A typical middle school Reading Class at the end of the period.
A second straight half-day of subbing at a middle school has smoothed out my ruffled feathers and damaged teacher-ego. It was, first of all, a different middle school. Blalack has better stewardship and more carefully worked-out standard practices. They handle misbehavior far better and the actual teachers are respected far more. I do not blame yesterday’s teachers or assistant principals. They were doing their jobs as best they could.
But today’s 8th grade Reading Classes were smaller. Twelve to fifteen students rather than almost thirty. They were given routines to follow every day in class that maximized their time on reading tasks and left students with little or no time to think of evil misbehaviors or acting out.
The differences in race, socioeconomic backgrounds, and cultures are practically non-existent. The kids I had a good time teaching today were no different then the ones I hated dealing with yesterday. The differences were all in how each set of kids are treated and managed every day.
So, we had a good day. Practically no student was involved in a reading-related death. No skulls of non-readers collected at the reading-raptor’s feet. Today teaching was fun.
Novel #14 is now complete and published. The Norwall Pirates, softball team and liars club, take on an ancient undead Chinese wizard. All of it takes place in small Iowa farm towns during the Bicentennial summer of 1976. But some of the major players in this life-or-death struggle are immortal, and most of them are only high school freshmen, fifteen-years-old and still quite awkward in the face of a dangerous and arcane world full of the difficult problems of growing up.
The novel is called The Boy… Forever. Icarus Jones is a main character like Peter Pan, faced with the possibility of living forever, but never growing older than ten.
For now, I haven’t settled on the next one. But Number 14 is done.
Ged had begun to feel at ease with the strange ninja powers he had absorbed by eating the Black Spider Leader while in the form of a dinosaur. He was a master of The Discipline now. Back on Earth in the time before travel between the stars, this Discipline had been known as K’ung Fu. The Black Spider Leader had mastered the jump-kicks of WuShu and the graceful, swift hand-to-hand combat known as Wing Chung. Because the skill had been trained into The Black Spider Leader’s muscle memory, Ged had absorbed it whole, even if he did not have the philosophies that were supposed to go with it. One thing he liked about it, though, was that it allowed him to defeat and overpower an opponent without doing permanent damage. Ged had never loved killing the way Trav Dalgoda loved it. He always preferred the bloodless victory, whether over man or beast. The prey was always to be honored and respected. And the prey was not to be stalked if it was not capable of self-defense.
In the heart of the Celestial Dragon was a large, gym-like room that was perfect for giving students lessons in the art of the Discipline. It had a soft, forgiving floor, plenty of room, and a pair of bathing pools that provided purified water for drinking or bathing. It was in this room which Ged now called the Practice Center that he was trying to impart his skills to Shu Kwai, Junior, Billy Iowa, and Rocket Rogers. The Phoenix and Hassan Parker sat at the side, both cross-legged, watching with great interest.
“The simplest form of this move is a shield, making it an effective block to the offensive strikes I have shown you,” said Ged, demonstrating an arc of the right arm in a circle to his right side.
“You know,” said Phoenix, “Master Bres taught Alec and me a very similar stroke, but it led to a killing strike to the neck or groin.”
Ged looked grimly at the red-haired boy. “I prefer not to attach that sort of thing to this move, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I think I prefer your way,” said Phoenix with a smug grin. “It will prolong the battle and make things much closer. You know, more challenging.”
“It allows you to protect yourself without killing,” reminded Ged. The other boys all looked at him with questioning faces.
“If Alec were here, he’d say it protects you better to end it quickly. Bres would say that the kill is the only worthy goal.”
“I would rather not be compared to Bres, if you don’t mind.”
Phoenix smiled a more genuine smile. “You don’t have to convince me, sensei. You are much better at this than the new Black Spider Leader. It is because your motives are so much purer than his, I think.”
“Thank you.”
Ged allowed Billy Iowa to try an offensive strike. Four times he deflected it easily. The move worked.
“Practice with your partner,” said Ged.
Shu Kwai paired himself with Rocket. Junior squared off with Billy. All four of them were dressed simply in loin covers and tabai boots. Rocket also wore his ever-present cowboy hat. Ged watched bare arms and legs flashing as they worked on the technique. All four boys were distinctly different from each other. Shu’s skin was yellow-orange in the Gaijinese manner. Rocket was a pale peach color like Ged himself. Billy was Indian bronze, while Junior was blue. Still, Ged couldn’t help but marvel at how they meshed together whenever they tried to accomplish the same goal.
“You know,” said Ged, “It is our differences that make us strong as a whole. We are blessed by being different, complementing each other.”
Phoenix laughed. “Is that wisdom, sensei?”
“I hope it is,” said Ged, somewhat sheepishly. It wasn’t easy to tell if he’d really won Phoenix over or not. The boy was more dangerous than the others, his Galtorrian lizard eyes so much harder to read.
