Category Archives: NOVEL WRITING

August 20, 2015 · 2:15 pm

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

August 13, 2015 · 5:04 pm

A Low-Fat Essay With One Third Fewer Calories

Yesterday I posted a political satire in which I accused Rand Paul and Chris Christie of being the reincarnation of Laurel and Hardy. I may have also suggested that Republican Presidential candidates are mostly possessed by the spirits of old comedy teams who share the bully and the idiot style of comedy made famous by Stan and Ollie. That post had about 380 calories from empty carbohydrates and the saturated fat was off the charts. If I am to provide a healthy diet of low-quality purple paisley prose to those who ready my pretentiously faux-literary blog, then I need to alternate in some high-fiber, low calorie fare. After all, this is a place where people come to sample my ideas and my so-called humor. Any and all fat that they get from here goes straight to their head. It can clog the arteries of the thinking organ. So, let me offer something light and fibrous today.

Yesterday I finished the first-pass edit of my novel Snow Babies. I also got it sent to my editor at PDMI, Jessie Cornwell. Her edits caused serious pain and minor bleeding, but that is merely an indicator that she is very professional and does the job well. And on occasion, she makes me laugh. She identified and corrected my creepy fascination with the word “penis” and cut it out of my novel. I am sure you can imagine how painful something like that can be. But I deserved it. A writer has to be aware that there are quirks in his thinking that interfere with communicating ideas to the reader. And the nutritional value of the ideas and thinking in a book are not only what makes it worth reading, but worth writing in the first place.

It is a little odd to be working on a novel about a blizzard in Iowa in deep December when it is August in Texas and we are undergoing 100-degree plus weather during the yearly heat wave and drought. It is hard to imagine deadly cold and Christmas-wish thinking when you have to sit naked by the air conditioner and you still sweat out gallons. (Notice I did not use the word “penis” even once in this paragraph, Jessie.) (Oops! Okay, don’t count the parenthetic expression, please.)

But I love these characters.

Valerie Clarke, the main character, is an eleven-year-old girl trying to make her way in a cold world after the death of her father. She finds and latches onto a mysterious old hobo who goes by the name Catbird. The man wears a coat which is a crazy quilt of colorful patches. He carries around a dog-eared copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and quotes from it as if it is his Bible. She gives him a place to stay, with her and her grieving mother in the nick of time before the blizzard hits her little Iowa town. Valerie is based in part on my own daughter.

A bus gets stranded in the rural farming community and the bus contains four boys who are not only passengers, but runaway orphans escaping from the Illinois foster care system. The youngest boy is crippled.

So, I am for the moment only posting something light that you really don’t have to work too hard to consume. The main idea is simply that I have finished another step in the process of publishing my long-delayed novel. And hopefully this post isn’t needlessly fattening, like many of my posts are.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as humor, novel characters, novel writing, Paffoonies, PDMI Publishing, Snow Babies, working with editors

August 9, 2015 · 2:21 pm

Timeline – Part 2

You may remember that yesterday I was giving a run-down of my various Home Town Novel projects according to the order they supposedly happen in real time (measured in years). Here is what I went over yesterday;

Superchicken, set in 1974, the first Home Town Novel that I completed.

The Baby Werewolf (also possibly titled The Wolf in the Attic), set in the Fall of 1974, not yet completed.

The Forever Boy, set in Spring 1975, not yet written in manuscript form.

Sweet Pickles, set in the Fall of 1974 and Spring of 1975, half written, but possibly too graphic to publish.

Under Blue Glass, set in 1977 and not yet written in manuscript form.

When the Captain Came Calling, is set in 1983-84, the manuscript is currently at 25,000 words and being worked on.

And the novel I am editing for publication this week, Snow Babies, set in the Winter of 1984. Snow Babies is the story of how the small town survives the raging blizzard and faces the prospect of freezing to death. Valerie Clarke, in the picture above, is the central character in a large cast trying to avoid being the one the snow spirits have come to claim.

The second generation of Norwall Pirates, the boys’ club of dreamers, goofballs, and liars, have come to be led by a girl, Mary Philips and Valerie is the second girl ever to join the club.

The next novel has undergone two transformations. It started as a book called Little Boy Crooner. It is about an orphan from France who comes to live with ne’er-do-well Iowegian relatives. Homesick and deeply troubled, the boy has discovered a natural talent for karaoke, and has a voice that people come from miles away to hear. Then, the clowns of the Dreamlands began invading this story and had to be renamed. It is now called Sing Sad Songs… with Clowns. I may, however change the name to just Sing Sad Songs.

