I have been using the book-reviewing service called Pubby to get readers to actually read and review my books. I have barely gotten any readers to pick up and read one of my books since I first started publishing my work in 2007. And I get it. Beginning authors, no matter how good they are going to be later, are not so very good on the first, second, or even third try. My family is reluctant to read anything I have written because I pester them too much about it. My children are all creative in their own way, and consumed more by their own projects than by anything I have done. And when my wife reads anything I have written, she becomes laser-focused on what is unusual about how I use grammar and how things are spelled.
“You can’t spell that word like that!” she insists.
“But honey, it’s a made-up word that I made up myself.”
“That makes it worse, because the word it makes me think of is a bad word in the Philippines, even though it is spelled nothing like your word for butterflies thinking of ear wax.”
“Okay, I guess I have to change it then.”
Not my wife and me… but close.
But Amazon doesn’t like your relatives writing book reviews anyway. And their rules knocked out a couple of reviews I got from other writers with whom I had a deal for exchanging reviews. So, this review service was supposed to help with the problem. You read books from Pubby’s list and write a review to get points that you can put toward getting your own books reviewed. That seems both reasonable and equitable to me.
So, I started with some of the best books I have written and began getting them reviewed. So far, Snow Babies has gained four five-star reviews. Sing Sad Songs and Recipes for Gingerbread Children have each added three five-star reviews.
And it began to concern me.
It seems that some of the truly terrible writing that I was reviewing were getting overly-generous amounts of five-star reviews, along with their twos and threes. And the closer I looked at some of the comments in the reviews of my books, which were somehow read in only one or two days, were merely restatements of what other reviewers had already written. It was entirely possible that I was getting reviews like I was because writers were slapping an empty five-star on there to justify earning their points to get their own books reviewed. They weren’t actually reading the stories themselves.
I am not going to complain about mere suspicions over a five-star review. But I was looking for proof that people read and like my books. And I expect to see some lower grades on my work. That’s part of how you know things are real. Not everyone likes every good book. The best books ever written have their detractors.
That is an ordinary tractor in the background, not a detractor.
So, I went with my most recently published book, Laughing Blue. I chose the free-review-copy option and gave the reader every opportunity to dislike my book of boring old essays. And I got back a five-star review with some actual proof that the reader did read it and enjoyed it.
Now I feel better. But I would still like to see some three or four-star reviews, and I would definitely survive a one or a two. It would make me think the whole thing is a bit more honest than it has seemed at times.
And that’s how it’s supposed to be… according to Mickey.
The Leaping Shadowcat and The First Half-Century both came out of jump space together into the system of 1232 Ardonnis, the home system of the high-population world called Coventry. Immediately, the situation became the silent-operatic equivalent of Beethoven’s Knock of Doom in the Ninth Symphony. Daaat Daaat Daaat Dooooh! Three hundred of the Imperium’s newest space ships, ships of the line, tenders, and support ships were all arrayed against the two ships of Ham and Ferrari’s tiny rebel fleet.
Ham leaned on the pilot’s control panel and let his jaw drop as he gazed out the Shadowcat’s viewport at them.
“I see the Bregohelma!” he cried. “Admiral Tang is out there himself!”
“We are so dead!” moaned Duke Han Ferrari. The Duke twisted the right end of his handlebar moustache nervously. “I will surrender myself to them, and maybe they will spare you and the crew of the Shadowcat.”
“Give me some credit, Duke,” said Ham sullenly. “I may not be the famous space hunter, Ged Aero, but I can be a hero too. I will NOT desert my friends.”
“Hey, Ham-boy, old Jester!” The call came from the command deck of the fighting space frigate, The First Half Century. “Do you see what I see out there?”
“Yes, Goofy, I’m afraid I do.”
“Wow! Old Jester, I mean literally WOW! We can win glory in battle like this against impossible odds!”
“Goofy, we are going to die! Don’t get all hammy over it! We have to make them pay for it the best we know how.”