Suddenly there was a loud fwooping noise. Two more students appeared in the Practice Center. They were both naked and connected to each other in the most embarrassing way possible. It was a deeply blushing Alec Songh with a writhing, moaning Jadalaqstbr held in his arms.
Ged was a little shocked, to say the least.
“What is going on here?” asked Shu Kwai, immediately incensed at what he saw. Rocket and Billy couldn’t help but giggle. Junior looked on with fascination.
“Ooops!” said Alec. “I guess it’s pretty obvious what is going on.” He pulled away from the girl, trying to cover his embarrassment with his hands. “What I’m wondering is how we ended up here?”
As young Jackie came to her senses again, she couldn’t help but blush deeply also. “I guess I lost control of my power. I’m so sorry, Alec.”
“Hmm,” said Ged. “I believe this is a breakthrough, although I would’ve preferred to find it out a different way.”
“What do you mean, sensei?” asked Shu Kwai.
“Well, we did not know before it was possible for a Psion like Jackie to teleport two people,” said Ged. “We need to know if it can be done again.”
“I’m sorry, sensei,” said Jadalaqstbr. “I was so overpowered by a new experience that I didn’t know what I was doing. My inner eye activated almost by itself.”
“Can you teleport back to the room you were in, get your clothes on, and both come back here again?”
“I don’t know,” said the embarrassed girl. “Do you think we have to be doing the same thing on the way back?”
“Yes!” said Rocket. “Try that again!”
Jackie blushed.
“No,” said Ged. “Hold onto him and try to take him with you.”
The girl gingerly took hold of Alec’s arms again. The fwooping sounded again and the two students were gone as suddenly as they had come.
“Should you have let them go like that?” asked Shu Kwai. “Don’t you think they need to be punished for what they were doing?”
Ged shook his head. Perhaps Shu was right. Still, who was Ged to judge the guilt of others in this area? “We cannot punish them for being humanoid. I will talk with Alec about it, but it is really a thing between their consciences and themselves.”
In a few more moments, the two children reappeared, this time fully clothed from head to toe. It was obvious they had felt quite mortified by their experience. Jadalaqstbr had demonstrated before that teleporting with clothes on was not difficult.
“Before the lectures begin,” said Alec with a frown, “I want to tell you, sensei, that I love her. I am not just defying you. And, Shu, it’s none of your frakking business what Jackie and I do.”
“I love him too, sensei,” said Jadalaqstbr. “He didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do.”
Ged nodded. “We need to have a private discussion. This class is dismissed for now.”
The boys all filed away, Alec and Jackie staying behind to face the music. Alec had a look of determined defiance on his face. The music would have to be about birds and bees, and right and wrong. Ged knew what a parent and teacher would have to say in this situation, his mother had once had this discussion with Ham and Ged. It wasn’t going to make things any easier for any of them, though, especially Ged.
“The Wings of Imagination”Bird-brains speak outYes, this is in the air. See? No space suits.Travel by “airship”If we cannot fly, at least our spirits doTravel by bubble-blowing, gum-chewing goldfish.We all have wings… sometimes.
My book advertised here is the best book I have that hasn’t gotten a single reader yet. I am trying to promote it by giving out free Kindle e-book copies for free this weekend. That tactic is supposed to generate readers and reviews. So far, two days in, only one free book has been selected by anybody on Facebook, Twitter, or here on WordPress. I mean, even clicking on a free book and then never reading it helps me as a marketer. But I am not getting any of that.
I did better with Recipes for Gingerbread Children, especially the first two days. But I admit, even though it shares a time, parts of a plot, and characters with The Baby Werewolf, it is a better book.
But tying the two books together has no visible effect.
I will, however, keep trying. I have other good books to promote as well as this one. Perhaps people are too afraid of werewolves to buy it, even for free.
Click on this if you’d like a free e-book. Every single one clicked on helps.
My book is free this weekend in e-book format. This book is a werewolf story, a murder mystery, a comedy, and a slice of life in the lives of the kids who make up the softball team and liars’ club that is the Norwall Pirates.
I have been running free-book promotions on Twitter and Facebook with limited results. But people are reading my books. Now that I will soon have 14 books published and available on Amazon, I can run one free-book promotion per month, as the author’s right to run that sort of promotion without paying for it renews every three months for each individual book.
This month I am promoting The Baby Werewolf for the first time.
Here’s a run-down of the previous promotions.
So, as a reminder, the next promotion I am trying this next week is for the novel The Baby Werewolf.
Because I was a teacher, I have a thing about kids, and making pictures of kids.Some kids, of course, tell lies… a lot. Or maybe all kids…
But kids have an inherent beauty.
And kids are naturally innocent and good.And they are naturally imaginative and individually unique.No matter what culture they come from…Or what color they are…They are worthy of making pictures of… And they are worthy of love.
