Category Archives: novel writing

July 30, 2019 · 1:40 pm

When the Captain Came Calling… Canto 30

Canto Thirty – Rage in the Clarke Name

Kyle Clarke came storming into the Zeffer house before either the sheriff’s deputy or Mrs. Philips could arrive.  He was angry to the point of curse words over what apparently had happened to Valerie.  He made Mrs. Zeffer and Ray repeat the story of how Ray found her three times before he even started calming down.  He made it clear he wanted the story from Ray, not Valerie.  Once he had learned she had been unconscious, he didn’t even want to hear her version of events.  He told her she would not be able to make sense of things until she was well rested and recovered.  He wanted Mrs. Philips, a registered nurse, to examine her before any other investigation took place.  Valerie could only imagine in horror what he suspected.

“Mrs. Philips!  We need you to examine little Valerie Clarke,” said Mrs. Zeffer as Mary’s mother arrived at the Zeffer home.  “She’s been attacked by someone.”

Mrs. Philips was very pale, and also seemed shaken.

“What is the matter, Mrs. Philips?” Kyle asked.  “You seem unwell.”

“My daughter Mary and her boyfriend Pidney Breslow are missing.  I’m afraid it has something to do with what happened to Valerie.”

“Oh, no!  We’ve phoned the sheriff already and he’s sending Deputy Harper from Belle City to investigate,” Kyle said in a concerned tone.

“Do you know what happened?” asked Mrs. Zeffer.

Ray was sitting on the bed in Bobby’s room next to Valerie who was already wearing the clothes Kyle had brought her.  Both of them looked at the adults standing just outside the bedroom doorway.  Valerie’s fear for what might’ve happened to Mary and Pid was overwhelming.  She leaned against Ray’s shoulder and began to cry softly.

“It was the strangest thing.  The three of them were all in our basement, reading some old book.  Then, suddenly there was a purple fog in the house.  It smelled so sweet it made me sick to my stomach.  It apparently knocked me out.  When I came to, I found my daughter Amy and her brother Jason were both sleeping on the floor.  They had been knocked out too.”

“And the kids were taken from your house?”  Kyle looked alarmed and upset.

“Yes, all we found were their clothes in the basement.  I have never seen anything so strange.  Whoever took them must have stripped them naked first.”

“Oh, you poor dear,” said Mrs. Zeffer, taking hold of Lady Philips’ shaking hands and guiding her to a chair in Bobby’s room.  “Sit here.  Let me get you some tea.”

“Was there any indication who might have done this terrible thing?” asked Kyle.

“I… I don’t know,” Mrs. Philips said as Mrs. Zeffer bustled out of the room to make tea.  “We found the empty clothes… and then you called asking me to come here and examine Valerie.”

“You should’ve said something then,” Kyle said.

“I… I just felt numb.  I told Jason to look after Amy and came right here to see what I could find out.”

“All right… um, Mrs. Philips… I called you over here to examine my daughter Valerie.  I was worried someone might have… well, she was found naked in the alley, unconscious.”

Lady Philips made a small strangling sound in her throat.  Valerie knew immediately what she must have thought had happened to Mary.

“I’m okay, Daddy.  I know for a fact that nobody did anything like that to me.”

“Valerie, princess, you were unconscious.  Somebody drugged you and stripped you naked.  We need to be certain what happened.”  Daddy Kyle was trying to be comforting and soothing, but there was a cold, desperate edge to his voice that actually scared Valerie.  She looked at Ray.  Ray’s eyes were frightened too.

“Your dad is right, Val.  You need to be checked.  Mrs. Philips is an RN, a professional nurse.  She’ll be able to tell.”

“Okay, Ray,” said Valerie’s dad coolly, “You should go help your mother in the kitchen.  Deputy Harper will be here soon.”

Ray reluctantly let go of Valerie and stood up.  “You know, sir, that I would never hurt your daughter.”

