When you are in pain, it is better by far to use laughter as medicine than to rely on anger or tears. I need to do this. More now at the end of my life than ever before.
I may not be well enough to write very much, but I can still click on the picture and show you some clowns.
It is surprising to see in my media file how many pictures of clowns there actually are to choose from. I draw clowns a lot.
Mr. Dickens, Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Disney, and Mr. Poe
Not all clowns tell jokes and make pratfalls. Some clowns are simple. And some are profound.
And one clown to rule them all… and with sad laughter bind them.
It turns out I woke up alive this morning and not needing to immediately worry about doctors and hospitals.
So, today, though not well enough to do much, I will take advantage of no fever and no congestion. The sun has come out. I can at least be glad of the day.
Who knows? I may even wake up alive tomorrow. It makes me smile.
In case you were wondering, the face in the sun today is my daughter the Princess, as near as I can do in yellow and orange, and without her glasses.
I have been feeling ill for three days now. Every morning I wake up feeling that I must’ve caught the Coronavirus. Head all congested, body aching, chest hurting and giving me breathing difficulty, and possibly fever…
And yet, every day, my head clears, my chest stops hurting. No fever is detected. Who knows? I have lived yet another day.
I have honestly been treating every day as if it were my last. I have been doing that for six years now. One day at a time. I have convinced myself that it is the only way to live. Careful of my fragile mortality, yet savoring the music of every single day.
Who knows if tomorrow will be another day? I will do as I must tomorrow if tomorrow is given, and I am thankful for today.
In my time living every single day as my last one, I have written a number of stories. This is one of the good ones that I cherish. It has nudists and Nazis in it. It has gingerbread men (and girls) in it who magically come to life. There are also fairies. And one old German woman with some stories to tell to children. It is built of the sweet memories and cookies and milk from my own boyhood. And it may offend some people. But everyone who will admit to me that they read it, loves it. I love it. Twitter nudists think it represents naturism well.
And the next book I write, if I can string together enough last days at 500 words a day, will be nothing like it, completely different, and maybe better.
And so, on the chance that today really is the last, here is the wisdom that I would leave behind as my legacy.
Words, if chosen wisely, have meaning. And meaning, applied to life, is a priceless treasure. But only if you give it away when you find it.
All people are worth knowing. The unpleasant ones have even more to teach you than the ones who love you. But do not fail to make time for those you love.
Live in the moment. Sing your best. Dance whenever you can. There’s no time like now. At least until tomorrow becomes now.
Hopefully this gift of wisdom is enough for now. If it isn’t, then may the next day make me wiser so that I will do better.
The three primary colors of paint are red, yellow, and blue. Together with the neutrals, white and black, these colors can be mixed to make any other shade, tone, or hue that exists on the color wheel and can be perceived by the human eye. When all three are present in a painting, it inherently has a feeling of completeness, wholeness, and balance.
Young Prinz Flute
How those primaries are mixed, allowed to dominate, or allowed to recede does a lot to determine the feeling the artwork projects into the viewer’s mind.
Great Grandma Hinckley as I most vividly remember her.
All of the artworks I am showing you today haven’t appeared in my blog for some time. But all of them are interpreted in primary colors. I won’t tell you how each picture is supposed to make you feel. I am just the artist. Only you can prevent forest fires, and only you can interpret a painting and tell someone else how it makes you feel.
The Wolf Girl and Dunderellathe Island GirlGilligan’s IslandAnnelise in Gingerbread TownChiron’s School for HeroesLong Ago It Might Have BeenThe Sea Witch
I finished another re-read of my most recent book, A Field Guide to Fauns. In spite of this being an experiment expected to fail, I read into it a growing sense of my ability to write well. The issues it deals with, mental health, body shame, self-image, and dysfunctional families, are all things critical to my own understanding of myself. All of these things have deeply affected my life and my family’s life. And, being set in a nudist park, it has a certain aura of comedy about it that you can really only achieve with characters who are naked (figurative or literal are both funny).
Ironically, two of my five best books have nudists in them. Six of my fifteen books over all have nudist adventures in them at one point or another. That’s four more more than have Nazis in them. Four more than have werewolves in them. Four more than have zebra puppets in them, as well as four more than have literal clowns in them. And two more than feature aliens from outer space. Five more than have rabbits who are changed into people by science.