Sing Sad Songs and the next novel in the series, Fools and Their Toys, happen at the same time in 1985-86. They not only share a setting and many of the same characters, but they share a villain and many of the same plot-shaping events. They are, however, very different stories.

Fools and Their Toys is the story of autistic Murray Dawes. Because he has never really been able to communicate before, his turning point comes when a new member of the family, an adopted little brother, makes for him a ventriloquist’s dummy in the form of a zebra. He calls it Zearlop and uses it to unleash the hidden intelligence that was there through all those years when other people thought he was retarded. Unfortunately, just as Murray is blossoming, a serial killer comes along, targeting young boys. More unfortunately still, some from the area believe Murray may be the killer.

Leadership of the Pirates is passed from Mary to Valerie. And in 1988 I have set my current contest novel The Magical Miss Morgan. Valerie passes the leadership of the Pirates to her highly imaginative and extremely annoying cousin Timothy Kellogg. Tim is a the second most important character in the story of the teacher, Miss Morgan, who loves to teach. Miss Morgan is the sister of original Pirate wizard, Milt Morgan. Because of her brother, she inherits responsibility for a local war between good and evil fairies, while at the same time trying to save her job from evil principals, parents, and school board members and teach a lesson or two worth remembering forever. This full manuscript novel is currently being judged for the contest, and will be submitted for publication after.

Tim Kellogg is one of two main characters in the next novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. Orben Wallace, the inventor, is the title character who may have accidentally created a time machine. The novel is set in the years from 1988 to 1990, and it is about how the genius’ old inventions come back to haunt him as he tries to solve the problem of having invented a time machine, having worked on mysterious government projects, and having helped to fight off an alien invasion. This novel is also complete and merely awaiting the proper time to get published.

Catch a Falling Star is the published novel that started this blog and my dream of making it as a novelist. It is set in 1990 and tells the story of when the Telleron alien empire of frog-like fin-headed aliens fail to invade Norwall, Iowa because they hadn’t reckoned on meeting the Pirates.See Catch a Falling Star on Amazon here.

I guess I leave it here for today. It seems there is enough more to fill another blog… Part 3.

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Filed under aliens, characters, clowns, humor, Iowa, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, publishing, Snow Babies, writing humor

Tagged as bad novel writing, humor, Paffoonies

August 8, 2015 · 3:13 pm

Timeline

Editing my novel Snow Babies has led me to realize that I need to align the events and character progressions in all the related Home-Town Novels. So here is a feeble attempt to make sense of the wealth of crap that this whole project has generated.

The first novel in the series is called Superchicken.

This story is about a boy who comes to live in the small town of Norwall, Iowa and struggles to make friends and fit in with a close-knit and inter-related group of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. It contains the origin story of the Norwall Pirates, a boys’ gang and liars’ club who cause most of the chaos in the story. It is intended to be an Iowa-River version of Tom Sawyer, a picaresque novel where the main character uses his natural instincts to try and gain the recognition of the world that he exists and has worth as a person.

The second novel is not completed yet. It is a story called The Baby Werewolf. It is about the Norwall Pirates pursuing an encounter with a very unusual child shut away in the attic of an aging house by the harried adults in his life.

All of these stories are humor novels written for a Young Adult genre audience. This one, however, also introduces elements of the horror genre.

Three more unwritten novels exist between this set of Norwall stories and the next set which introduce a whole new group of Pirates. Of the original Pirate stories there is an encounter with immortal beings who are somehow more than human and include a villain who is secretly an un-dead Chinese wizard looking to kill and consume another immortal who has taken refuge in Norwall. This novel does not yet have a name. The working title is The Forever Boy. Another novel involving the Pirates is called Sweet Pickles. It takes up the story of a girl nicknamed Pickles who is desperate to be loved and joins the junior high football team to impress boys. The novel includes the sexual awakening of more than one member of the Pirates, and though it is half-written, it may never see publication. I am not a pornographic writer, but the issues of this book have become so explicit, that it would have to be gutted and rewritten completely to be acceptable to my chosen genre. A more likely story is Under Blue Glass, the story of the Pirates handling their teens and high school and the excitingly horrible prospects of leaving home.