Kyle’s angry glare softened a bit.  “I… I do know that, son.  And believe me, I am grateful for the way you rescued her and brought her somewhere safe.  I’m on edge right now.  I don’t know what was done or who did it.  You know what I mean?”

“Of course.  If I were in your shoes, I’d be afraid for my daughter too.”

Ray nodded resolutely.  Then he went out of the room.

“I will examine her in private, Mr. Clarke.  I will be able to tell.  I have treated rape victims before.  I don’t have a kit with me, but I will know if one needs to be used… Only…”

“What?” Kyle asked.

“After we know, I am going to need you and Deputy Harper to find Mary.” Valerie’s dad was grim-faced, but he nodded his agreement.

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July 29, 2019 · 7:28 pm

Closing in on the Ending

Valerie is in this picture, as the squirrel.

I know this title sounds like a total bummer of a post written by a sixty-plus-year-old loser in poor health and totally obsessed with his own imminent mortality. And I know why you might think that based on the general trends you have observed in my reflections-on-life sorts of posts, especially if you actually do more than only look at the pictures in this goofy blog. But it is not the ending of me that I am obsessed about. It is the ending of a novel.

I wrote the first draft of When the Captain Came Calling in 1996, twenty-three years ago. And I knew then that it was not finished. And I thought, perhaps, that it would never be finished. It was a hard thing to write. And I knew from the writing of the novel Snow Babies that I could not write this book without writing directly about the suicide. Something like that can’t just happen to a major character in a series of novels in between what happens in novel one and the start of novel two. It has been a twenty-three-year struggle with a plot-knot that was almost impossible to untangle.

Valerie Clarke and her skateboard

You see, the most important character in the patchwork-quilt-book that is Snow Babies, is Valerie Clarke, a skateboarding thrasher of a girl from the 80’s based on a girl I taught in the 90’s and named after a classmate I had a hopeless crush on in the 60’s. And she could not have been the character I wrote about in that book without having survived the fact of the suicide in the previous book. But when I completed Snow Babies, the Captain still didn’t have the suicide in it. And believe me, writing about suicide is hard. It is something that has been a life-long hardship to explain and to deal with.

You see too, that suicide has been a thing I have had to deal with in real life. Ruben got himself killed in a car accident in a car-theft joy ride. Osvaldo took his own life with a gun after getting out of prison. J.J. got drunk and ran his pickup truck into a train. And they were kids I taught and learned about from talking to them about their lives. And two of them I loved like they were my own children because that’s how teachers do… And I have spent three whole days in emergency rooms and one terrible night in ERs with suicidal teens, two long conversations with kids over the telephone when I had to talk them out of hurting themselves, and I had no idea where they actually were. And I have talked to counselors at three different schools about suicidal things kids shared with me more times than I can count accurately. And some of those incidents I am listing are about family members. And my cousin’s son… Well, you can see how that kind of battle can make a suicide something hard to write about. Especially since all the scars it leaves makes you hyper-aware of how precious and fragile life really is.

But you see three, now that I have taken time out to cry a bit for having written that last horrible paragraph, that it is important, as a writer, to share your truth with the world in the best way you know how. And as the spirits of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Terry Pratchett nod knowingly from beyond, I can honestly say that the best way that I can deal with it is by writing comedy, making readers smile and laugh and feel good about enough good stuff to make up for the bad stuff that everybody faces… even suicide. And I have finally passed the test. I wrote the chapter about the suicide. I have written about Valerie’s recovery, and I am nearing the end of the book, my current Work In Progress, When the Captain Came Calling. A good story can heal the world, the way Oliver Twist did, or the way The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did. And while the jury has not yet convened on this book of mine, and I can’t begin to compare my book to those, I don’t hate it now the way I did for the last twenty-two years. It is going to get finished. And then the whole world can ignore it the way they have all my other books.