“Oh, you got it, Ham-ster! I am putting the Crown of all Stars on my head right now. I can use the powers of the Ancients to defeat this bozo!”
Ham slapped his right hand over his forehead in total frustration. There was a good reason that Mammy Aero had once banned little Ham and little Ged from playing with the demented little goofy child. That boy just wasn’t entirely right in the head.
“Belay that! You don’t need to melt your brain to die in this battle. You need to fight the way they taught you back at the Space Academy. We need to go down with honor.”
The video communicator snapped on and showed a smiling one-eyed Goofy with the three-orbed alien thing pulsing yellow, orange, and lime-green lights all over the bridge of the military ship. Goofy’s crew were resolutely manning battle stations in the background. Ham could also see the unearthly Tesserah thing pulsing and glowing with menace behind the Goof.
“What’s that Tesserah thing doing?” I asked the view screen, feeling I had to insert myself into the dire problem to find some sort of sensible solution.
“That, old Scientist-Jester, is an Ancient weapon now fully primed and ready to be used against the enemies!”
I have to tell you, I was more than a little alarmed as a scientist and scholar. This situation seemed sure to end only one way. We would be atomized by space-born weapons systems or torn atom from atom by Ancient alien energies. Even I didn’t see a way out.
“I order you to stop what you are doing right now!” said Duke Ferrari, trying to take command of the situation.
“No, your Duke-ness. I can do this! Watch!”
Goofy Dalgoda made a face like he was having a painful bowel movement, and then the space between the Tesserah and the Imperial Fleet was suddenly ablaze with alien energy, like a strange ochre lightning in the vacuum of space.
Fifteen Imperial ships disintegrated before our disbelieving eyes.
“Wow!” I said, being the first one able to speak. “Mr. Dalgoda? Are you actually able to direct that power?”
“Yessir, old Mr. Science Dude! I can drop that beam on the head of a pin.”
Ham was suddenly smiling again. He was a very handsome man when he smiled. “Let them have it, then, Goof! Give ‘em all you’ve got!”
The Goofy One did not have to be told twice. Blasts arced out into space on all sides of his ship. For three hundred and sixty degrees all around, the small capital ship laid waste to larger and more powerful space behemoths. The Wargod Class Dreadnaught called The Benjamin Franklin, ruptured like a dried gourd and spilled its disintegrating seed into surrounding space. The Nimitz Class Fleet Carrier, the Colonel Green, launched a thousand fighters as it rolled over in space and dissolved. One by one all of the fighters winked out of existence too. It was like watching silent fireworks. It was all I could do not to shout “Ooh!” and “Ahh!” There was a terrifying beauty in so much fire and death.
“Goof?” asked Ham anxiously, “Can you target the Bregohelma?”
“Oh, Ham-boy! We have to make the old red bird see all of this destruction first!”
A huge blue bolt of energy surged out of the Tesserah and painted a wide swath over the most populous of the cities below on the planet. Everyone was suddenly sick to their stomach as almost a billion innocent beings on the planet below were consumed by alien energy.
“Trav! What have you done?” cried Ham.
“I did just what the crown said I should. I used my mental connection with the Tesserah to start cleansing the planet below us.”
“Trav!” wept Ham. “They were on our side!”
As Ham pleaded, I suddenly saw Commander Dana Cole on the view screen. She had a laser weapon in her hand. “Forgive me, Ham!” cried Dana Cole as she cut off one of Trav’s arms with the laser. “He’s possessed by that alien thing! I have to stop him.”
Trav Dalgoda was still laughing as he used his remaining arm to gesture and make a smaller blue splash of energy launch toward the planet.
“Forgive me, Trav. I do love you,” said Dana as she sawed off his other arm. Trav was still smiling as he tried to gesture with a foot. She cut the leg off too. Then the other leg. Finally, with a destroyed look of regret on her face, she cut off Goofy’s head. The crown grew dark and the Tesserah grew silent.
All of us aboard the Shadowcat were still stunned. Trav had nearly saved us from catastrophe. Then he made everything a billion times worse.
