Category Archives: NOVEL WRITING

March 5, 2015 · 3:59 pm

Snow Day Again… In March?

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20150305_083349It is truly amazing how little snow it takes to totally paralyze a city like Dallas.  Chicago would be embarrassed to death at having to close school down on a sunshiny day with less than a foot of snow on the ground.  But Dallas likes to build major roadways up into the air so freezing air can hit the underside as well as the upper side of roads that, once shut down by a hideous three-car five-death accident on sheets of super-slippery ice, totally prohibits movement from one side of the metroplex to the other.

I have considerable pain from my arthritis, and I am shut down most of the time anyway.  But with the city closed around me, there is not much left to do but sit and write and make fun of southerners who can’t drive on snow because they don’t realize that speeds below seventy miles-per-hour do exist in the real world.  I have had time to further work on the final edit of my novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  I also had time to submit my novel Magical Miss Morgan to the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ YA novel-writing contest called the Dante Rossetti Awards for Young Adult Fiction.  265469780

I don’t have a head full of straw and really believe I am going to walk away with a top prize.  But I did enter this contest before with Snow Babies, and that book made it into the final round.  It will help my manuscript get published.  Who knows?  I may score something bigger than an Indie publisher this time around.  Maybe I can get an agent.  (Okay, there’s a little straw in there.  I will have to clean more carefully next time.)

But old, broken, bed-ridden me with nothing but time to lay around and fiddle with the computer am definitely making good use of my snow day.  I took pictures of the snow.  I walked the dog in it.  And I didn’t have to drive to any schools or school events.  Hot dang!  What a fine life.

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January 26, 2015 · 3:13 pm

Galtorr Prime

Galtorr Prime

Here is the world where Stardusters and Lizardmen is set.  It is the environmental nightmare known as the planet Galtorr Prime.  It is the world where Sizzahl was born and where young George Jetson, the Telleron cadet from Xiar’s exploration command has to find a new place to colonize.  I should explain that of the characters from this novel excerpt, George Jetson, Davalon, Brekka, Menolly, and Tanith are Telleron tadpoles, or children.  Alden and Gracie Morrell are a middle-aged farm couple from Iowas that were turned back into children in a previous adventure.  Let me share with you a Canto from this work in progress….

Canto Ten – Aboard Golden Wing Sixteen Near an Abandoned Space Station

Looking for interesting places to explore, the tadpole crew of Wing Sixteen spotted the abandoned orbital station before sensors could detect it.  The sensors were set to find life-forms, lizard men in particular, and the instruments all said that none existed on the space platform.  In fact, it was apparently devoid of all life but a few plants.

“Can you dock with that thing?” Tanith asked George Jetson.

“Of course I can.   I am programmed to be the best wing pilot you have ever seen.”

“And you are programmed to be the most modest Telleron we have ever seen too,” said Brekka.

“Or maybe the one with the biggest gonopodium and the smallest brain,” said Menolly.

George just laughed as he focused his instruments on the docking bay.

“What’s a gonopodium?” Alden asked Davalon.

“Father, you would call it a penis,” said Davalon.

“Oh.”  Alden’s forty-year-old sense of propriety turned his twelve-year-old face a bright crimson red.

“Why do you suppose there are no personnel on that station,” Tanith asked everyone in general.

“Maybe there is something wrong with it,” suggested Gracie Morrell.  “Maybe they had to abandon ship.”

“Maybe,” said Davalon, looking carefully at the sensor monitor.  “But I don’t see anything wrong with the on-board systems.  They are all operating like they work perfectly.  That station has air we can breathe, water we can drink, and no alarms are going off anywhere.  It’s as if they abandoned a perfectly good station.”

“Well,” said George Jetson, “we can find the answer by going in and taking a look around.”  He said that just as he pulled a control lever that thrust the wing forward to meet the docking ring and impacted the station so hard that everyone on board was knocked senseless.

“George!  What did you just do?” Davalon asked from his new position prostrate on the floor of the control pit.

“Um, I meant to dock with the docking port, but it appears I may have embedded the wing in the side of the space station.”

“Oh, this can’t be good,” moaned Tanith, rubbing the greenish-brown knobby bruise that now blossomed on her pretty forehead.