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July 2, 2019 · 10:42 am

When the Captain Came Calling… Canto 26

Canto Twenty-Six – The Secrets of Stupid Dogs

Valerie-squirrel, despite the almost endless supply of squirrel energy provided by a fast-pumping squirrel heart, was panting and out of breath as she stopped at the corner of Cecily Dettbarn’s porch roof.  She needed to catch her breath, but she could see Mazie Haire’s Gingerbread House on the other side of the Norwall water tower, just across the street.  Even better, she hadn’t seen Skaggs the cat for at least two blocks.

The evil cat had nearly caught her as she ran along the fence back at the Kellogg place.  When he had lunged at her, he missed, and he toppled into the concrete birdbath that sat between the fence and Mrs. Kellogg’s big bay window on the west side of the house.  She hadn’t seen the cat since she had left him behind there, sputtering cat-curses and spitting out old sparrow feathers.

Valerie-squirrel had gone back up into the trees to travel the rest of the way north on Whitten Avenue, and then from maple to maple along the north side of main street.

Now, looking carefully all around for signs of danger and lurking cats, she climbed down the trellis on the side of the Dettbarn house.  She then sniffed the air and scampered quickly across the street to tall grass under the water tower.

“Boof!  Boof!  Boof!” barked Barky Bill from the end of his chain behind Martin’s Bar and Grill.

“What does boof mean, stupid dog?” Valerie-squirrel thought in the direction of the stupid dog.

“Well, it means boof, or possibly bark in dog language.  How is it you don’t know that already?  You are a dog, aren’t you?”

Valerie-squirrel was stunned.  “I thought the cat told me dogs can’t speak.  You’re Barky Bill, aren’t you?”

“I answer to that, yeah.  But also, Stupid Dog, and Ijit Dog, and Damned Dog… and some other strange words that end in dog.”

“Skaggs the cat told me you couldn’t speak.”

“Yeah.  The cat’s right.  Dumb dogs can’t speak.”

“But you’re talking to me now.  What do you mean dogs can’t speak?”

“You are a dog, ain’t ya?  Dogs can talk to other dogs.  We do it by waggin’ tails and sniffin’ butts and stuff.  You know about that, right?”

“I’m not a dog.  I am a girl, actually.  Valerie Clarke.  But I’ve been turned into a squirrel by black magic.”

“Oh, yeah.  You are a squirrel!  I can smell you from here.  But not the eating kind of squirrel.  I can smell that you are not a real squirrel.”

“Do you smell the cat?  Skaggs?  He was chasing me, trying to kill me.”

“No.  I hate the dumb cat.  I will kill him some day.  I don’t smell him now… no.”

“Good.  Promise you won’t eat me if I go over to the Gingerbread House?”

“The witch’s house?  You don’t want to go there.”

“Yes, I do.  And I don’t want you to attack me when I try to get there.”

“Oh, I would never eat you.  You smell like the prettiest little squirrel-girl that ever lived in this town.  I will protect you.  I will boof at the cat if he comes near.  And one day I will kill him.  But I could never eat you.  Barky Bill is a good boy, yes, he is.”

Valerie-squirrel was a little worried that Barky Bill might not be completely sane as dogs go.  She didn’t know if she dared run past too close to the chained and perpetually angry dog.  So, giving him the widest possible berth she could manage, she slipped under the water tower and down the alley behind main street into the back yard of the Gingerbread House. “Boof! Boof!  Boof-boof-boof-boof!” was how Barky Bill ended their brief conversation.

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July 1, 2019 · 5:18 pm

Mickey is on Twitter

One of the things I was taught by the good people of I-Universe Publishing is that writers do Twitter. They set me up with a Twitter account that never got followed by real people and got no traction of any definable kind.

There are obviously magic spells out there somewhere that help you sell copies of your beloved first real novel if only you are willing to go on Twitter to engage… to sell yourself and your books… to trolls… and nudists and other writers and nudists who are writers… and, inexplicably, the Norwegian Branch of the Tom Hiddleston as Loki Fan Club. In order to do this I ended up having to establish my own Twitter account to handle what the I-Universe account couldn’t. What a mistake that was!