“We can still win,” growled Ham resolutely. “I can crash the Shadowcat into the bridge of the Bregohelma and destroy Admiral Tang.”
Trav’s former command, the frigate, was battling the last remaining ship of the line, and apparently winning. We actually could rule the day if we made the ultimate sacrifice Ham was suggesting. All on the bridge of the little safari ship looked each other in the eye and nodded yes to it. Ham fixed the navigational controls on the target, dead center on the bridge of the Admiral’s Flagship. Full throttle we began to plunge toward her.
In my mind, the symphony had reached a crescendo, cymbals clashing, drums rumbling, and violins soaring. I was prepared to die in that instant, as we all were.
Sinbadh, the Lupin space cook, stuck his head in the doorway to the bridge.
It came to an end for Justice Ginsberg after 87 years. It will come to an end soon for my father too. He is in hospice care at 88 years and eleven months. Her turns 89 in October. But he is deteriorating every day now. The final destination can’t be too much farther down the road for me either.
Life is not a Disney movie with Bambi in it. My mother made it out of the meadow alive when I was small.
But, when you think about it, after a cute and funny childhood, there was that moment behind the car tires when trauma struck, at age ten, and after that I had to grow up faster than should have been necessary. And in my youth and in my prime, I had to struggle to prove myself. Against other bucks, and hunters with guns, and… at the end of the movie, it seems like the whole world is on fire.
So, maybe life is like a Disney movie with Bambi in it. And maybe I have to make my own happy ending.
Perhaps Bambi is my spirit-animal. The one who protects my family. My patronus. My guardian angel.
No matter how I take it on, it has been a long and wearying road to follow. And the journey now is nearly complete. But the last few miles are always the hardest to bear. Still, I know the journey has been worth it. And there will be rest to be had in that last meadow. RGB already knows it. Soon my father will too. Peace be upon us, for we have earned it.
My title doesn’t mean that I am free from writing space books. These bizarre little sci-fi satires keep reeling out of the space between my ears. My head is full of science fiction froo-froo. And it has to go somewhere. So, in honor of Book 3 of the AeroQuest series being free this weekend (through September 22), I am posting today more AeroQuest art.
Fiona Arbuckle, Space Journalist from the planet Don’t Go Here.A Nebulon Princess, blue-skinned alien wife of Ham Aero.The villainous synthezoid villain.Time Traveller and meddler extraordinaire
ADaB (Another Danged Boy 1578) an artificial life-form created to be ultra-creative
A pestiferous alien life-form of questionable intelligence
Admiral Tron and Grand Admiral Cloudstalker
Fleet Admiral King Killer
Banzai Joe, owner and operator of the Rimbaud Memorial Deep-Space OutstationGirl traveler of time and spaceSpace Opera HeroTriceratops Space Cruiser from the rebel planet Don’t Go Here.Three alien space kids
I was a middle school English teacher. And part of that job is to build reading skills. But that is a challenging thing. Especially if you work for a poor rural school district with limited budgets and very little ability to buy computers and the necessary software. After all, being a reading teacher in the upper grade levels of public schools is HARD. Can you figure out a child’s reading level with teacher-made Cloze tests? Do you know how to tell a book’s reading level just by sampling the concept density, vocabulary load, and sentence lengths in the beginning, middle, and end of a book? Do you know where to find the readability information in the student’s History and Science textbooks? And did you know there is no formula anywhere to cover how you match up kids to books they will actually read and like without becoming a mind-reading trusted friend of every kid in your class?
Seriously. Even if you are a teacher certified to teach reading, they do not teach you these things below the doctorate level in teacher-training schools. I had to teach myself before I could effectively teach them.
The fact is, life-long readers are made by book-reading parents who read to their children a lot before they ever come to school. Those kids get to school and top the lists of readers no matter what reading or literacy test you give them. They benefit from a reading teacher they can talk to about books, but they don’t need them. They know how to teach themselves. And kids who don’t catch fire in their reading ability thanks to an enthusiastic and gifted kindergarten, first, or second-grade teacher are never going to learn to read for fun, or probably ever read anything not assigned by their boss with job-loss consequences ever again after leaving school. Some kids burdened with dyslexia, ADD, or even mental illness of some sort are never going to read at all… without intervention.