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January 25, 2015 · 7:13 pm

Sizzahl

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My writing time of late has been mostly absorbed by a Sci-fi novel, Stardusters and Lizardmen, a sequel to my novel about aliens invading Iowa, Catch a Falling Star.  It is not set on Earth.  It is a post-apocalyptic story about an Earth-like world and a civilization of lizardmen that have destroyed themselves by abusing their environment, wallowing in greedy politics, and fighting biologically manipulated war.

The Tellerons, who have failed to invade Earth, accidentally end up at the lizardmen’s planet and have to find a home, though they would rather find it anywhere else in the universe if they had a choice.

If the visitors from outer space, both Telleron and Earthmen are going to survive, their best hope is the character featured in the Paffooney.  Her name is Sizzahl.  She is very unusual in many ways.   She is a little-girl genius who is the only Galtorrian lizard-person on the whole planet who doesn’t eat meat.  She also is a scientist studying ecology and genetics, hoping to bring her people back from the brink of extinction.  I like this character, and she is the reason that I have decided to follow this novel project through to the end.  I hope you like her too, even though she’s a dedicated nudist and hippie-style back-to-nature commie freak.

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January 16, 2015 · 2:28 am

Paffooney Updates #2 – Following the Plan

Val in color 2

Okay, you should begin to see now that I am actually capable of finishing a project step by step.  Take no note of the fact that I have done a number of creative and wacky things in a scheduled order that looks like I put my to-do list in the mixing bowl and beat it to pieces with a wire Whisk.  (It is tricky to type this now, because my “o” key is giving out and I have to either punch it repeatedly, chews tu intentiunally misspell werds, or use verbiage sans that particular letter.)

I have been working on my novel projects at the same time as I have been coloring this beauty.  One would assume that it was the novel When The Captain Came Calling (Thank Gawd that title has no letter “O’s” in it), but naturally, it is naught.  I have been putting way more wit and words into my Sci-fi novel, Star Dusters and Lizard People, a sequel to Catch a Falling Star.  The Telleron crew of Xiar’s base ship have reached the planet Galtorr Prime, in the Delta Pavonis star system, and they are beginning to explore and find out what a miserable world it is.

I also added about half a chapter to the Captain novel, but I am still introducing the little people and the Pirates.  I have not even gotten to the sinister cloaked figure lurking in the shadows.  (This book is actually a re-write, so I am not creating from thin air like I am with the Stardusters.)  

I also spent time drawing a portrait of Sizzahl, a new character for Stardusters.  She is a little girl who is a biogeneticist and a genius who also happens to be a lizard person.  I will show you and tell  you more about her in an upcoming post.

So, I drew this project in a step by step order that was really more of a step here, then back-track over there for a bit, then do another small step, then go over here sort of order.  I can’t help it.  I am what educators call a “non-linear” thinker… also known as right-brained, global thinker, or total creative nut-job.

So, since I am not following a straight path anyway, let me finish this post by plugging a friend’s book.   My friend Stuart R. West is a blogger and novelist from Kansas.  His humorous blog is called Twisted Tales from Tornado Alley and can be found here http://stuartrwest.blogspot.com/.  I am recommending his new book that can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com.  I haven’t read it yet, but the book is called The Secret Society of Like-Minded Individuals : Book I

I honestly think you will like it.  If you can stand or understand my writing, you will find Stuart to unnamedbe very much the same kind of wacko bird.  I have to admit though, he does scary way better than me.  He knows his way around a thriller.  (And thank Gawd his name is not Stooart.  Dang “o” key!)

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January 15, 2015 · 1:20 pm

Paffooney Updates #1

Val in Progress

The work on this latest Paffooney is coming along nicely.  I confessed to mess-ups yesterday.  Today I can show you real progress without further oopsies.  The figure of Valerie Clarke is the most important part of both this illustration and my novel project.  She is the single focus-character in When The Captain Came Calling.  I usually vary the focus character from scene to scene in my fiction, because I have a pathological need to play around inside the heads of multiple characters.  This book will be the first one I’ve written to stay inside the same head through the entire novel.   The story, assuming it doesn’t totally take on a life of its own and change itself, is about how a young girl sees and evaluates the people in her life… Mom, Dad, the boy she has a crush on, the girlfriend of that boy, the goofy members of the Norwall Pirates (a 4-H softball team and liars’ club dedicated to adventure, story-telling, and being a kid while you can), weird people who live in tiny Iowa farm towns, and mysterious strangers who can somehow be invisible.  It is about friendship, love, sex, and growing up.  It is also about overly-protective parents and a world full of dark magic and mysterious dangers.  I am trying to capture that in my Paffooney, to hopefully make it into a possible cover illustration.  I intend to show you in this blog each stage in the completion of the project… the making of colored-pencil Paffoonery.