I have after six years finally gotten past the 2,000 follower mark. I have sold a precious few copies of more than one of my books. And I have learned what a horrific alternate universe Twitter actually is.

Trying to sell my books to Twitter followers who seem like the kind of person interested in reading YA novels full of humor and fantasy and goofy stuff, obviously generates more marriage proposals than sales.

Apparently, young women on Twitter are looking for husbands and lovers online. It you answer their direct messages thinking they are women interested in your writing, they will aggressively try to convince you that they have fallen in love with you, one even saying this without asking for a better picture of me than the cartoon I use to portray myself. They ignore the fact that you have been married for a quarter of a century. They ignore the protestations that you are only on Twitter to sell books, and ask you to send them money for an airplane ticket so they can come to where you live and have an affair with you… even though you protest that you are married and don’t have money for airplane tickets even if you wanted to have an affair with a young lady who could be your granddaughter age-wise. One essential function on Twitter is learning how to block someone. Ooh! That was a lifesaver. Learning who not to answer is useful too.

Pirates often take your money via selling you insurance.

And women are not the only ones with dangerous schemes to take your money away from you.

I was Twitter-friended by Arab royalty. Prince Hamdan of Brunei wanted to give me money as part of his charity work to salvage the image of his royal family. He offered to put thousands of dollars of oil money in my bank account just because he liked me and felt sorry for me. All I had to do was give him my online bank account number. I may have told Arabian royalty that I had a fatal disease that made me forget all my bank account numbers and would cause me to die before he could get a reply sent back to me. I stupidly gave him no bank information what-so-ever. And my bank account audibly breathed a sigh of relief.

So, I have successfully now used Twitter to sell copies of Snow Babies and Recipes for Gingerbread Children. I have become a member of Twitter’s #writingcommunity. I have also become a member of a group called Writers Without Clothes. (#FF#naturist fiction by: @Mr_Ted_Bun, @buffprofwally, @CalowAndrew, @AuthorMatBlack, @NakedDan, @smdenham3 and @mbeyer51 (growing list!)) They offered me a chance to join their group because they liked the nudists in my book Recipes for Gingerbread Children, and because they learned I have written for nudist websites and do much of my writing in the nude. I recently also got a tweet from a fellow author who is reading Snow Babies and loves it. She says it is a well-written book, high praise from another published author.

So, I intend to keep writing… right up until the end… and maybe I can learn how to use Twitter from beyond the grave so I can keep my writing alive and my future ghost-tweets can make you all horrified enough to be compelled to buy my books. They say my books are funny, even the nudist parts, and maybe I can make more Tom Hiddleston jokes to keep that part of my Twitter following happy too.

If you are foolish enough to look for me on Twitter, you can find me at @mbeyer51.

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June 21, 2019 · 4:18 pm

Chewing on Gingerbread Stories

I have started re-reading my werewolf stories again as I intend to promote the heck out of the two books pictured here in the rest of 2019.

Both books are intertwined even though they are both stand-alone novels with different genre ties and different themes. They share the same characters, many of the same scenes (though seen from different viewpoints in each novel), many of the same plot points, and the same werewolf. I like to think that reading both books together makes a better, more nuanced story as a two-book whole. But each book is also a whole in itself. And you can read them in either order.

I started by re-reading Recipes for Gingerbread Children. This book is basically a fairy-tale story-collection contrasted with a Holocaust survivor’s story. It is about how a storyteller manages to shape the world around her to help herself and others make sense out of a cruel world filled with evil and betrayal.

Dunderella and the Wolf Girl (a random werewolf illustration not connected to either book)

The Baby Werewolf is a Gothic horror tale where the real monster is hidden by deeply buried secrets, and lies have to be pierced to protect the innocent. I will re-read and promote this book second. I love both of these books with a paternal sort of overlooking-the-warts-and-birth-defects love.