The next set of Pirate novels cover the 1980’s. The Captain Came Calling is about the reformation of the Pirates with Mary Philips, the story-teller’s little sister, taking on the daunting task of leading the Pirates through a new decade. South Pacific island magic brings the cursed Captain Noah Dettbarn to a farm town about as far away in all of North America as you can get from any ocean. The captain is cursed with invisibility and has to get to the bottom of a terrible family secret to cure it. Meanwhile, another terrible secret is destroying the family of Valerie Clarke, the main character of the novel.

Snow Babies is actually the second novel of this group, although it is the second novel being published. I will talk more about it as the process goes along and it actually reaches a state of publication.

After that comes a group of unwritten novels that are nebulously plotted out. I am thinking I probably need to declare halftime on this post at 600 words and do the second half of this timeline tomorrow.

Working on Snow Babies

I really don’t have to put very much into this blog since most of my 500 words are already taken up with novel editing. So I will just put in a few comments on this novel that has consumed me since 2012. It is called Snow Babies

because it is basically about lost children and a blizzard that threatens to take them away completely. Now, there are fantasy creatures in the story, child-like ghost-things that come in the teeth of the blizzard to take away the souls of those who die in the cold. But the title actually refers more to the child characters in the story, Valerie Clarke (as seen above) and the four runaways from the Trailways bus. It is a story of survival during a blizzard, and survival when you have lost the ones you love. It is also a story of quilts… patchwork quilts… of many colors and varieties all stitched together seemingly at random. Because that is what life is like. Random stuff. Stitched together…to make something beautiful that can save your life in the cold.

This novel was submitted in manuscript form to the Chanticleer Book Reviews novel writing contest for Young Adult fiction. The contest is called the Dante Rosetti Awards as seen in this logo. The book didn’t win, but of the many manuscripts submitted it made it all the way through to the final cut and was a finalist in the contest.

I am currently working with editor Jessie Cornwell of PDMI Publishing to get the book ready for print. I hope to have it published soon. Clay Gilbert, Managing Editor of PDMI LLC recently did a profile on me because of my upcoming book. Here is the link for that;

Portals and Pathways by Clay Gilbert

Let me leave you with a look at the frost spirits from my novel.

I hope you don’t feel hopelessly mooned by that, because there are worse things that Snow Babies can do than that.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, Snow Babies

Tagged as humor, novel characters, novel writing, Paffoonies, publishing, revision, Snow Babies

August 2, 2015 · 2:28 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

July 10, 2015 · 3:36 pm

Bits and Pieces

Having written 1000 words again for no apparently good reason yesterday, I figure I am entitled to a shorter, pithier, sissier, saucier, sillier post today (the kind where I use long strings of adjectives in order to fill up the paper… a trick learned from little darlings in English class that figured I would be happy with a page full of words, and that it didn’t matter if it made the least bit of sense). Writing is, after all, piecing together the puzzle that is my noisy noodle, full of imaginings, weird images, and all sorts of listy-type things that I could list here to fill up more space if I weren’t so danged lazy today. I found a good article about being a writer while my noodle was simmering and trying to cook up today’s post. It gives insight into the tumultuous brain-scape that I am struggling with at the moment because I am (sadly) a writer.

Here’s the article from AuthorsPublish

I am trying to noodle out a cartoon that I am trying to compose from a rough draft that has more holes in it than Swiss cheese has bad smells. I suppose you could call that cartoonoodling (but would never actually call it that because you’re not as dippy as I am). The drawings of that composition come first. So, here, at least, they are!

I know you can’t possibly know what sort of sense to make out of these because I haven’t put the words and dialogue balloons into these pen and ink and red drawings. (Remember, Clown Noire is a new cartoon genre I am trying to develop like black-and-white Film Noire movies, only in black-white-and-red pen-and-ink cartoons.) So, foolishness aside, these are only raw work-in-progress Paffoonies. Or maybe not foolishness aside, since foolishness tends to be the whole point.

I am also trying to advance through the struggles of two novels at once. I am still trying to progress through the middle of Stardusters and Space Lizards, where I have to bring the totally evil villain, Senator Tedhkruhz the lizard-man (no relation to the real life Senator I am obviously trying to make fun of), together with his well-deserved comeuppance. I know how the novel ends, but not how the middle-middle and the later-middle connect to that end.

And I am trying to finish the beginning of the novel When the Captain Came Calling. I have to come up with a way for the evil mermaid that sinks the Captain’s ship to reach that condition of being righteously indignant about the wrong done to her enough for her to use her fishy mermaid powers to swamp and wreck the ship.