And high-stakes State tests that have been all the rage with Republican governments who want to prove teachers make too much money, don’t even measure reading skills and compare results to see how much kids have gained every single year. They don’t want to give teachers credit if they take it upon themselves to actually teach students to read better. That is not what capitalist economies want to measure. They prefer to see how well students conform to norms and standards… to make an obedient working class that doesn’t cost too much because they think for themselves.
But a good teacher teaches kids to read or read better. They do it in spite of the huge challenge. There are ways to do it.
Pictured in this post are four books that I have read aloud to my classes. And walked them through the stories with word banks, guided-reading worksheets, focused discussions about theme-setting-character and whatnot. I tricked them into caring about what happens to the main characters because you learn to care about them as people (meaning both the characters and the student readers who invest themselves in those characters.)
I have used these books to make students laugh, as when Mr. Sir is shooting at yellow-spotted lizards in Holes. And I have made them cry, as when the family learns how Tom was killed in the Battle of Shiloh in the book Across Five Aprils. And I have horrified them when it is revealed what happens to old people and defective babies in The Giver. You can literally make students love good books if you are willing to share them hard enough.
I have never tried to get students to read books literally naked as my Paffooney might be suggesting. I don’t think the school boards I have worked for would’ve liked that very much. But it is a triumph of teaching when you can get them to figuratively immerse themselves in books to that degree.
But teaching reading is something all schools need to be doing. And I have to tell you, they are not doing nearly enough anywhere in Texas. And maybe not in the rest of the United States either.. Now that I can teach no more… I am left despairing. But not because of lack of belief in kids and good books.
This book of mine is in a free-book promotion this weekend.
When he walked through my classroom door for the first time in August 1988, the start of his seventh grade year, Jorge Navarro was a tiny little third-grader-looking thing. But one of the first things he ever told me in English was that he was a cowboy.
He had two older brothers. Sammy was an eighth grader that year, and Jose was in tenth grade. So, I already knew his brothers. Big strapping lads. They didn’t speak English really well and couldn’t read. But they were smart in a pragmatic, workman-like way. They all three came from a ranch down in Encinal, Texas. Fifteen miles closer to the Mexican border than where I was teaching in Cotulla, Texas. But they were not Mexicans. Their grandparents and parents were born in the USA, and their great grandparents, and possibly further back than that had lived on the same ranch-land all the way back to when everything South of the Nueces River was Mexico. These were Tejanos. Proud Americans from Texas. Hard-working, dedicated to the ranch owners who paid them to do what they loved, getting the most agricultural benefits possible from the dry South-Texas brush country.
Jorge was, at the start, a little man with a big voice in a small package. He was smarter and could read better than either of his brothers. He could even read and translate Spanish, which, of course, was his native language. And he had strong opinions that you could not argue with him about. He was a cowboy. That was opinion number one. He not only rode horses, he fed them daily, curried them in the morning to loosen the dirt and stimulate the production of natural oils that kept their coats shiny, and he even told me about the times he bottle-fed newborn colts when their mothers were sick.
And he strongly believed that a boss, or a teacher in my case, should never ask someone to do something that he didn’t know how to do himself. That was opinion number two. And he held me to that standard daily.
You should never use bad language in front of a lady… or a teacher, was opinion number three. He had a temper though. So, unlike most of the other boys, on those days when he lost it, he apologized as soon as he was back in control of himself. It made the girls giggle when he apologized to them, but that was an embarrassed reaction. He impressed them. They told me so in private afterwards.
He had a cowboy hat in his locker every day. You never wore a hat inside. Strong opinion number four.