So, I have a plan. A hopelessly pie-in-the-sky plan. But a plan. And hopefully at least some part of the plan will work.

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June 7, 2019 · 2:16 am

Hurry Up and Worry, Murray!

Mary, the leader of the Pirates, with Squirrel Valerie and Invisible Captain Dettbarn

I am now writing every novel as if it will be the last one that I ever write. So it is with my current work-in-progress, When the Captain Came Calling. It is a story that comes before my best novel, Snow Babies, already written and published, but was actually formed in my head and in my libretto long before I began putting Snow Babies down on the page. It is a good novel, but not the best I have ever written. I am very near to completing it.

But, unfortunately, I am also very near to completing my whole life. Pain is a constant reminder that my health is so poor, that each new day could easily literally be my last.

The IRS is trying their best to help me on towards the grave.

While I am currently dealing with the tax burden from 2018, they dug up another unpaid bill from 2017, a late-payment penalty they forgot to tell me about last December. More than $200 dollars worth. I am flatter than broke.

So, I am forced to Uber drive once more. Yesterday and today I picked up fares again for the first time in the last ten months. And I am not really well enough to do it. The curse is heavy.

But this grumpy old man ain’t quite dead yet.

One more novel to finish, and maybe another one after that.’

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June 4, 2019 · 3:41 pm

When the Captain Came Calling… Canto 22

Canto Twenty-Two – A Beach-Front Home

I followed the naked girl and her pet red panda about a mile along the beach.  She skipped and sang songs in a language I didn’t recognize, but sounded a lot like the Filipino language.  The panda sported about like a playful puppy, following her devotedly.  I didn’t think you found red pandas on small Pacific islands like the one we were on, but it didn’t matter what I thought.  I was no scientist or naturalist, so I didn’t really know.  I kept looking worriedly out to sea.  I mean, I did know for a fact that Chinooki the mermaid could eat people.

“We have been coming to this house, my tahanan,” she said proudly, showing me a beached submarine from World War Two.  It had a large rising sun flag from the Empire of Japan painted on the conning tower.

“You live in a submarine?”

“It is where Mangkukulan wants me to stay while we wait for the volcano.”

“Oh.  It’s like that, is it?  Well, show me.  Do you have any guns aboard?  Or swords?  Something to protect us from Chinooki?”

“Oh, silly captain man, Chinooki serves Mangkukulan.  She will not be harming me.  And she is ordered not to be hurting you also.”

I was a little worried about the actual intentions of this coo-coo man.  I didn’t think he really had Malutu’s best interests at heart.  Not if he meant to toss her naked into an erupting volcano.  I followed her warily up the side of the submarine and down into a hatch near the nose.

“My goodness, this is certainly rusty and rather dreary,” I said as I surveyed the narrow candle-lit corridor in the center of the submarine.  I followed her into the forward section where I really expected to see a forward torpedo room.  I found, however, that it had been hollowed out, lined with bamboo, and turned into a cozy and rather decent living space.  It had a bed in the center of the not over-large room.  There was a potbellied stove that had obviously been put there for cooking.  The room was also decorated with carved wooden idols.  They were the kind of Tiki idols that you could buy in Honolulu if you were a tourist who liked kitschy stuff to decorate your porch back in Iowa with.  Especially one large ugly idol with a man-like body and wearing a frightful carved mask.

“You have a nice home here.  Didn’t you say something about clothes you could put on?”

“Oh, yes.  Or… you could be getting naked too, Captain.”

“No, no.  Put on a dress please.  You need to be decent around me.”

She pulled out a rather nice red cloth dress with a white flower pattern on it.  It was a Hawaiian sort of wrap-around affair.

“This okay?  Or are you wanting the kimono?”

“That one is fine.  You are very beautiful like that.”

“Yes, I am being beautiful for you.  It is being important that I get you to like me very, very much.”

“Oh, yes?”

“I am liking you.  But I must be telling Mangkukulan that you are here now.  Chinooki has done well.”