But rather than bore you with the details of my inner swordfights with the weapons master of the Pirate crew that runs my brain when I’m writing, I will leave it here… after all, I promised I was going to write less words today, and I am already at 494.

4 Comments

Filed under cartoons, humor, NOVEL WRITING

Tagged as cartoons, connections, humor, novel writing, paffooney cartoony, Paffoonies, word games

June 23, 2015 · 3:26 pm

Writing in My Head

Okay, I am justifying and vilifying today because yesterday I didn’t write 500 words… the first time in 2015… not in my blog, not in my novels, not even counting text messages. I had extenuating circumstances. I went to a movie, Disney’s Inside Out which made me laugh and made me cry like any good Disney/Pixar movie always does. Then I got a message that one of my children went into the hospital in Florida. And I have been down and out with a bad back, so I missed the Florida trip all together… (the child is fine, by the way, thanks for asking that in your head while reading this). But all of that stuff and nonsense is really just an excuse for a dastardly act of cowardice. I didn’t write a full 500 words. How dare I? This writing thing has now become my sacred mission from God. After all, I retired from the first sacred mission because poor health was God’s way of telling me, “MICKEY, IT IS TIME TO BE A WRITER.” Really! He talks to me in all capital letters just like that.

And you have probably noticed already that I am doing stream-of-consciousness writing for today’s post, a useful form of pre-writing that is known for producing lots of garbage to go along with the gemstones-in-the-rough. My mind is still boiling with emotional turmoil and upset and less-than-critical thinking… The reasons for that are understandable… I am guessing. … But I think the point is (if points are possible in this no-win game I am playing, and losing, called Old Age) that I am never really not writing. I have two novels in rough drafting at the same time. Both When the Captain Came Calling and Stardusters and Space Lizards are both on my task bar at this very moment. I add new inspirations for the next canto every time a new light bulb clicks on over my little furry head.

So the ideas are already there for several pieces of writing that I simply have to sit down and knock out on the keyboard. Potentially I have way more than a mere 500 words waiting to blossom and unfold like flowers into paragraphs of purple paisley prose. (Since this is as close as a writer can come to showing how he actually thinks, I guess I have also answered a question that many who try to read my writing have been wondering about… I really do think in loopty-loops with streamers attached and a knot in the tail.) Writing is not something I can ever be accused of not doing because writing and thinking are the same thing… the only difference between the 500 per day and the leventie-leven trillion in my head is your access to it in a form that is written down and edited (well, at least re-read for typos… I kinda like leaving the stuff and nonsense… and moldy bananas… in the final product because I can pass that particular form of goofiness off as humor). (And, yes, it just helped me pass 500 for today.)

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as 500 words, colored marker, colored pencil, goofiness, humor, novel writing, Paffoonies, pen and ink, writing process

June 9, 2015 · 3:10 pm

The Mickey Himself

I was desperate for a daily topic and trying to pull together all the best Senator Ted Cruz jokes I could think of when this message from my publisher, PDMI appeared on Facebook;

Daven Anderson

May 31 at 3:52pm · Edited

Good evening PDMI family!
Attention new PDMI team members: I would like to run features about you on our company Facebook pages. Don’t worry if you don’t have a book ready, these posts are about you. What drives you. What got you here to PDMI. Your hobbies and interests. Who *you* are.
Message me, the PDMI Publishing Facebook page, or e-mail me at (his proper email address not revealed here)@pdmipublishing.com.
Thank you! smile emoticon