And when he was an eighth-grader, he almost doubled in height. But not in width. He was what they call in Spanish, “Flaco,” skinny as a rail. He was taller than me by the time in mid-year when he started competing like his brothers in rodeos. And he was good. Something about the way his skinny, light frame could bend and twist under stress allowed him to stay on a barebacked horse longer than his brothers, or even the older men. He was pretty good at roping steers too. But it was the bareback bronc riding that won him trophies.
This is not a story about someone overcoming hardships to succeed. It always seemed like Jorge was blessed with it from the beginning. But it was the fact that he did what was needed every single day without fail. You could depend on it. He had a code that he followed.
The drawing that started this story is one that I did for him. I gave him and every member of his class that asked for one a copy made on my little copier at home.
And he taught me far more than I could ever teach him. Jorge Navarro was a cowboy. And you couldn’t argue with him about that.
It was the commander on the bridge of the Bregohelma who first spotted it as it came out of jump space.
“What the hell is that?” he complained in a nasally voice while looking out of a face that was not the face of a weasel, but that only obvious because DNA scans had proved he was human and he didn’t have a tail. He looked around the bridge for someone to give him an answer to his question. But almost everyone on bridge duty at that moment was an undead rot-warrior, a skeletal dead body reanimated with electronics and controlled by a computerized brain. And all of them, at that moment were still trying to compute how to get the answer out of “Hell” since that was where the commander had requested it from.
“That looks like a… dinosaur,” said Wormheart Toadsucker, who was only slightly less dead-looking and probably less intelligent than the rot warriors. “You know, like the ones on the planet Dionysus.”
“It can’t be one of those. It’s in space. It just appeared in far orbit around the planet.”
“You should have one of the smart ones scan it,” said Wormheart. “I need to go alert Admiral Tang.
“Okay, which of these mud-brains is a smart one?” The commander looked at every vacant-eyed face on the bridge and then started scanning himself. Amazing things began popping up on the scanner-screen report.
The red-armored admiral appeared on the bridge moments later with the boot-licker Wormheart groveling along behind him.
“So, what does it appear to be?” asked the admiral in his ultra-creepy modulated voice.
“Well, it’s a kind of starship like I have never seen before. The scanner computer can’t completely identify it. It seems to be some sort of alien artifact from the time of the Ancients.”
“Ah, that might explain the weird dinosaur shape. The Ancients were of so much higher a tech level than we are now that many of their relics seem totally inexplicable to us.”
“Yes, but this one has a primarily human crew. They are not even mostly Galtorrian/human fusions like you might expect. Just plain Earther types.”
“And it is coming towards us under power.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
“Are the shields up?”
“Um… they are now.” The commander quickly corrected his oversight.
“Find out what they want.”
As soon as the admiral commanded it, a visual appeared on the commo-screen. The Lizard Lady herself appeared in the middle of a bridge full of oddly-dressed human crewmen.
“Are you not an Imperial spy, Captain?” Admiral Tang asked, lowering his voice to basement levels of creepiness.
“I am. And I have stolen a flagship of the new fleet you will face if you try to invade the Outpost system of Tron Blastarr.”
“That is remarkable good work, um… what is your name?”
“I am an original Galtorrian, simply called Lizard Lady.”
“You will be remembered as a hero to the Imperium, Lizard Lady.”
“Ah, but the mission is not yet fully complete. We need to pull up to your ship and dock. This is Ancient technology, and we will need your brilliance to fully control it.”
“Very well… we should be able to…”
Suddenly another sleek spaceship of Ancient designed popped out of jump space directly beside the dinosaur-shaped ship. After a few moments in which no one had time to do another scan, the new, sleek ship disappeared once again.
“We are moving in to dock with you now, Admiral,” said the Lizard Lady as she gave orders quietly to her pilots and then swiftly left the bridge before Tang could ask her anything.
The dinosaur ship lurched forward and was approaching at an impossible docking speed.
“Shields on maximum! Back away from them fast,” ordered Tang, obviously sensing a trick. “Fire everything at that ship now!”