“Um, maybe we can hold off a bit on telling the coo-coo man.”

“Why?  I am supposed to be telling him immediately… faster if it is being possible.”

“Are you sure that coo-coo man has our best interests at heart?  I mean, it seems to me like he might be trying to hurt us in some way.”  I was imagining being tossed into the volcano along with the girl.

“Oh, no.  This he will not be doing.  I will be sending the juju to tell him you are here.”

She went over to the biggest, ugliest Tiki idol and tapped his tattoos, once each until she had tapped them all.  And she sang;

“Juju do dah goodah… oojie-magoober!”  Purple smoke poured out of the top of the Tiki’s head and filled the room with a smell like burnt sugar.

“Is that a magic spell or something?”

“Yes, it is being something.  We are wanting you to be very comfortable here, Captain mans.  Will you not be taking off your clothes?”

“I most certainly will not.”

“Okay.  We will be doing the talking about it.  You will see.”

To my utter shock and horror, the Tiki man began to glow with an unearthly greenish-blue light.  He moved as if he were alive and trying to shake himself awake.

“It’s alive?”

“Don’t be being silly.  It is made of wood.  But, Oojie-magoober, please be telling Mangkukulan that the Captain is here.”

“Juju doo dah!  Yaya!” said the wooden creature.  Then it scampered out of the room and out of the submarine.

“You are liking Malutu, yes?” she asked me.

“Yes.  You are very beautiful.”

“Good-good!  Now you will be taking off your clothes, Captain.”  And just like that she had me naked.  I was as much under her spell as the wooden Tiki man.

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June 4, 2019 · 3:22 pm

When the Captain Came Calling… Canto 17

Canto Seventeen – Invisible People

The next day Valerie had a chance to hang out with Pidney and Mary again, so she took it.  She road into town on the school bus after school with Danny Murphy.  They didn’t actually talk about anything the whole way.  Anticipation is often better than the real thing.  And it wasn’t often that Mary and Pid were both off directly after school.  Pidney had no football practice that afternoon, and Mary canceled whatever school meetings she had planned that day in order to come back to Norwall with him after school.  The four Pirates were supposed to meet in the Library for Pirate business.

“There’s Mary and Pid,” said Danny pointing as he and Val stepped off Milo’s school bus.

“Yeah, but who is that?” Valerie asked, pointing at a mysterious cloaked figure standing behind the tree by the Library door.  She was instantly reminded of the cloaked man she had seen the day they got the Tiki idol.

“Hey, Pidney!” Danny shouted, “who is that near you behind that tree?”

Pidney was holding the door of his step-dad’s old 70’s Lincoln Mercury to help Mary get out.  Mary carried a tall stack of books.  They had driven home from the high school in Belle City together.

“What man?  Where?”  The figure moved out of sight behind the large fluffy pine tree.

“Look behind the tree!” shouted Valerie.

Pid walked around to where he could see behind the tree.  He looked back a Valerie and Danny and shrugged.  “Nobody here that I can see,” he said.

“You guys need to see what we found in the high school library,” said Mary waving them to come towards the Library building.

Valerie looked at Danny.  He shrugged.  They both walked toward the Library.

“I found some old high school yearbooks in the library,” said Mary.  “We can use them to get an idea what Captain Dettbarn used to look like.  He’s kinda hard to describe any other way.”

“And there’s a book about the ship, Mary Celeste.  It tells about the old ghost ship, not the Captain’s ship, but I still think it is important,” said Pidney.

Valerie and Danny walked across the street from the bus stop to join the two high school kids.

“Here’s the 1962 Belle City Bronco yearbook,” said Mary, handing the black-bound thin book of pictures to Valerie.  “The Captain is in the Junior Class in that one.  He had a beard then, just like the one he had on his face the last time I saw him.”