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January 14, 2015 · 5:55 pm

Work in Progress

Val inked up

Here is the straight poop.  (Wait a minute!  Not poop metaphors again!)  Okay, better idiomatic expression… Here is the truthful statement about work habits.  (Better!  But that was idiomatic not idiotic, right?)  Right.

Sometimes I mess up.  I am working slowly and steadily on the next story burning to be told, When the Captain Came Calling.  In the illustration I am working on, you can probably see the mess-ups already.  I very carefully blot my black ink pens when I am doing the pen and ink work.  Even ball point pens can blot.  I will admit I press entirely too hard on both ink pens and colored pencils.  I break a lot of colored lead and make a lot of black pens bleed.  I have arthritis in my hands and often push too hard because I am pushing back against the pain.  I can sometimes use a lighter touch with the colored pencil, the area being covered may require a more lightly penciled mark and have more paper whiteness showing through.  Black pen lines are never like that.  To get a steady, even line, I push with pressure to get things dark and full and even.  The pen that I was using had developed a leaky ball and had to be blotted with every use.  When it made the first smear, I changed to a new pen.  I cussed a little too.  (Cussing makes it better.  I learned that from Mark Twain.)  But I didn’t panic and throw the drawing out.  I can fix it up a bit when I add the color.  But the second pen I was using was a pen I switched out earlier for bleeding.  That’s how I got the second smear.  Dang me!  It almost ruined what I think is a very promising portrait of my main character Valerie Clarke.  (Valerie, whom you may remember from Snow Babies posts, is based on a girl I once had a crush on, and my own daughter, the Princess.)Mina & Val

Now, ink smears are not the only thing that had to be twisted and worked around to get this project underway and at least a little bit tamed.  The title was originally a problem.  I tried to call this story The Captain Came  because of the primary antagonist and the fact that he is returning from the South Seas to the little Iowa town of Norwall.   This was a problem because Captain Dettbarn was running from a bunch of psychotic little Juju men (animated Tiki idols) who were chasing him because he made the witch doctor’s chief’s daughter pregnant.  That made the title an R-rated joke that I hadn’t intended even before I considered this story a YA novel idea.

The Juju men themselves are problem.  In this time of unintended racism, I had to work on them to make them be something other than a racial stereotype.  They were not originally made entirely of wood.  I had to eliminate cartoonist’s shortcuts in depiction that made them look like little black men or little dark brown men.  They are of an indeterminate South Seas racial stock.  Their language is mostly Tagalog (because it is a language I have tried to learn due to Filipino relatives).  Their culture is mostly movie fiction that comes from the Captain’s own liar’s brain.  Most of the information about the witch doctor and the mysterious island come from the Captain’s logbook which is a work of fiction written by a drunkard with a vivid imagination.  So I am trying to be fair to a people and race that don’t actually exist outside of the story within the story.  Whew!  I’ve got to stop explaining complicated things now before my brain melts.  Smoke is already coming out of my ears and making it hard to see here in my studio.

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January 1, 2015 · 4:19 pm

Stupid People

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It is generally considered an insult to call someone “stupid”.

Okay, I get that.  I am not without feelings on the subject.   Stupid people have feelings just like I do.  But if I have to live with “nerd”, “geekazoid”, “brainiac”, and “four-eyes”, I am thinking they don’t have to be more sensitive than I am.

