I decided to be lazy today. The work I am sharing with you only took a week to accomplish.
She was inspired by a cartoon character in an old animated TV show. But the model for this idea was fully clothed and not a fairy. I don’t know why I felt it necessary to portray her nude.
But drawing clothes made from leaves and acorn caps is hard. So, this little 3-inch-tall fairy girl decided to pose nude.
This is a second drawing. The first one was a little too revealing and I felt the need to give her a longer braid.
This, then, is Derfentwinkle, a fairy resident of the Hidden Kingdom of Tellosia. Specifically she is the apprentice of an incompetent necromancer known as Old Bumble Bones.
Once I had the drawing scanned into a jpeg, I decided to enhance it with the basic paint program that came with the computer back when I bought it.
I am not overly fond of this kind of coloring. My old laptop is quirky and unreliable, and my arthritic fingers still prefer a pencil to a mouse or a keypad. So, I may recolor it with colored pencil, But for now, here she is in all her glory.
In 2012 I completed and published Catch a Falling Star. That novel is about aliens who speak English because they have been watching old television broadcasts from Earth and absolutely adore I Love Lucy reruns. They invade Earth via one small town in Iowa where they make the fatal mistake of being charmed by humans. The juvenile specimen they kidnap, Dorin Dobbs, leads a tadpole mutiny aboard the Tellerons’ space ship. The tadpole they accidentally leave behind on Earth is adopted and becomes beloved by a childless farm couple. And Commander Biznap falls deeply in love with a septuagenarian Sunday School teacher who aids him, and he rewards with a return to her youthful twenties via de-aging technology. The invasion gets defeated. Someone disintegrates himself, and the Tellerons leave having learned to be better people as they flee to Mars in defeat.
Of course, this novel, written while I was still teaching for the Garland School District, is ultimately the origin of my manic love of researching conspiracy theories. After publishing the novel, I had a dream about the book. I dreamed that aliens had read the book and began chasing me, wanting to know how I knew what I knew about them. I tried to tell them that I made it all up, but they didn’t believe me.
So, after I had written and published the book, I took up researching alien contact and flying saucer encounters Wow! I began to see what some really, obviously insane people believe is true, as well as what some very intelligent and credible people hesitantly report, revealing some insanely disturbing things.
I do not believe any of the stories told by David Icke, the lecturer who sells books and lectures on the existence of shape-shifting lizard-people who masquerade as important government figures and celebrities. (Although the orange president we so recently had was definitely a lizard pf some kind ) Icke is very easily recognizable as a grifter and con man. Of course, his grifts are all legal. If lying were completely illegal, fiction writers would be out of business, and nobody would fall in love or be able to sell real estate.
But one cannot quickly dismiss the work of journalist and physicist Stanton Friedman so easily. He had an interview experience with Major Jesse Marcel who was the intelligence officer on the New Mexico base in 1947, and who told Friedman what may be the real story behind the Roswell Incident . This was a credible source telling a story as a whistle-blower years after the actual experience which was very different than the government’s version of events in spite of the fact that Marcel and other witnesses had been threatened to keep the secret.
The real trick to this fascinating search for reality in the bizarre world of alien contact, MUFON researchers, and underground alien facilities is to accept that complete knowledge of reality is unattainable.
You know that something real is being covered up based on the elaborate cover-up efforts that the authorities have gone through. Weather balloons? Really? Even Project Mogul balloons for spying on Russian atomic-bomb efforts? Well, maybe. But there are so many things that were subjected to cover-up, misinformation campaigns, threatening witnesses, Men in Black, and deathbed confessions that you have to believe something very disturbing is actually real. It is real that lying is going on on both sides. And there are a lot of concerning facts brought out by people who have nothing to gain by their revelations and an awful lot to lose. Some have even died.
So, you have to detect lies and juggle the lies of liars to get anywhere near to reality. And I have applied the process to more than one conspiracy theory.