Valerie opened to the page of Junior portraits and ran her finger over the C’s and D’s until she got to Dettbarn.  He was kind of a dumpy fat boy even then, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a derfy smile that showed his crooked teeth.  He had a rather ratty looking beard, which was perfect for a rodent-like face, that, while it didn’t look like a rat, it did look an awful lot like the face of a woodchuck, or some kind of short-toothed beaver.

“He’s kinda funny looking,” Val said to herself, but loud enough for all to hear.

“Now, see here!  I take exception to that remark!” said a cloaked and hatted figure stepping out of the shadow of the evergreen tree by the door.

“Who…?” croaked Mary, leaping away from the figure and towards Pidney.

“Help me…!” squawked Danny as he awkwardly leaped into Pidney’s arms, the football muscles catching hold of the smaller boy easily.

“Don’t you get mad at me!” said Valerie hotly.  “It is not like I was talking to you… whoever you are!”  She lunged toward the stranger, grabbing his yachting cap and yanking it off his head. 

But where the head was supposed to be… nothing at all there except a pair of thick bifocal glasses hanging in the air like they were weightless in outer space.

Valerie looked at the glasses, and then down at the yearbook picture still in her other hand.  Yes, it was an updated version of the same style of thick glasses. 

“Erm…  Captain Dettbarn.  It’s you!”

“Uncle Noah?” Mary said.  “What happened to your head?”

“Oh, um… it’s still there, Mary dear.  Head-hunters didn’t eat it or anything.  I am just the victim of a curse.  A curse that makes my body completely invisible.”  He removed the cloak to reveal a free-standing pair of pants, a short-sleeved red-and-white-striped shirt, and empty neckerchief, and floating white gloves that didn’t seem to be properly attached to the invisible dumpy body wearing the sailor’s clothes.

“Er, uh… sir?” asked Pidney, “What is all this purple smoke coming out from behind the pine tree?  It has a funky smell, like burning sugar or something.”

“Well, I hate to say it, but that is an indicator that the witchdoctor himself is watching us at the moment from somewhere not too far away.  That purple smoke always seems to come around right before some evil magic happens.”

“Oh, that’s not good.  Maybe we better go inside the library before anything bad can happen.”  Mary was looking around the street for signs of the evil witchdoctor.

Pidney put Danny on the ground and both boys headed up the Public Library steps.

“Um, uh… Pretty girl, can I have my hat back.  I want to go in the library in disguise.  No sense in scaring the librarian.”

Valerie frowned at the invisible man as she handed him back the hat and the disembodied gloves placed it back on top of his invisible rodent-like head.

“Let’s go inside the Library,” said Mary.  “We have things to talk about and questions to ask… Lots and lots of questions to ask.”

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May 28, 2019 · 11:16 am

When the Captain Came Calling… Canto 21

Canto Twenty-One – The Deserted Beach

I was all alone on the island for all I knew, so I immediately got busy on my best Robinson Crusoe plan.  And then my headache made me rethink that, and I went back to sleep for another two hours.  I think it was two hours, estimating by the sun, but I don’t really know how to estimate time by the sun, and as I decided the first order of business had to be to locate any useful wreckage from the ship that had washed up on the shore, my head started hurting again, so I slept again.  Now, I know from re-reading this paragraph that I was probably sleeping way too much… and I didn’t know for sure that Chinooki wouldn’t come up on the sand to eat me, but, well… having this kind of horror-story adventure in the South Seas was really tiring.

When I did finally search the beach, I found almost nothing at all to help me.  I needed a knife, or a hammer, or a gun, or a shovel… but all I found was this log book and a wooden crate full of Pink Fizz Cherry Soda Pop.  Luckily, I also discovered I still had a pencil in my jeans pocket, otherwise I might’ve forgotten everything that happened before I could write it all down.  I know my thinking was a little fuzzy at the time… or possibly Pink Fizzy… but I wrote down everything as truthfully as I possibly could so that whoever found the book would know what happened to the Reefer Mary Celeste and her crew. 