If nudity is not funny, then I have seriously miscalculated the appeal and gone entirely down the wrong garden path of humorous story-telling. So, since I now believe The Field Guide to Fauns is one of the best novels I have done, I may have actually laid an egg. (Who knew that farm boys could one day grow up to lay an egg themselves?) For balance I need to plant a few more carrots of irony in that garden that the garden path of humorous writing leads to.
Mandy Clarke, Pinky Pithers, and Tandy Clarke
I am planning to make my newest novel this month’s free-book giveaway sometime next week. I have a few more corrections to make on it before I do, so stay tuned. I don’t like it when I find bugs in the writing on the fourth re-read. But I think I may have sprayed them all with anti-bug proofing spray (figuratively speaking again, because with Mickey, you never know.)
I have not yet finished AeroQuest 3 : Juggling Planets, but the groundwork is being laid already for part 4 in the AeroQuest Saga. The series is, after all, the rewrite of my out-of-print, 2007 novel, AeroQuest. So, the overall structure of the story already exists. I am merely expanding and revising that 350-page book into a better series of four or five books. In fact, there might have to be even more than that. I basically am too inventive for my own good, and there are just too many characters and plot threads for one book. And it may take six books to work it all out correctly.
This, then, is not so much a novel project as a hobby. Or maybe an artifact of an old hobby.
You see, AeroQuest was a story made from the notes I kept of my ongoing Traveller Role-playing game of the 80’s and early 90’s. Hamfast Aero, a main character, was a player character created by one of the first gang of players I had in the 80’s. In fact Ged Aero, Trav Dalgoda, Tron Blastarr, Xavier Tkriashav, Vince Neill (the player’s misspelling, not mine), Cold Death, King Killer, and Duke Han Ferrari were all player characters and strongly reflect the personalities and style of their original players. The plot is bizarre because of some of the creative problem-solving decisions made by the group of nerds who played the game. It had to be a comedy because we always had that over-the-top jokeability as a guiding principal of game play.
I am past page 100 in Book 3, and I have passed 27,000 words. It will end up being at least 135 pages and at least 35,000 words when it is finished. Book 4, if it ends the series, will have to be more than twice that. That’s why I am thinking five books instead of four.
The inspiration for the book was the foolish idea of combining Douglas Adams’ Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy wackiness with Frank Herbert’s Dune huge-book-with-many-short-chapters style. I guess the rewrite has given up on the Herbert format, if not the multitude of characters and subplots that went with it.
Anyway, I will have Book 3 published before I move on to the next writing project. The goal has never been to make money and be famous as a writer. But telling stories and writing them as novels has never been a choice. And, as painful as some of it is to give birth to, there is fulfillment to be had just from the simple act of writing.
Lemurians were shaped like human children except for the thumbs on each foot and the long prehensile tail. Most sentient aliens and Unhumans treated them like mere animals mostly because they wore no clothing and spoke no discernable language. Of course, nakedness made them much more like the Classical Worlders rather than apes. They were covered in soft tan and chocolate fur, but it covered up no more of their bodies than the oil that a naked athlete from the planet Mantua might wear.
And lack of language didn’t necessarily make them any less of a person than the vast numbers of humans that fell under the general heading of “stupid people”. Emperor Slythinus, though, the deposed Emperor of the Galtorr Imperium, had discovered a telepathic ability that he shared with the monkey people. He called it the “shining” because it was more a matter of reading colored auras and electrical impulses around the monkey people than reading actual words from their minds. It was a primitive brain-to-brain language that served as a sort of pre-telepathy. It allowed him to translate for the Lemurian people.
Ookah, the Lemurian leader, now stood in front of King Killer, Dr. Hooey, and Slythinus naked as the day he was born and radiating green-colored lies.
“How could you not tell me about this?” raged Slythinus. “You have been my most trusted friend. Better than my top advisors on Galtorr.”
The monkey man shined an answer that was intended to be soothing and conciliatory, but ended up being a transparent form of lie.
The blind Emperor turned to King Killer and Dr. Hooey. “They found the device when they first came through,” he said, interpreting. “They found it from the other side because they did not originate here. Ookah and his friends sought to keep the knowledge of it from me because they feared I would be hurt by the place’s guardian, some villain they “shine” at me as being a “white man”.”