Here are some things that I have concluded (at least until more information surfaces.)
In the 1940’s and 50’s the U.S. government knocked down a handful of flying saucers and UFOs using high-intensity radar waves developed for World War II. Bob Lazar is probably telling the truth. Linda Moulton Howe is probably telling the truth. Travis Walton is probably also telling the truth, but is less believable than the other two. David Icke and Alex Jones are liars. The Ancient Aliens program from History Channel and now on Netflix is not solid science, but have some very interesting details to add to the mysteries. The government definitely knows about aliens, either because they made contact with other worlds in the Eisenhower Administration, or because they are producing the information themselves to cover up something far more concerning.
The important thing in this topic is not the reality of aliens visiting Earth. The important thing is how the reality of the topic is pursued. Are you going to be crazy or pursue a sensible information-gathering process where the results are tested and retested? ls it about my thinking processes. or am I deceiving myself? These questions are the reasons I do what I do. And also why I had to re-post this old post today with numerous typos corrected. Did the government put those in to make me look like an insane idiot? Or is my idiocy self-inflicted? You be the judge.
Since I have written my Hometown Novels as a series with certain recurring characters, it becomes important that I know what they look like in my own stupid head. So, I draw them. Mike Murphy and his girlfriend Blueberry Bates are good examples. They appear in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, Magical Miss Morgan, and Catch a Falling Star.
Valerie Clarke is a main character in When the Captain Came Calling, Snow Babies, Sing Sad Songs, and He Rose on a Golden Wing.
Farbick the pilot and Davalon the tadpole are main characters in Catch a Falling Star, Stardusters and Space Lizards, and both appear in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.
Sherry Cobble and her twin sister Shelly, both dedicated nudists, appear in Superchicken, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, The Baby Werewolf, The Boy… Forever, and Sherry by herself appears in A Field Guide to Fauns with her own twin daughters, Mandy and Tandy Clarke.
Brent Clarke is the leader of the Norwall Pirates in Superchicken, The Baby Werewolf, The Boy… Forever, and he appears as an adult in A Field Guide to Fauns, and The Wizard in his Keep.
Milt Morgan, from boyhood onward, is a wizard. He appears in Superchicken, The Baby Werewolf, The Boy… Forever, and he is an adult character in The Wizard in his Keep.
Tim Kellogg is the leader of the Pirates in the 1990’s. He appears in Catch a Falling Star, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, and Magical Miss Morgan, as well as brief appearances in When the Captain Came Calling, Sing Sad Songs, and He Rose on a Golden Wing.
Torrie Brownfield is not actually a werewolf. He suffers from a genetic hair disorder called hypertrichosis. He appears in Recipes for Gingerbread Children and The Baby Werewolf.
Some characters have a single starring role, as Francois Martin does in Sing Sad Songs.
And Devon Martinez does in A Field Guide to Fauns.
I can always tell a better story when I know exactly what a character looks like. And I do that by drawing a picture.
Every day I get a little bit older. Something new hurts that never hurt me before. An earlobe, a small toe on my right foot, a red spot on the back of my hand… a spider bite on my belly.
Something flits like a butterfly across my field of vision, caught only by my severely imperfect peripheral vision. Of course my keen old mind, sharpened by 31 years of teaching in Texas public schools, knows instantly that it is not a butterfly… No, it must be a little naked girl with butterfly wings. A fairy. What else could it be?
“It’s a bug,” the dog says affirmatively. “And if I can catch it, I’m gonna eat it! I hope it tastes like bacon.”
And then I try to argue that you shouldn’t snack on fairies. They are too much like little people, and you should not eat people.
But she insists you cannot argue about a dog’s right to eat what she catches because there is no such thing as a talking dog.
And she has a point. But she is old too. She’s going blind in one eye with a milk-white cataract. So, if it is a little naked girl with butterfly wings, she will never actually be able to catch it.
