback collection. Talk about your dog-eared tomes of magical mirth-making lore! I know I will never be the writer he was. But I can imitate and praise him and maybe extend the wonderful work that he did in life. This word-wizard is definitely worth any amount of work to acquire and internalize. Don’t take my convoluted word for it. Try it yourself.

borrowed from artistsUK.com

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Filed under book review, humor, NOVEL WRITING

Tagged as book review, books, Discworld, fantasy, favorite author, humor, novel writing, satire, teaching, Terry Pratchett

July 18, 2023 · 12:53 am

Living in a Fictional World

My title for today has at least a double meaning, if not a triple or fourple one.

“Fourple?” you say.

Yes, four plus the color purple. Purple, after all is the dominant color used in the video game “The Legend of Hoodwink“.

And, of course, the video game is not real. It is the virtual reality video game used in the story as the secret land that the orphans and their mother’s friend flee the authorities to live in after the deaths of the Brown family’s parents.

So, I have been living in the world of Glammis, the imaginary game world inside a mainframe supercomputer. I started this story back in the 1980’s, inspired just a little bit by the Disney movie Tron. Of course there are all kinds of more current technological details to employ to make the story more up to date. The story has been reset to 1999. (I don’t write stories set in the 21st Century. I just don’t. Mark Twain never set one in the 20th.) And one of the ways to create the game-world of the story is to draw pictures of it that I can use as illustrations in the book.

Hoodwink and Babbles (the horse-headed Kelpie) are both game characters that play key roles in the story. They transform from game characters following the script to real people fighting for their lives and honor in the course of the story.

A key setting is the candle-castle called Candlemere, for obvious reasons. The wizard, Milt Morgan, lives there, though he is a real person from Iowa living in Texas as a game designer.

These are the three orphans that Milt Morgan has rescued after the car crash. Mortie Brown, Daisy Brown, and Johnny Brown now live in Glammis after the deaths of their parents, Brom and Stacy Brown.

The three orphans are being pursued in the real world by an FBI agent, a relentless tracker and pursuer named Agent Brent Clarke. What the kids don’t know is that Agent Clarke is trying to find them for their grandparents that they don’t realize are still alive. And Clarke is also their uncle, their mother’s older brother.

In the video game, they are pursued by the evil Daniel Quilp, who is in the video game playing the wicked King Murdstone of the Chelsrod’s Spire. He is not a relative. He is secretly the enemy of their parents and the wizard Milt Morgan.

The servant of Murdstone in the game is Errol of the Devylkind. He is more than he appears to be as well. He is another player character who is also very much acquainted with Daisy in the real world, and has a huge crush on her.

But, at present, I haven’t yet reached that part of the story, the latter half of Act One. Instead, I am today establishing setting further by narrating the visit to BrooglieTown, the home of the chocolate dwarves (literally made of chocolate and not a racist faux pas by any means.)

So, in the middle of writing a novel, I am describing the world-building I have been doing… and drawing… while pretty much living in this made-up game world due to the ongoing pandemic and intense heat of Texas in July. It is a better place to be living for now, though it is soon to heat up too as the plot gets churning and the Devylkind, rather hot-blooded fantasy characters, get further involved.

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Filed under novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as The Wizard in His Keep

July 15, 2023 · 1:09 am

Saturday Is Art Day… Again

I draw things as illustrations to stories. Take, for example, the protagonist and hero of Catch a Falling Star.

Dorin Dobbs is boy from Iowa. That tells you some terrible things about him right there.

He was ten in 1990.

He hated girls.

He met some pretty green-skinned girls from outer space, amphibianoid frog-girls with fins on their heads. He danced with them to Mickey Mouse Club music while he was their prisoner on a sectet base on the planet Mars. They were dancing naked in the nutrient bath that all Telleron tadpoles use daily.

Brekka and Menolly are two of the Telleron frog girls with fins on their heads. They love Earth music in the 1990’s. They are background characters in Catch a Falling Star. They are main characters in the book Stardusters and Space Lizards, where they help Davalon and Tanith to conquer the dying planet of Galtorr Prime after the Telleron invasion of Earth failed in the previous book.

Tanith and Davalon (the Telleron boy in front)

Sizzahl of Galtorr Prime, Ecologist and Lizard Girl

…..

”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

Galtorr Prime is undergoing drastic climate change and environmental collapse and ends up being saved by superior Telleron technology and the lizard-girl heroine, Sizzahl, who has a plan for fixing the atmosphere and saving fundamental eco-systems. Of course, this is all science fiction-y stuff based entirely on fantasy and imagination and has nothing to do with the real world we now live in.

Millis, transformed from pet rabbit to near-human

Of course, not all characters I illustrate are people or aliens.

Millis, Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit, is an ordinary albino bunny who eats a piece of alien technology that evolves him into a talking, walking-on-two-legs, near-human form.

He becomes the chef (who cooks only vegetable dishes) for Norwall, Iowa’s own mad scientist, Orben Wallace, in the book The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.

Orben Wallace, and his favorite bicycle, The Happiness Machine

I think I have now given out far more spoilers for stories than I have any right to do. But the thing about character illustrations is that your get to know the characters at a glance. And to know them is to love them.

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Filed under aliens, artwork, characters, illustrations, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as Catch a Falling Star, Stardusters and Space Lizards, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius

June 26, 2023 · 1:57 am

Stories with Gingerbread

Yes, this post is a shameless promotion. But this is a good book that not enough people are reading to truly appreciate that fact. When I was a boy in the 1960’s, there really was an old German lady who lived in a small tar-papered house, all ginger-brown in color, which we all called the Gingerbread House. She really did love to give out sweets and cookies and popcorn balls to the kids in our town. And she really did love to talk to people and tell them little stories.