Inland on the island was jungle… a rather thick jungle.  But I desperately needed food and fresh water.  And if I tried walking the beach until I either found civilization or discovered I was on a deserted island; I might die of dehydration and thirst before I discovered I was all alone for certain.  So, I made a brief foray into the island.  If I met headhunters or an evil killer gorilla, I couldn’t do any more about it than writing a scathing commentary on why they shouldn’t be eating me raw in this log book.  I could write that I hoped to give them a fatal case of indigestion as long as they ate my writing hand last.

The jungle was very hot and humid, but I found a rainwater pool a short way into the jungle and was able to slake my thirst. Coconuts and bananas were growing in abundance near the pool.   I also ate.  And it was then that I saw her for the first time.  She was a young girl.  I admit, at the time, I didn’t really know how young.  But she was lovely.  She was Asian-looking with slanted eyes and caramel-brown skin.  She had black hair and dark brown eyes that twinkled at me as she smiled.  And she was standing on the edge of the pool completely nude.  The only thing she wore was an adolescent red panda sitting on her shoulder and grimacing at me with a raccoon-like smile.

“Parlez vous Francais?” she said.  “Tagalog?  Maybe English?”

“I understand English,” I confessed.

“Ah, so good.  I am liking practicing my English.  We don’t be speaking it on this island.  Maligayang pagdating sa masasamang isla.  That means be welcome to Evil Island.”

I didn’t know whether to be frightened or worried about the name of the place, or be incredibly embarrassed that I was talking to a completely naked girl.  “I… I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to spy on you while you were bathing.  I will give you some privacy…”

“Huwag pumunta!  I mean… don’t be going away!  I be liking you.  I don’t be wearing clothings on this island, but I am having a kimono back at my bahay… my house.  I can be putting it on if hubad is wrongness for you.”

“Um, well, I…”  I didn’t know what to say. I was seven kinds of flustered and at least three kinds of embarrassed.

“Please.  Gwapong Lalaki and I are wanting to be talking to you.  It is lonely on the island, waiting for sa galit na bulkan…  for the volcano.”

“You… you are waiting for the volcano?”  I looked up at the high mountain peak about a mile inland.  Black smoke curled nastily out of the top of it.

“Yes.  I am being the virgin bride.  I am waiting for my husband to be.”

This of course sounded like some of the worst rumors I had ever heard about South Seas islanders.  It seemed they intended to throw this beautiful, naked young girl into the volcano to appease an angry god or some such nonsense.

“We have to get you out of here,” I said as bravely as I could manage.

“Yes, yes, that is what I am waiting for.”

“Um, you are?”

“Oh, yes, my husband is to be coming and taking me away from here forever.”

I was determined to rescue the poor girl.

“What is your name, sweetie?”

“I am Malutu… the Red Flower of Matuling Lupa.”

“I don’t have a way off the island at the moment, but I can build us a boat or something…”

“First you are coming to the house of Malutu and Gwapong Lalaki.  Follow us.”

She padded out of the clearing on bare feet and back towards the beach.  She apparently had a house to live in while she waited for her evil people to throw her into the volcano.  I followed her, not knowing what else to do.

“Um, Malutu?  You haven’t seen any mermaids on the beach have you?”

“Mermaids?  You are meaning sirena Chinooki?”

“You actually know about her?”

“Of course, silly man…  She is being the one who brought you to me.”

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May 24, 2019 · 3:18 pm

My Latest Book

I received the first copy of my book Fools and Their Toys.

It is the story of an autistic man with hidden talent for ventriloquism, an irrepressible ventriloquist’s puppet. a zebra. with a habit of insulting the right people at the wrong time, and a lurking serial killer who targets young boys for sexual torture and death.

It is in many ways a continuation of the story in Sing Sad Songs.

My ten good books, and the one bad one that is now out of print.

I have so many books published now that it is rather hard to photograph them all together in one picture. Of course, this fool feels compelled to put some of his toys in the picture.

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