I guess I should seriously stop arguing with dogs who can’t really talk because I suppose it is evidence of an old man going a bit loony and losing his mind.
So, I dropped in on my old friend and noted chemist trying to create a happiness potion, Milton G. Dogwhiffle. He lives in that yellow house in our neighborhood that I only seem to be able to find when my blood sugar is a little bit low and I find it really easy to get lost… and see fairies in the bushes.
“Simon, my old friend, how’s the happiness potion coming?” I say in my silliest old-man voice.
“My name is not Simon,” Gilliam says with a surprised look on his face, “But the happiness formula is nearly perfected. It is, however, a potion for turning dogs into people which means they will then be able to work can openers and refrigerator doors which is the part that makes them the happiest.”
“I volunteer as a test subject,” my dog says.
“You can’t really talk, remember,” I tell her.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Ralph. “I am testing it on myself first. I used to be a cocker spaniel, you know.”
And this confused me further since I was almost sure Milton’s name used to be Chester P. Dogwhipple… not Ralph.
So, the dog and I wandered around the neighborhood for a while aimlessly, until I happened to remember where our house was. And that made me happy.
What the heck is that on her head? A furry giant spider? A super-poofy hairdo? Or is she practicing being a cheerleader with mop heads for pom-poms?
Since I was a child, my world has revolved around telling a story. Whether it is a matter of telling a joke, or telling what happened when the rooster attacked my girl cousin when she was a small child and then the hired man on my uncle’s farm killed that rooster with a shotgun blast that made us all jump and turned the rooster in a cloud of feathers and chicken vapor, or making up stories about the secret underground river we could access through Grandpa and Grandma’s cellar, I was always practicing making other people see in their imagination what was playing in the theater of my little mind.
And long about the time I started going to school, I added to my storytelling an ability to draw pictures of the things I was telling about.
So, now that I am older than the oldest donkey that ever lived, I have to take a moment or two to reflect on where those abilities have taken me.
Well, I am not a millionaire like Stephen King.
In fact, it would take me more than a million dollars to be a millionaire because that’s how debt and credit cards and Bank-o Merricka work.
But I have wealth in other ways.
This is a review on the… well, not the first novel I ever finished, There was that awful pirates-meet-demons-and-fairies thing that is too embarrassing to even talk about. And not the first novel I published. I published Aeroquest, Catch a Falling Star, Star Dancers and Space Lizards, and Snow Babies before it. It’s not the worst novel I ever wrote. And it certainly isn’t my best novel. But it is the first novel about the Norwall Pirates, liats’ club and softball team.
And apparently at least one reader liked it five stars worth.
But it also proves that even what is clearly not my best storytelling work is capable of being read and liked by intelligent readers. That is a kind of treasure.
And this blog is doing well too. This is my 168th straight days with at least one blog post. And before I published this, my blog had 188 views just today, while averaging well over 100 views per day this week.
So, as Mickey writes, he continues to operate under the delusion that he is a good writer. And maybe, just maybe… he’s not the only one who thinks so.
My proudest achievement of my thirty-one year years as a public school teacher was the fact that I survived my whole first year. That doesn’t sound like much to you unless you are a teacher. But it sounds even more amazing if you knew what South Texas junior high schools were like in 1981. I mean, my school, Frank Newman Junior High had practically been destroyed the year before I started teaching there by the seventh graders I would be teaching as eighth graders.
You see some of my favorites in the painting I did during my third year as a teacher. From front to back they are Dottie, Teresa, Ruben, Fabian, and Javier. Of course, in these essays about being a teacher, I usually don’t use real names to protect the privacy of my former students, both the innocent and the guilty. So, I leave it to you to decide whether, even though I love these kids, those aren’t probably their real names. Unless… they are.
But not all Texas eighth graders are loveable people. In fact, they are hard on first-year rookie teachers. Especially the ones with a Midwestern faith that they can step in and change the world with their idealistically pure and golden teaching methods. Those teachers they will try to eat alive.