Truthfully, life as a mentally gifted person of no color is a bit of trial even if people don’t generally understand that.    I have an I.Q. in the range of 155, (calculated from my ACT and SAT scores using standard statistical analysis, give or take 5% for margin of error due to the nature of the calculation… am I scaring you yet?)  I had trouble fitting in with my peers as a child.  I related better to older people rather than my appropriate age group, and until my best friend, a preacher’s kid, moved to town when I was nine, I really had no friends and was routinely picked on and preyed upon by other kids.  It was so bad that I was making C’s and D’s in school primarily because I didn’t want to be identified as smart.  Once the eye doctor hung black horn-rimmed glasses on my face, my fate as a socially doomed uber-nerd was sealed.  And my friend Mark, who would grow up to become an actuary with mathematical gifts, moved away when I was a freshman in high school.  I had to help stupid people with homework and class work… I was required to endure threats, bribes, and tearful pleas to help athletes cheat on tests.  Bullies made me tie their shoes and endure endless jokes about the size of my private parts.  Life was terrible until I decided to go out for high school football.  I was small and thin and probably doomed as I made the team, but I had a secret weapon.  I understood almost instinctually that angles, trajectories, and leverage can make the difference over sheer muscle power.  During one football drill where we had to pick up and carry our partner for five yards, I was matched with the big offensive tight end, George Merlock, who outweighed me by almost a hundred pounds and was literally Incredible Hulk-like in football pads.  I simply used my shoulder on the proper spot under his armpit and lifted with my legs.  I picked him up and carried him for twenty yards when some of the other players who were bigger and stronger than me couldn’t even lift him.  After that moment, I was never bullied again.  For one thing, I impressed George so much that he would’ve killed them for even looking at me cross-eyed.  Life got better.  A cheerleader asked me out on a date (though I said no because I thought they were still making fun of me… which I later learned I was mistaken about and I had accidentally hurt her feelings).

So what does that whole long-winded whiffle-story of my misspent youth have to do with stupid people?  Well, I am one.  (Doesn’t the cheerleader thing prove that?)  Smart people can be stupid more often than your average ordinary Joe.   A character like Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory is funny because his intelligence and his social abilities are so wildly mismatched that he often makes totally stupid geekazoid mistakes.

Harker

But there are also stupid people who are actually not smart.  Writing humor has taught me to draw upon the experiences of people I have known who were less than knowledgeable.  People with lower than normal I.Q.’s.  Life has taught me to value and even love people like that.  In my novel Snow Babies, at least one of the clown characters is a stupid person.   Harker Dawes is an inept businessman in the process of destroying a successful business that he bought from one of the town’s most beloved and respected elders.  He immobilizes himself with super glue.   He gets nailed to a poster board with a nail gun.  Accidents and near-fatal pratfalls are his trademark.  And yet, he is a sympathetic and loveable character.  He is generous to a fault.  He has a simple, good heart.  Practically everything he does is a mistake, and yet, people grow fond of him and help him out because they appreciate his innate goodness and value as a person.

So, I really think calling someone stupid can be a sort of compliment.  Forrest Gump calls himself stupid, but that character from Winston Groom’s novels and the award-winning movie of the same name is really a very wise and lovely man, though he is not smart.  I have to say that I really no longer resent being called stupid, because no matter how smart I actually am, stupid is sort of a compliment.  (But how about climate-change deniers, Texas politicians, and anybody who believes what they say on Fox News, you say?  They are not stupid.  That is willful ignorance.  It may take a whole other post to make that difference clear.)

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December 28, 2014 · 5:56 pm

The Next Little Project

All right, the time has come to figure out what to write next.  I have another thirty-plus-year-old writing project that would make an absolutely, terrifically horrible novel that I want to try to tame.  I have a cartoonized version created back when I was young and stupid… in about 1981, before the invention of the graphic novel.  It is in full color.  It was done before I learned how to draw.  It is a book that will now go under the ridiculously alliterated title The Captain Came Calling.

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The novel is set, like all of my hometown stories, in Norwall, Iowa… The fictionalized version of Rowan, the town I actually grew up in.  It isn’t quite as dorky in real life as it appears in my cutsified illustration, but it is approaching it at glacial speeds.

The town’s portrayal will have to change as I attempt to update and clarify characters.

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The people have to be switched about.  Phyllis Murphy has to become Mary Murphy.   The Pirates will have to switch from the 90’s Pirates to the 80’s Pirates, as the main character, Mary Phillips has to create a new Pirates’ Club that didn’t exist when I first wrote this bilge.  I have to update and increase the plot, adding the back-story  through the inclusion of the Captain’s Logbook… How else can I get mermaids and the voodoo priest into the story otherwise?