Lasers, plasma cannons, nuclear missiles, and Gauss cannons all fired at the incoming ship. It did not fire back. Instead it ignited and blew up in what would have been a spectacular fireball if it had blown up in an oxygen or hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The shock-wave nearly obliterated the Bregohelma as it was, but apparently it was too far distant for the resolution of the mission that the Lizard Lady had planned.
*****
Dr. Hooey’s time ship, the Star Wars, materialized in the Bregohelma’s cargo bay.
The door of the phone-booth-like thing opened and the Lizard Lady stepped out to confirm her present location.
“Is it the proper cargo bay?” asked Dr. Hooey from inside the time ship.
“It is,” she answered. “Now that we are in the proper place, we only need to move to the proper time.
“Very well. The time according to which of the prophecies?”
“Yes, according to all of them.” She stepped back into the time ship. It made its normal grinding sound, and promptly disappeared into the near future.
Some characters need to have their story told for reasons that are buried deep in the author’s personal history and damaged psyche. For me, Torrie Brownfield, the Baby Werewolf, was that kind of character.
The book, The Baby Werewolf, is a different kind of horror story. The central question of the book is this, “Am I a monster? And do I know why or why not?” And Torrie has to answer that question because he was born with a rare genetic disorder called hypertrichosis. It is the “werewolf-hair disease” where hair growth happens in unusual places on the body and in Torrie’s case, everywhere but the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. He is a perfectly normal boy who really only looks like a monster. But how you look can have a profound impact on how people treat you.
And the character of the boy who looks like a werewolf and thinks he is a monster is based entirely on me. Unlike Valerie Clarke whose origins I can pinpoint, I have to honestly admit the way Torrie thinks and feels and acts are all based solely on me and me alone.
You see, when I was a boy of ten I went through a horrible traumatic experience that threw my whole life into darkness. And I kept it secret from everybody. In fact, for a few years, I kept it a secret even from myself.
It is not that I really didn’t remember I had been sexually assaulted by an older boy. The nightmares and remembered pain were a constant even when I couldn’t admit to myself what had happened. I defended myself from it all by burying the knowledge deep, and worrying about things that only sexual-assault victims worried about. I embarrassed myself twice in seventh grade by wetting my pants in class, all because I couldn’t go into the boys’ bathroom at school. Whenever I would have sexual urges of any kind, I would lie down or sit on the heating grate at home, burning scars into my lower back and the back of my lower legs. I fretted about how to fight monsters. And I knew from the movies that if a vampire bit you, you could become a vampire. And if a werewolf bit you, you could become a werewolf. So, if a sexual predator bites you, do you not become a…??
In all honesty I probably became a teacher at least in part to protect other kids from the same kind of thing that happened to me. And I had to write this book to tell the story of how not to be a monster.
The true monster in this monster-movie tale is actually Torrie’s uncle, the person who actually psychologically abuses him. And the villain proves himself to be a sexual deviant, trying to create kiddie porn in his photography studio.
I suppose I just spoiled the whole whodunnit part of the book. But the murder mystery was never the point of the novel. The message of this novel is that no child is ever a monster unless he actually chooses to become one.
And that is the kind of character Torrie Brownfield is. The autobiographical kind. The kind that brings the author’s worst fears about himself to light, and tries to answer the question with… “No, I am not a monster.”
No man is really fit to judge his own character. You can’t see it objectively from the inside. But one of the benefits of being a fiction author is that you don’t have to judge yourself. You can get away with judging everybody else around you. And they don’t even need to realize that that is what you are doing.
I am going to dissect three examples from my own fiction.
The first, as you have probably already guessed, is Valerie Clarke, the heroine of Snow Babies, When the Captain Came Calling, and Sing Sad Songs.
Valerie is named after the prettiest girl I went to school with, the one in my class that was in school with me from kindergarten to twelfth grade. The one who used to politely laugh at my jokes and smile at me a lot when I needed someone to look at me and not scowl. She is a very lovely lady now with grandchildren and a good life in Iowa. And besides the name and the beauty, that’s about as far as the real Valerie goes in the make-up of this crucial main character.