I followed the seventh grade English teacher in the same classroom with the same kids. They made her scream daily, had classroom fist fights weekly, exploded firecrackers under her chair twice during the year, and made her run away to the San Antonio airport and leave teaching behind forever. As ninth graders, they made their English I teacher leave teaching forever even though she was a three-year veteran. And believe me, they tried to do the same to me.
I foiled them constantly by being an on-your-feet-all-day teacher rather than a sit-behind-the-desk-and-yell teacher like my predecessor. After I had a chance to sit during planning period, I always had to clean thumbtacks, tape, and smeared chocolate bars off the seat of my little wooden teacher chair. Paper airplanes were the least gross things that flew through the air. Boogers, spit-wads, spit-wet pieces of chalk, and brown things you had to hope were chewed chocolate flew constantly whenever you had your back turned to them. And if there was only one kid behind you and you turned on him and asked pointedly, “Who threw that?” The kid, of course, saw nothing, has no idea, you can torture him, and he still won’t know anything because you are a lousy teacher and didn’t make him learn anything.
And lessons were mostly about talking over the malevolent tongue-wigglers. They didn’t listen. Not even to each other. One kid would be talking about monster trucks that shoot fire out of their exhaust pipes while the kid next to him was talking at the same time about whether Flipper is properly called a dolphin or a porpoise, or like his older brother says, “a giant penis-fish.” And the girls behind them are actually hearing each other, but only because they are speculating which boy in the classroom has the cutest butt.
I broke up three fights by myself that year, one of which I got slugged in the back of the head by the aggressor during, teaching me to always get between them facing the aggressor and never being wrong about who the aggressor is.
They don’t let you do much teaching at all your first year. They force you to practice discipline by keeping them all seated at the same time with their books open in front of them. “I don’t do literature,” Ernie Lozano told me. Well, to be accurate, none of them actually did literature that year. But they taught me to survive long enough to learn how to actually teach them something.
On the last day of school that year we gave them all extended time on the playground, using the outdoor basketball court to keep them occupied for long enough for a terrible school year to finally run its course. They didn’t set the school on fire that year. They didn’t break into the office that year and steal all the cash. We did well enough at keeping them under control that year that I got rehired and our principal got promoted to high school principal. I had a decision to make that year. Would I keep teaching? Or find another job? Sixty percent of all first-year teachers in Texas in 1982 quit teaching. I only earned $11,000 that year. Did I really want to continue down that dark path for another school year?
Ruben walked up to stand beside me and watch the bigger eighth graders foul each other on the basketball court. “You know, Mr. Beyer, you were my favorite teacher this year.”
“Thank you, Ruben. I needed to hear that.” I bit my lip to keep from crying.
That was when I made the decision. I stuck it out in that same school and district for the next 23 years. I became the head of the Cotulla Middle School English Department. I moved to the Dallas area for family reasons in 2004, but I would teach for eight more years in two more districts and in three more schools. But all of that is Ruben’s fault. Because that was the most important thing anyone ever said to me as a teacher. And I did hear it more than once. But he was the first.
Softball was a summer thing that boys had to do. There really was no choice in the matter. 4-H Clubs were part of how boys became men and girls became ladies in small Iowa farm towns. And, of course, in order for small town like Norwall to have enough members to have their own separate 4-H Club, they needed every boy in the whole town, and all the surrounding farmland to join. And worse, in order to field a softball team, in the 1990’s, you had to let the girls play too.
“Bobby, I’m glad you remembered your glove. You will take right field and we’ll let Blueberry be our bench tonight.” Tom Kellogg was Tim’s Grandpa and the coach of the team. He’d been involved in 4-H for more than 30 years. What he said always goes. And, anyway, right field was where you always played your weakest players. It was the one place Bobby was most suited to be during the game.
“Right coach. Did Blueberry forget her glove?”
“No. She always remembers. I just think it’s your turn to get the playing time this week.”