I also have to be a little bit more politically correct about the portrayal of the tiki-idol-men.  South Seas’ Magic can’t be racist or misogynist.  And then there’s the whole thing about Captain Dettbarn’s less-than-Iowegian morals that has to be dealt with.  He’s basically a clown character, not a villain.

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And the Captain is cursed with invisibility.   That is no small thing to pull off in work of fantasy fiction in a Young Adult style.  It has to be believable enough to make the audience accept it, even if it is a comedy caper of the lowest sort.20141228_145924

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December 26, 2014 · 4:05 pm

School Is Out For Miss Morgan

Cool School Blue

I have done it.  I wrote the final scenes in my story of the school teacher who loves to teach and runs afoul of fairies fighting a war of good versus evil.  The epilogue put the cherry on top last night, so I actually finished this book on Christmas Day 2014.  I have great plans for this book.  It is the best thing I have ever written.  I based the lessons presented and the teacher experiences on my own teaching career.  I transformed myself into the viewpoint character, Miss Morgan, though I did not actually have the sex change operation.  The fairies are all based on real fairies I have known… as are the students in Miss Morgan’s classes… based on real students, I mean.  The evil principals, teachers, and parents in the story are totally fictional.  Yes, I have to keep telling myself that to prevent nightmares.  I don’t know about the goblins.  It’s hard to get to know critters you are spending your life stepping on and wiping out.  I hope a few people read this book one day.  I think it is one of the greatest pieces of literature ever to come out of a Midwesterner who moved to Texas and became a school teacher for 31 years before losing his mind, wigging out, and believing he could become a published author writing great pieces of literature.

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December 22, 2014 · 4:35 am

Reading Assignments

Yesterday I revealed that I have no earthly clue how to be a best-selling author with a blog and a brand and all those other things that marketing racketeers keep pettifogging at me about.  I may not know anything about marketing and being an author, but I do know how to be a writer.  I have learned to say things flat out when they are on my mind and I know how to do the two essential things that a writer has to know how to do… I can practice writing every day, and I can read.

If you are one of those few who actually read my blog regularly, you may remember some talk about the classic novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.  Believe it or not, I know how to read and understand great books.  You can find me on  Goodreads.com to see some of the wonderful things I have been reading, and to decide if you might like them too.  If you are not on Goodreads already, why not?  That is now your next assignment, young reader.  Oops.   You know what they say, “Old English teachers never die, they just lose their class.”

Today’s little self-imposed book report is about a book that I read my senior year in high school, 1975.  It is called The Other by Thomas Tryon.  It is a book that was made into a movie.  The author is also a Hollywood actor that has been in many films.  He wrote the screenplay for the movie version.  But I have to tell you, the movie pales in comparison to the book itself.  Movies simply cannot give you the rich depth of atmosphere and the delicate psychological nuances that a book can.  Movies show you something.  A book can explain something in detail.  And that is a key difference.

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Michael Beyer‘s review

Dec 22, 14  ·  edit
5 of 5 stars
Read in April, 1975
This is a fascinating book for it’s ornate description of long-ago New England life, and the eerie way old houses and long-gone people can twist and mangle our lives. It is a psychological horror story about twin boys, Niles and Holland Perry. They are polar opposites. Niles is warm and loving. But Holland is distant, cold, and sinister. Their grandmother Ada, a lovely old woman with deep Russian roots, has taught the boys to play an ESP-sort of game, reaching out with their minds to feel what a bird feels, or a squirrel, or a magician to find out how he did a certain disappearing trick. She has no idea that the mind-game will have such a devastating effect on both the twins and ruin so many peoples’ lives. I cannot say more without revealing the magic the author uses to bring this book to a totally unexpected and devastating conclusion. This book is not everyone’s cup of tea… and it may be many readers’ cup of arsenic… but it worked its spell on me. I recommend it if you wish to be chilled to the bone marrow.
Fools
I am reading this book now for the third time.  It is rare that I read a book more than once, because every time through changes your perception of it and risks making you dislike it.  But certain books are immune to that effect.  And I am re-reading it now because I want to closely analyze the techniques he used to create his surprise ending.  There-in lies the reason for this reading assignment that I have given myself.  That is how I roll as a writer.

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