Her name, in real life, was Marie Jacobson. She was, in fact, a survivor of the holocaust. She had a tattoo on her right forearm that I saw only one time. Our parents told us what the tattoo meant. But there were no details ever added to the story. Mrs. Jacobson doted on the local children. She regularly gave me chocolate bars just because I held the door for her after church. But she was apparently unwilling to ever talk about World War II and Germany. We were told never to press for answers. There was, however, a rumor that she lost her family in one of the camps. And I have always been the kind that fills in the details with fiction when the truth is out of reach.

I based the character of Grandma Gretel on Mrs. Jacobson. But the facts about her secret life are, of course, from my imagination, not from the truth about Mrs. Jacobson’s real life.

Marie Jacobson cooked gingerbread cookies. I know because I ate some. But she didn’t talk to fairies or use magic spells in cooking. I know because the fairies from the Hidden Kingdom in Rowan disavowed ever talking to any slow one but me. She wasn’t Jewish, since she went to our Methodist Church. She wasn’t a nudist, either. But neither were my twin cousins who the Cobble Sisters, the nude girls in the story, are fifty percent based on. A lot of details about the kids in my book come from the lives of my students in Texas. The blond nudist twins were in my class in the early eighties. And they were only part-time nudists who talked about it more than lived it.

But the story itself is not about nudists, or Nazis, or gingerbread children coming to life through magic. The story is about how telling stories can help us to allay our fears. Telling stories can help us cope with and make meaning out of the most terrible things that have happened to us in life. And it is also a way to connect with the hearts of other people and help them to see us for who we really are. And that was the whole reason for writing this book.

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Filed under autobiography, fairies, gingerbread, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as Recipes for Gingerbread Children

June 12, 2023 · 1:19 am

Terry Pratchett, the Grand Wizard of Discworld

image borrowed from TVtropes.com

borrowed from artistsUK.com

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Filed under book review, humor, NOVEL WRITING

Tagged as book review, books, Discworld, fantasy, favorite author, humor, novel writing, satire, teaching, Terry Pratchett

June 6, 2023 · 1:37 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 25

Canto 25 – Dealing with the Devil

Stanley was determined to get both hands around Eule Gheist’s stupid neck, and squeeze until he gave up a solution to saving Maria’s life. He bulled his way into Aunt Philia’s Toy Store.

Before he could shout out the first threat and demand, he was stopped dead in his tracks by the other man standing beside the Owl Man’s check-out counter.

“Hello, Stanley. We’ve been waiting for your return,” said the mysterious stranger with the ice-blue eyes.

“You know I want my daughter back? You are going to give me a way to go where she is and bring her back home?”

“Oh, no. Our offer is far more complicated than that.”

“What kind of a place is this? You trap and kill your customers.”

“You have it all wrong, Mr. Mensch. We always give our customers exactly what they pay us for.”

“Maria never paid you to kidnap her and put her life at risk.”

“Oh, you are confused about who our customers are.”

“What do you mean? You never actually sell any of these toys.”

“We have never harmed a customer. We couldn’t possibly kill them since they are already dead.”

“And you sell them these toys?” Stan’s arm swept around in a circle indicating the whole collection of dust-covered antique toys.

“We sold Maria to Esperanza for five years’ worth of spirit life. We don’t sell these toys from the store.”

“Maria is a toy?”

“Basically. We provide the other side with humans to play with.”

“So, how do I get to where Maria is?”

“You don’t. No member of the story she is playing in will want you to be a part of it. You don’t fit the story.”

“So, what’s to prevent me from throwing a fit and wrecking this store?”

“Pick up a toy and destroy it.”

Stanley picked up a wooden rocking horse and slammed it into the floor with the full force of his anger and frustration. Almost immediately the fractured pieces disappeared and the rocking horse rematerialized on the shelf, even wearing it’s dust covering.

Stan stopped and stared, feeling totally stunned.

“Everything is set in spirit life. It will still be here even after a nuclear missile from Russia blows Dallas into vapor.”

“I don’t… I mean… ah…”

“I know you are stressed about your family’s situation. We have a possible solution to offer for a price.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can guarantee Maria’s survival. And I can cure Bonita’s cancer.”

“How… how do you know about that?”

The Owl Man grinned. “This is the store’s owner. Mr. Mephisto.”

“The dark man from the Shandra and Mark story?”

“Exactly,” said the gimlet-eyed man.

“So, I’m making a deal with the Devil. What will it cost me? My soul?”

“We want you to become the new manager of the Toy Store. You are a very resourceful man. And you have a good heart.”

“And I am due to return to my owl form,” said Eule.

“If I refuse?”

“You have to make the choice, of course. But the job has perks. The spirit life will make you immortal. And Maria and Bonita are both saved.”

“And if I refuse to accept the job, what happens?”

“You trust to luck for the outcome you seek.”

Stanley could do nothing but stand there and try desperately to think.

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Filed under ghost stories, horror writing, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as The Haunted Toy Store

Category Archives: NOVEL WRITING

A Character Reference, Part 2

Tim Kellogg

Grandma Gretel Stein

Farbick

Davalon (re-named David by the couple who adopts him)

Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken

How NOT to Tell a Story – Part Two

How NOT to Tell a Story

Being Old Enough to Know Better…

Terry Pratchett, the Grand Wizard of Discworld

Living in a Fictional World

Saturday Is Art Day… Again

Stories with Gingerbread

Terry Pratchett, the Grand Wizard of Discworld

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 25

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