“Thanks, coach,” he said totally without enthusiasm.
“Hey, Bedwetter Bobby! Good to see you in the line-up again,” Frosty Anderson said with a wicked, sneering laugh. Old Forrest Woodley Anderson played short stop like a pro. He was actually on the Belle City Broncos High School Baseball team too that summer.
“You owe us a home run this season,” said Tim Kellogg. Tim played catcher. He was the leader of the Pirates and basically the boss of every high school and junior high kid in Norwall. He was referring to the fact that last summer, Bobby had let a fly ball drop in front of him and then roll past him out to the road behind the softball field. It had been a home run for Delwyn Marmoody of Clarion, playing for the Lincoln Leaders of the Clarion 4-H Club. And Delwyn was a runty little loser who only played softball as a sport, nothing else, and had only hit that one home run in his whole entire lifetime. That home run.
Bobby was supposed to hit the only home run of his whole entire lifetime this season to make up for it. His error had been the reason for all three runs that the Leaders had beaten the Pirates by in what was supposedly a very important game.
And now Mike Murphy was walking out to the mound where he would pitch his famous “Wicked Windmill” underhanded fastballs and try to make it impossible for the Leaders to hit one out into the right field again this year. Billy Martin was out in the outfield too. And he was good at catching practically anything hit into left or center field. He played both positions in softball. He was the varsity baseball left-fielder for the Belle City Broncos, and definitely good enough to play two positions at once in 4-H.
Bobby trotted out to the lonely grass of deep right field. Nothing was going to get past him this year. Especially if no one hit it to right field.
And nobody did in the first inning.
Mike whiffed two of the three Lincoln Leaders he faced in the top of the inning. And the other one, Leroy Watson, the blond Apollo of Clarion High School, tried to beat out a bunt, and Dilsey Murphy, Mike’s older sister, and a girl playing third base. threw him out by five feet.
Then it was time for the Pirates to take to the plate. Johnny Miller, a farm kid from the country East of Norwall, but who went to Dows High School instead of Belle City, led off with an out. Dilsey, the third baseman but second hitter, was thrown out at first.
Next, Mike Murphy was up. He took his big blue bat up to the plate. It was a twenty-ounce bat, the heftiest one the Pirates had. And he clubbed it with the same stroke he had used to slay the rat at the Niland place. The ball went out to center field and Mike was on third before the fielders could get it back to the infield.
“Now you’re going to see something!” Frosty Anderson bragged, as he picked up Mike’s blue bat and took several practice swings.
And Frosty was right. He watched Watson get totally rattled by Mike’s hit and throw four straight balls, allowing Frosty to stroll on down to first with a walk and a smirk on his face.
“Alright, Niland. You are up next. I’m gonna save Tim and Billy to see how many we can score if you can get on.”
“But, coach!” Tim Kellogg was livid. He would normally be batting next. And with two men on base!
Bobby was mortified. “Coach, no! Please!”
“Bobby, yes. This will work. The boy is rattled, and you are a smaller strike zone than Tim. He will walk you for sure.”
Grudgingly the Pirates did see the logic in this.
“You can do it, Bobby. I believe in you,” Blueberry said with a pat on his back and an encouraging smile.
Bobby walked to the plate with one of the two lightest bats the Pirates owned. He reached it out to tap the plate as if he knew what the hell he was doing, and then took a semi-awkward stance and glared at Greek-god Watson.
Sure enough, the first pitch was high and outside, a pitch even Bobby couldn’t be fooled into swinging at.
“Way to watch ‘em, Bob! That’s a good eye!” shouted Mr. Kellogg the coach.
“Don’t swing at the next one unless you’re sure you can hit it!” hollered Grandpa Butch from the stands where he was sitting with Dad, Mom, and Shane.
But, that, of course, only served to convince Bobby that he would hit the next one, no matter what.