“Interesting!” cooed Hooey. “These little monkey people have developed a real fondness for you, a man mostly snake by nature. Tell me, did you have your eyes when you first met them?”
“No, of course not! Prince Ali blinded me before he marooned me here.”
“I wonder if they would’ve had an atavistic fear of those eyes if they had seen them.”
“What I want to know,” said King Killer, “…is where is the dang thing, and how do we use it?”
Slythinus took a moment to “shine” back at Ookah. The little simian looked quite agitated as the answer came back.
“He says he will take us to the place. He has no other way to tell us.”
Ookah turned and gestured to the monkey people who surrounded the tree house sitting in each and every one of the trees around it. They began jumping up and down on branches and shouting raucously, sounding more like upset children than alien primates. Eerily, it almost sounded like a series of swear words.
“They don’t like it,” interpreted Slythinus, “but they promise to take us there and help us defeat the white man.”
“Natives defeating the white man?” said King dubiously. “That doesn’t sound like something that happens too often in History.”
Hooey laughed aloud. “Now the skeptic thinks he knows History better than a Time Knight! Wait and see. And remember the Little Bighorn.”
In the 80’s and early 90’s I played a lot of the science-fiction-role-playing game called Traveller. Those hours and hours of gaming produced the characters and stories I turned into my novel AeroQuest, now AeroQuest 1, 2, and very soon3. So, most of this artwork is either for the game and was used as a part of it, or the book, used as an illustration.
The Megadeath starship with her motley crewJunior AeroMai Ling on the planet GaijinShen Ming’s Palace on the planet Gaijin
Jadalaqstbr the teleporter and Alec Songh
Gyro the Nebulon and Shaman Billy Iowa
Tiki Astro is an artificial robot boy that looks fully human.
Tron Blastarr and Hassan the Peri ElfJunior Aero, Nebulon adopted son of Ham Aero
I did some house-cleaning today. The ceiling fan in the kitchen was filthy. It had grease from cooking on the nearby stove top all over the blades. And embedded in the grease was dirt and grime. So, it had to be scrubbed with Clorox. And I am allergic to Clorox. So, now I am done for the day. My lungs hurt. And it is hard to think. But I am not dying today from that. I am pretty sure the virus that has us shut up in the house has other plans for me.
But not everything is bad. Dust is bad. I am allergic to that too. Yet, I have now gotten 1,800 followers on WordPress. And somebody is using Amazon Prime to read more than one of my books. The pennies are rolling in on my Amazon author’s dashboard. Number one son has a serious girlfriend. Number two son has a work-at-home job that he is doing right now. And my daughter, the Princess, is helping her mother to finish cleaning the fan.
As part of my quest to rewrite AeroQuest as a comedy-science-fiction series, I am rereading the first book in the series.
Rereading your own work can be surprisingly rewarding in unusual ways. When I was working on that novel and reading and re-reading each section and Canto, I really began to hate the writing. It is my worst work so far. And yet, after plenty of time to forget how awful it seemed at the time, I find myself laughing at the jokes again. I know I am a notoriously un-critical critic. But I also am convinced I am a good writer, and even my bad books are better than I usually think. Now, if only somebody else would read them.
Work continues on AeroQuest 3.
So, even if I am a little bit down and blue, I am not out yet. The Dust wlll not win.
Catch a Falling Star 
Stepping Out of My Skin
Who exactly am I?
I know who I wish to be.
And I have a pretty clear idea
Of who I have actually been.
Bur do I have a notion of who I am now?
Have I finally awakened after watching…
The bowling of little green men?
I live inside the heads of characters,
And walk around in their imaginary lives.
I pretend to be someone I don’t want to be.
And then I try to break out again.
But the problems I have
Are not quite my own,
Though once they were
In the long-ago way back when.
I look into mirrors that are shattered,
And see myself twisted and grim.
And I complain about just what I see there,
And the poetry just does not rhyme.
Who am I?
Where am I?
What am I?
How?
Mostly I think
I’m that thing from the circus.
You know the one.
That thing that rhymes with brown.
But mostly also I think,
I am something entirely else.
A writer.
Yes, that’s the one.
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