Category Archives: NOVEL WRITING

October 5, 2015 · 2:46 pm

The Sky is Red

Today is a this-and-that post because I am juggling so many things with at least one hand tied behind my back. And because this morning, (as you can see in my sunrise photo) the sky is red. You don’t believe in signs and portents, you say? Well, neither do I. Still, the old saying is, “red sky in morning, sailors take warning.” Are there rough times directly ahead? Rough seas? Hard sailing? I wonder.

My favorite sports teams, the St. Louis Baseball Cardinals and the Arizona Football Cardinals have both been the best in the business in the really-recent past. The baseball team has won 100 games and goes into the World Series playoffs expected by many to win it all. Yet, they ended the season on a three-game losing streak with two of their best pitchers taking losses. The football team, along with my all-time favorite football player, Larry Fitzgerald, had been cruising along undefeated at a totally dominating pace. Yesterday they lost by two point to the St. Louis Rams. Both teams are still sitting pretty in enviable positions in their respective sports. Yet there are portents of doom.

My home continues to crumble and my own personal health is up and down and super-iffy. The city gave us notice of a program to help with repairs and maintenance, but we make too much money to qualify. And we still don’t have any money in the bank thanks to health-related expenses. My body aches and my head spins frequently, but I am going to have to get back up on the ladder and finish painting the house.

So, what shall I do about it all? Grim omens scare me and slow me down, but I grit my teeth and pitch in. I have repainted the four shutters for the back of the house and re-hung two of them yesterday. I can still paint and do work on the house. Amazing things can be accomplished a little bit at a time. After all, I put up new siding on the back of the house last year at this time working with only my sons and my daughter to help. I managed to do it all before the city’s deadline and threatened thousand-dollar fine (because it only makes sense to fine people that much when they have no money to fix the outside of the house.) I will beat whatever new deadlines they give me too. But it is a good sign that they want to help and haven’t hit me with any new deadlines yet.

And I will double down on writing work. I sent Snow Babies back to the editor Saturday, and I am closing in on getting that book in print. I am getting back to work on the prequel, When the Captain Came Calling, and I even started a new character illustration, depicting Mary Philips and the invisible sea captain. Here is the pen and ink drawing;

And here is the first of the color I have completed;

So maybe portents are not always bad things. Maybe the sky is red because it is the color of cardinals, and things are looking up for the boys wearing red. Cardinals are the little red birds that sing sweetly and never fly away when the winter comes. We cardinals take on all comers and maybe we will win it all for the 12th time… or the 1st time since the 1950’s… or the first time ever. After all, the sky is red.

4 Comments

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as autobiography, humor, novel writing, Paffoonies, portents, superstitions, trouble brewing

October 3, 2015 · 2:48 pm

Lazy Plugs for Small Holes

I have been working on final edits for my novel Snow Babies. I have also been struggling with diabetes, arthritis, and COPD. At the same time, I have been writing up a storm on my blog and posting all kinds of incredibly goofy and somewhat creative stuff. So today is a break without leaving a hole in my goal of posting a blog post every single day of 2015. I have to go all the way to Balch Springs, Texas today for a flag football game. So, if you are disappointed with this meager post, go back and look at any of the other recent posts you may have missed. I’m not saying they are worth the effort, but wasting your time is what I do.

2 Comments

Filed under NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, writing humor

Tagged as humor, novel writing, paffooney

September 21, 2015 · 2:28 pm

The Beg-Eye

“I want that chip… yes, that chip… that Pringle’s chip!”

“Are you talking to me again, dog?”

“Yes. I need that chip. If I eat that I will be a people again.”

“But I am eating this chip. I like Pringle’s. And I need energy if I am going to finish editing my novel Snow Babies. Let me finish eating my chips.”

“Look at my eyes. Can’t you see I NEED that chip? It is the most important thing in life that you give me that chip.”

“No, I will not look at your eyes. I know about your Beg-Eye super power. All dogs have it, and little dogs have it in spades.”

“Seriously, just look into my eyes!”

“Oh! Uh, I shouldn’t have looked into your eyes just now.”

“Smack! Crunch! Chew-chew-gobble! Um, yes, you should have. Always look at my eyes when you have food in your hands!”

“Well, maybe I need to start writing now. I am putting the food back in the pantry.”

“Awww! Shucksies!”

“Look into my eyes!” says Jade the talking dog. “You want to buy this book when it’s published, don’t you? Yes, I think you do.”

The Unquiet Teacher Brain

Yesterday, as I was reviewing a movie that is almost as old as I am (in December, 1961 I was 5), I couldn’t help but think like a teacher. If I were going to teach this movie as a piece of literature (and movies ARE literature! Don’t argue with me!!!), I would start with an anticipation guide… or I could call it a lesson focus. I would tell the students a little bit about why this movie is important to me. I would give the background information about how Walt Disney wanted to make a musical picture like The Wizard of Oz, and even bought the rights to Oz books by Frank L. Baum to make it happen. It was supposed to be a starring vehicle for his popular Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers, and ended up starring Annette Funicello (and I would never mention anything about my childhood desire to see Annette naked because information like that mixed with giggle-happy teens and hormones is an explosive mix and would get me fired). I would also start a discussion of heroes and villains and what sort of patterns we might anticipate as the story went down that well-traveled path of the hero (I might mention some of Joseph Campbell’s work on myths because it is almost relevant enough to fit in the lesson… and it would not get me fired). But, suddenly, I realize as the teacher-brain machinery is churning on this idea… I am no longer a teacher. I am retired. I am not even well enough to go be a substitute teacher for a day or two. And besides, Texas principals all frown on showing movies in class when you could be doing worksheets to prepare for State STAAR Tests. And Disney sues teachers for using their copyrighted materials in the classroom because, well… evil fascist corporate empire ruled by a mouse, right? So I am bummed.

When do you stop thinking like a teacher so much that it hurts? Probably never. I got even with Fate just a little bit by writing the novel Magical Miss Morgan, in which I gave some of my old lesson plans to the fictional version of me as a teacher (the version of me that is not a cartoon rabbit as a teacher). I had Miss Morgan teach a class of sixth graders about J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and tried to incorporate some of my goofier teaching ideas into the story as evidence that Miss M is, in fact, a very good teacher (hard to fake if you are not a good enough teacher to at least recognize what good classroom practices look like). And I had enough fun pretending to be a female teacher with goofy imaginary students like Mike and Blueberry in the Paffooney above, enough fun to create what I think is my best work of fiction so far. I submitted it to the Chanticleer Book Reviews YA novel-writing contest. I have to wait like 30 years to find out if I failed to win anything… but that’s okay. Doing it quelled the unbridled teacher spirit in me that keeps threatening to kick down the stall gate and run away from the safety of the brain barn in the middle of a tornado… or something equally horsey but dangerous. So, I guess I am okay for the moment. But what do I do next when the teacher brain in me fires up and goes into overdrive yet again?

Ah well, I will think of something.

9 Comments

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, teaching

Tagged as autobiography, goofiness, humor, novel writing, paffooney, school teacher, teacher brain

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

12 Comments

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.

3 Comments

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.

3 Comments

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.

1 Comment

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.

2 Comments

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

Category Archives: NOVEL WRITING

The Sky is Red

Lazy Plugs for Small Holes

The Beg-Eye

The Unquiet Teacher Brain

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…

Catch a Falling Star FB Page

Recent Posts

Stars We’ve Caught

Catch a Falling Star

Follow Blog via Email

Categories

Meta