The pitch came in high and outside, almost precisely the same spot the first pitch had fluttered by. This time, of course, Bobby swung at the ball with home-run-hitting-Casey-at-the-bat confidence. He could see in his mind’s eye where the ball would fly out in a gloriously high arc, all the way to the road, and be the home run that he owed the team.
It was a complete whiff. His bat didn’t come anywhere near the ball, missing by at least two feet.
“Aw, no!” groaned Mike from third base.
“Why’d you swing at that, Bedwetter Bob?” hooted Frosty.
“You’ll get the next one, Bobby!” called out Blueberry.
“I’ll get the next one,” Bobby muttered to himself.
Another outside pitch and another swing brought another miss. More groans and insults came from the Pirate bench.
Bobby choked up on his light bat. In fact, he was strangling it now.
The next one was way low. But with two strikes, you have to protect the plate, right? He swung down below his knees at it, hoping to golf it over the road.
But when he connected, he dribbled a weird bouncer right back to the pitcher. Watson’s eyes bugged out. He saw Mike dashing for the plate. He whipped it to the catcher underhanded to get Mike out.
And he proved how shook-up Clarion’s blond Apollo still was. The ball bounced past the catcher’s sneakers all the way to the backstop. And then it caromed back to the plate where Mike had already scored. Watson caught the ball and threw at Frosty at third. This time it bounced past the third baseman and went past the left end of the backstop into weeds behind the bleachers.
Frosty stepped on home plate and shouted at Bobby who was standing on first.
“Run god-dobbit! Run you bouncy-ball smacker!” Whatever it was Frosty intended to say, what he did say had the effect of making Bobby take off to second base. And then as both the third baseman and the short stop searched for the ball in the weeds, Bobby realized he could make third. And as he got to third, the short stop fired the ball over the head of Delwyn Marmoody, the second baseman into right-centerfield. Bobby could’ve walked home. Instead, he slid into home, causing a painful abrasion to his right wrist.
It was Blueberry Bates who pulled him to his feet with the biggest, goofiest grin he had ever seen on her pretty face. And it was Mike Murphy who caught Bobby under the armpits and lifted him into the air.
“A three-run home run!” crowed Mike.
“More like a three-run triple-error!” said Frosty, who was also grinning and patting Bobby on the back. Bobby knew that Frosty was more right than Mike, but it was a feeling he had never had before. Well, except maybe in daydreams and his imagination. All those pretend home runs he had hit for the Minnesota Twins in his backyard fantasies had finally paid off.
Buckminster Fuller is an intellectual hero of mine. As he said in the video, if you bothered to watch it, “I was told I had to get a job and make money, but would you rather be making money, or making sense?” Bucky was always a little bit to the left of center, and basically in the farthest corner of the outfield. That’s why we depend so much on him in times like these when the ball is being hit to the warning track. (I know the world doesn’t really work on baseball metaphors any more, but my life has always been about metaphors from 1964 with the St. Louis Cardinals playing and beating the New York Yankees. Mantle was on their side, but Maris was playing for us.) You have to live in the world that fits into your own mental map of reality. And if you’ve been whacked on the side of the head one too many times… it changes the way you think. You begin to think differently.
If you don’t know who Bucky is, as you probably don’t because he revolutionized the world in the 60’s and died in the 1980’s, Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor. He is credited with the invention of the Geodesic Dome. But he was so much more than that. He wanted to build things that made better sense, in a practical sort of way, than the way we actually do them. He built geodesic homes because he felt a home should maximize space and use of materials and minimize costs and amounts of materials as well as environmental impacts. He is the one who popularized the notion of “Spaceship Earth”. He wrote and published more than thirty books, and gave us a variety of truly wise insights. He promoted the concept of synergy. He said, “Don’t fight forces, use them.” He also pointed out, “Ninety per cent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.” He was a man full of quotes useful for internet memes.
So, lets consider an example from the mixed up mind of Mickey;
Here are three dolls from the Planet of the Apes part of my doll collection. (Two different movies are represented here, the 1968 original, and the Tim Burton 2001 remake.)