The spirit and the personal history of this character come from a very composed and determined young lady that I taught as both a seventh and an eighth-grader. I have referred to her before in this blog as Sasha. But that’s not her real name. And I am not going to ever give you her real name because she’s entitled to the secrets I may have revealed about her in creating this character, as well as entitled not to be burdened with the things in my stories about her that she never did in real life.
In the course of the novels I write, I dramatized the loss of her father, writing a scene in which she comes home to find him after he has committed suicide over the loss of his part of the family farm that he co-inherited with his older brother. Kyle Clarke’s suicide is the single most devastating scene I have ever written up until now. It stopped the novel in the middle. I had to write two other whole novels before I could pick it up and continue. But Sasha’s missing father in real life did not commit suicide. The love that develops between Valerie and Tommy in Snow Babies and the love she finds with Francois in Sing Sad Songs are also facts that do not belong in real life to Sasha.
But the part of Valerie Clarke that really is Sasha is her indomitable will, the way she simply cannot be stopped when she makes up her mind to accomplish something. And that smile that melts your defenses and forces you to accept everything she is about change in your life for the better, whether it is painful or not. The bravery that Valerie shows when she loses someone or something that is important to her is also Sasha. Overcoming disappointment and how one manages to do it is a real key to someone’s character. It helps you decide whether that character is right to be the heroine or is a better fit to be the villain of a story. And Sasha could never have been a villain.
And finally, there’s the thing about the character of Valerie Clarke that has attached itself to my own daughter, the Princess, whose real name I also never use in this blog. She was roughly the same age as the character of Valerie as I was actually putting the story of Snow Babies down in sentences, paragraphs, and Cantos. Some of the more private details about Valerie come from her, things I could never have learned about the first Valerie or Sasha because I never lived in the same house with them. And these more private details are probably the reason that my own daughter has not read a story with Valerie Clarke in it.
So, now I have revealed the basic anatomy of the character creation of one of three promised characters that I am proudest to have created in my fiction.
A lot of my artwork has to do with students and teachers, and of course, the schools they attend. I wonder where this obsession came from?
The Psionic Ninja Class from AeroQuest.
There’s a lot of science fiction elements in school. After all, we are preparing students for the future.
Schools of the past fascinate me too. This is Chiron the Centaur teaching Hercules, Jason, Achilles, and other demigods and heroes.
It is hard to tell just by looking whether this school is in the past or in the future. The secret is, this illustrates a science fiction novel I haven’t written yet. It is on another planet three thousand years in the future.
This picture of one of my last high school ESL classes is not realistic. Students are far more cartoonish than they are pictured here.
Of course, school is not about the teachers. It is about the students.
These two are Blueberry Bates and Mike Murphy.
They are fictional people.
But they are based on three different seventh grade couples I taught in Texas.
One set actually grew up and married each other.
You know how you can tell that this school is from science fiction? The student in the picture is actually a robot who looks human.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Long Road
It came to an end for Justice Ginsberg after 87 years. It will come to an end soon for my father too. He is in hospice care at 88 years and eleven months. Her turns 89 in October. But he is deteriorating every day now. The final destination can’t be too much farther down the road for me either.
Life is not a Disney movie with Bambi in it. My mother made it out of the meadow alive when I was small.
But, when you think about it, after a cute and funny childhood, there was that moment behind the car tires when trauma struck, at age ten, and after that I had to grow up faster than should have been necessary. And in my youth and in my prime, I had to struggle to prove myself. Against other bucks, and hunters with guns, and… at the end of the movie, it seems like the whole world is on fire.
So, maybe life is like a Disney movie with Bambi in it. And maybe I have to make my own happy ending.
Perhaps Bambi is my spirit-animal. The one who protects my family. My patronus. My guardian angel.
No matter how I take it on, it has been a long and wearying road to follow. And the journey now is nearly complete. But the last few miles are always the hardest to bear. Still, I know the journey has been worth it. And there will be rest to be had in that last meadow. RGB already knows it. Soon my father will too. Peace be upon us, for we have earned it.
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