Aha! I can write about myself, post it here to count for my goal of posting on WordPress every day this year, and then send it to him to fulfill this request. That right there tells you a lot about me. No, I don’t mean that I’m lazy. Although I do re-post a lot of old Paffoonies on this blog (https://catchafallingstarbook.wordpress.com/). It means I have to be efficient and economize my best efforts. I was a Texas public school teacher for 31 years, ending in a retirement last Spring because I suffer both from six incurable diseases, and the need to become a published author before I croak. I have forty years worth of stories in me that have to get out in whatever time I have left. I am ill and having breathing trouble today as I try to knock this post out at my usual 500 words plus of finished prose per day (that’s the minimum I have set for myself). To date I have successfully published my book Catch a Falling Star that I published the hard way through I-Universe (now owned by Penguin Books). That, however, is the hard way to publish. All the editorial help and marketing help offered by I-Universe is offered for a price. I had to write the book well enough to pass all their editorial standards and I had to pay a hefty sum of money for the privilege. So, with the next novel project, I finished writing, and made it to the finals of Chanticleer Book Reviews YA novel contest, and then sought a new publisher, pdmipublishing.com, who agreed to publish Snow Babies and gave me a publishing contract in which I no longer need to pay out of pocket to get my precious stories into print. So, it is safe to say writing is now my second career, and if I starve to death in old age it won’t be because the government basically hates teachers. No, that isn’t accurate either. The government doesn’t hate teachers (not even the Texas government); they only hate having to pay them for their work. To finish up, I should make a list of my many life-consuming useless hobbies, but blogging is one of them, so you can read about doll collecting, comic books, and other such nonsense on my blog. I am also an amateur cartoonist, which I will prove with a couple of my picture Paffoonies that I created to go with my novels;

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as autobiography, colored pencil, goal-setting, humor, Mickey references, novel writing, Paffoonies, publishing

June 3, 2015 · 11:25 am

Blog Happy

At the outset of 2015, back on January 1st, I made a plan to blog every single day of the year. Now in June I am nearing the halfway point and I haven’t missed a single day. I was worried at the outset that I would quickly run out of ideas or have to re-post a lot of old writing. But I hammered out a goal of writing 500 words every day… not rough draft words, but polished words that were as near to finished writing as I can get without obsessive-compulsive editing and the post-traumatic stress syndrome that causes. I found out that the more I write, the more the well refills with fresh prose needing to be drawn out in my daily bucket-full.

I am supposing that it doesn’t hurt that I have been in poor health and spend a lot of my day in bed where I do the writing. You have more time to write when you are limited in what you can do every day. For instance, wasting a day water-skiing is not really an option. Neither is mountain-climbing, tennis-playing, race-running. and acrobatic maneuvers in a space-plane. Well, I actually do some of that last thing… but only in my science fiction stories. Moose-chasing, pun-hunting, time-travelling, working elaborate voodoo spells, and swashbuckling are the things I really do… and I do them in my imagination.

It also really doesn’t hurt my overall goals that I am a cartoonist and I draw constantly. It gives me plenty of visual punch punch to fill up spaces between paragraphs, and I have real, honest-to-god professional writer friends that say the visuals are a key to good blogging now and in the near future. People respond more to the pictures than the prose.

I really can draw upon my life for topics. I recently read an article that claims stress and uncertainty in day-to-day life fuels creativity and writing efficacy. So that is good news for me. The house is falling apart. The weather has gone from a serious five-year drought to record spring rainfall. The ground our house is built on is shifting with the transition from shriveled to soaked like a sponge. So the foundation is cracking and the rafters will soon be landing on our heads. The flower garden that is the yard is turning into more of a jungle. I am in no condition health-wise to mow and maintain, but the city will fine us a lot of money I don’t have if I don’t do something to curb the jungle’s enthusiastic spread. And of course the dog produces five times her weight in dog poop every day. (Here’s that disturbing thing about poop references turning up in my posts again.) But the exercise I am forced to get from dealing with those problems on a daily basis is probably keeping my heart going and keeping me alive. And, besides, ranting about troubles is a source of humor and gives me something to write about.

Now, I started blogging in 2013 because my publisher at the time, I-Universe, told me it was a necessary part of marketing my book. They neglected to tell me that I would be the only one marketing my books and that I would probably never see a penny of profit in my lifetime from writing, but that’s the breaks, ain’t it? There is a very good chance that, even though I have been published more than once, and though editors say my writing is good, my books will never be read widely during my lifetime. I may get discovered along the way given enough time and endurance… but I may just be writing books for my own satisfaction and reading pleasure. It is the nature of the beast in this day and age that being a good writer and a mediocre marketer is a recipe for failure, while being a poor writer and a good marketer yields success. So, while irony is having its way with me, I would just like to say… blogging is now where I find my happiness… and thank you for reading my blog.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as blog writing, humor, irony, novel writing, Paffoonies

Category Archives: NOVEL WRITING

Terry Pratchett, the Grand Wizard of Discworld

A Low-Fat Essay With One Third Fewer Calories

Timeline – Part 2

Timeline

Working on Snow Babies

Being Old Enough to Know Better…

Bits and Pieces

Writing in My Head

The Mickey Himself

Blog Happy

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