The world we now live in is increasingly like the movie, The Planet of the Apes. In that film the world the astronauts set down upon is ruled by talking apes. The human beings in that film are relegated to the fields and forests where they are no more than speechless animals. Much like the Republican Party and the wealthy ruling elite of this day and age, the apes control everything and, led by Dr. Zaius (seen on the far right) reject science and evidence as a way to explain things. They rely on the rules set down by the Lawgiver in much the same way that modern day Republicans swear by the U.S. Constitution to determine the truth of all things.
Here we see the apes capturing and enslaving Marky Mark… er… Mark Wahlberg rather than Chuck Heston from the original movie.
In the original set of movies, Charleton Heston, playing the astronaut Taylor, discovers that through hatred and warring, the human beings of Earth have bombed themselves back into the stone age and enabled the evolved apes to take over. How does Mr. Heston deal with that problem? He discovers an old doomsday device and blows up the world. Chuck Heston has always approved Second Amendment solutions to modern problems, so it is no wonder that he lays waste to everything, the good and the bad. I think we can see that old orangutan-man, Donald Trump doing exactly the same things now as he runs for President, or Great Ape, or whatever…
In both the previous series, and the current remake, salvation from the rule of the monkey people comes in the form of a leader among the apes. Caesar, whether he be played by Roddy MacDowell or by Andy Serkis, is able to solve the problems of apes and men by reaching out to those of the other species, assigning them value, and ultimately doing what helps everyone to survive and live together. Diversity is power and provides a workable solution through cooperation. The forces of hatred and fear are the things that must be overcome and threaten the existence of everyone. Donald Trump needs to learn from the lesson of The Planet of the Apes, and be less like General Ursus. We need Bernie Sanders to embrace the role of Caesar and show us how we can get along with our Muslim brothers… after all, they are more like us than the apes are, and Caesar builds bridges between apes and men.
So, there you have it, my attempt to build a new model based on an old movie… or on the remake… whichever you prefer. And if that doesn’t work, well, there’s always…
I love Marvel Comics, and, as a result, I am also falling in love with the Marvel Superhero movies. I spent this morning drooling over the Flash TV series which has that wonderful comic book wiseacre flavor. And I decided that Dallas needs its own superhero.
So, using the toxic pollution in the city air and the natural ability of the human body to adapt to anything, Muck Man is born. Yes, Muck Man, the toxic hero who smells so bad that bad guys don’t have a chance. Severe odor is his super power. He can remove his shoes and take down a regiment of evil villain minions with a wave of foot-fungus incredo-stink. He can radiate infected ear-wax smells through the earwax antennas on his helmet. And, of course, he can go fully nuclear with a Muck Man power fart.
The Magnificent Muck Man has a secret identity too. He is a mild-mannered retired school teacher by day, pursuing a mundane and forgettable career as a writer until the city is threatened by a super villain. And he is coming.
Behold, the Angry Orange King. He is tramping toward us in Angry Tramp Boots looking to tramp all over the basic human rights of people he doesn’t like. Especially poor people he doesn’t like. He gives rude finger gestures to the masses with the fingers of his tiny, tiny hands. And he likes to build gigantic things and make other people pay for them. He has recently defeated the homegrown lizard-man super villain that represents our state. He used his super villain power to hang insulting nicknames on people, and we all know that nicknames can be fatal, especially to lizard-people. Many would argue that the Angry Orange King hasn’t won total victory yet. He still has to defeat one more opponent before the frightened nation turns the keys to the kingdom over to him. But there is no guarantee that he will be beaten, as no other contender has beaten him yet, despite everything the wise monkeys claim to be true.
So the confrontation is set to happen. Blow-hard insult master against the world’s greatest source of stinky justice. Who will win? Nobody knows for sure. But for me, I tend to side with goodness over evil.