My new novel, finished the first time the day before yesterday, is not what writers call a rough draft. My writing process consists of doing rough draft, revision, and proofreading chapter by chapter. Or, as I call them, canto by canto.
It was written following an outline that existed first in my imagination as it was played out like a television show, dreamed up episode by episode knowing what would ultimately happen by the end of the story.
So, the process about to begin is not a second draft. It is not a revision-step either, though minor revisions may happen in the final pass before publishing. It is merely a final proofread where the story is reread as a whole, and given necessary corrections of typos and boo-boos. As a writing teacher, I have seen too many young writers skip this final, critical step. They don’t go back and read the whole thing as one piece of writing, stepping back far enough to view the work of art as a whole. How can any good writer only read the thing through as he or she writes it and figure it is good enough as it is? It may be that, but it is probably not.
Adjustments will occur for me because this new novel uses characters from a series of novels in which time passes and people change. Those adjustments are what you can safely call revisions. The character of Milt Morgan is appearing in the novel as a narrator. He has appeared in the story cycle three times now, in three different novels, and this is the first time he is ever used as a first-person narrator. He has changed and grown up a bit from novel to novel. This time he is no longer a virgin. He has freed himself from the cycle of abuse that he and his older sister both endured from alcoholic parents. He has a deeper understanding now of what magic really means and what meaning it gives to his life to call himself a wizard. But he has yet to come to terms with how lying and fantasizing about life can lead to consequences. That part of his future story will be tackled in another story that is a novel in my head, but not yet written out in novel form. That is a future writing project called TheWizard in His Keep. So, I must check this novel to be sure that all the pistons in the engine of his personal story arc firing properly in this book to ensure that it carries him forward into that new adult character he must later become. Those pistons in the engine are what revision is really all about.
Characters will die in this novel, as they do in almost every novel I write. Usually at least one bad guy, and one good guy. Of course, the doomed ones are not fated to change in this book. The story is set. I won’t be surprised by a death in this story the way I was with Snow Babies, and The Bicycle-Wheel-Genius. Of course, this story is about Immortals, and it is possible that a character dies in this book who doesn’t stay dead.
The final pass through The Boy… Forever will not be a rewrite either. Rewriting is what I am doing to AeroQuest where whole chapters (cantos) are added and left out, New characters are created. Old ones are deleted. And the plot changes in how the details come together. And though the main plot points remain, spread over four books instead of one, they are reorganized and better fleshed out.
That book is becoming books. The original and the rewritten are quite different from each other. For one thing, the new versions will make use of my cartooning skill and allow the books to be far more illustration-filled. Rewriting is a total do-over.
So, my baby book is still not quite ready to be born. But it is a complete book. Only the messy business of giving birth remains.
The planet Stanley was beautiful in a primitive sort of way, but covered with an endless, nearly unbroken jungle on its entire land surface. Strange reptilian birds fluttered through stifling, pollen-saturated air. Primitive Lemurians called out from height to height in the tops of the jungle canopy. Their simian cries spoke of fear and death and loneliness, the need of the semi-intelligent to cling to each other in the face of the predatory jungle darkness.
The pinnace rode upward on a pillar of repulsor force, using magnetic pulses to push away from the planet’s wild green surface. King Killer, Dr. Hooey, and Willie Culver watched it go with grim faces. Marooned on a jungle planet full of unknown creatures that hunt all that lives and breathes.
“What will we do now?” asked Willie.
“We’ll be fine,” assured Hooey. “What Admiral Tang doesn’t know is that I’ve already read how this turns out. There is an Ancient archaeological site in the southern hemisphere that contains an Ancient artifact known to the Time Knights as a “transmat”. It turns anything that steps onto it into a tachyon stream that can physically transport anyone or any physical thing to any other time and place in the galaxy that has another transmat.”
“What are you saying?” said King. “You are planning to scramble our molecules and send them on a particle beam across space? You really know how to do this? You’ve done it before?”
“Well… no. I’ve never done it before. But the book says I will figure it out in time to save us from certain death. You and I will be fine, King.”
“What about me?” asked Willie. “Do I make it out too?”
“Well,” said Hooey, “you’re kinda the one-episode character. The kind the writer sends along on the mission to allow for a terrible death without killing off a main character.”
“What! I’m gonna die? AAARGH!”
“Don’t panic yet,” said King. “We are quite capable of surviving this. All of us.”
“Yes, quite,” said Hooey, “now we need to head for the archeological site.”
“Is it close by?” asked Willie.
“About eight hundred kilometers to the south.”
“Good Lord!” growled King. “You aren’t making this any easier, are you?”
“What do you mean?” said Hooey. “I just have to follow the right timeline. I didn’t choose any of this.”
At about that moment something large gave them a glimpse of itself in the undergrowth. It was the creature soon to be known as the Stanley Damnthing. It was a large porcine predator with ears like an elephant, a mouth like a toothy wolverine, and the overall body shape of a ten-ton hog.
Catch a Falling Star 