I just got the first review for the last book I’ve published. Cissy Moonskipper’s Travels, book #20, a science fiction novella, has actually been read and evaluated by somebody who wasn’t me. I am tickled blue to get a good review. I don’t see any reason mentioned why it was given four stars and not five. But four is a good review, and I am not totally convinced that I am the second coming of Saul Bellow… not totally convinced. Maybe I shouldn’t be arbitrarily lumped into the same star-category as Faulkner and Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain. But I have noticed that a lot of not-so-great reviews are heavily influenced in their judgements by whatever the first reviewer said, and the number of stars they bedazzled me with.
As an Indie author with self-published books, I realize the importance of having people read and respond to your books. Especially when you can’t get a beta-reader you know to look at a manuscript before publication. My sisters don’t read my novels even after I publish them (and give them a gift copy and ask them specifically to read them.) And my wife is a fellow English teacher, so she wants to dissolve the book conversations into arguments about spelling and usage and points where my ideas diverge from her fundamentalist religious beliefs. So, I rely on strangers, some of them apparently semi-literate but highly opinionated, to tell me how they received my books. My source of validation for what I spend so much time doing is dependent wholly upon Amazon, Goodreads, and Pubby reviews. (Pubby is an authors’ review exchange where I earn reviews from other authors in return for my own books being reviewed by them through giving them the best reviews I can muster on their sometimes brilliant but often awful works of literature.)
It is all a matter of opinions. I give them my onions. They give me theirs. And, no, that isn’t a spelling or word-choice error in spite of what my wife probably is going to tell you when she tracks you down for reading this article.
The thing about putting Onions in the stew of reviews, is the way they can easily overpower the entire flavor. You must have a recipe, rules for the use of Onions in the stew.
I honestly don’t expect every reviewer to follow the recipe I use. That’s why I offer these rules only as a guide to how I do a book review.
Rule #1
I always look to give the book the best possible rating I can justify giving it. Therefore, there will always be a reason or multiple reasons given for how I rate the book.
Rule #2
Spelling errors or other minor proofreading or editing errors don’t lower the rating unless they make critical parts or lines in the book incomprehensible. (A five-star book may have such errors noted in the review even if it is otherwise perfect.)
Rule #3
I will not reveal important plot points or cause any spoilers to appear in the review, though I will talk about character-creation, world-building, inconsistencies of plot or character development, or other factors the author got wrong which mess up reader comprehension or basic interest in the story.
Rule #4
Comments are limited to praise or constructive criticisms. I have no wish to ruin the author’s perception of himself or herself even if they are literally a bad writer. Books too foul to do that with, I simply do not review. (And, unfortunately some of those do exist.)
I wish every “honest” reviewer would use these same rules. But they don’t. One Pubby reviewer reviewed my book Recipes for Gingerbread Children, a book about an old German woman who survived the Holocaust and dealt with it by telling fairy stories to children in Iowa in the 1970’s, and said about it, “This book has some really great recipes.”
The bum earned points for a five-star review on a book he not only didn’t read, he didn’t even look at the description on the Amazon page he had to go to to leave a review. Amazon has since removed that review.
Here’s what a good fiction book has to do to get a five-star review from me;
The lead sentences and paragraphs need to grab my attention, and hold it by telling me who this story is about, what they want or are pursuing, and what they fear most will halt them or harm them.
The characters have to be well-developed. I must like them even if they are bad people in some ways, and it is up to the author to make me like them.
The story must be well-paced, moving me forward through it because I want to read it, not because I have to read it. Surprises that make sense help. But the story can’t become boring.
The ending must be satisfying in some way. It can leave me hanging, but there has to be an identifiable conclusion. The book needs to feel like it has reached an end.
The reality behind all this blathering about rules I will never get all reviewers to adhere to is that I, as a retired English teacher, am not only a teacher, I am a writing teacher. I will be one even after I die and become a ghost writer. So, deal with it.
Catch a Falling Star 