I am having trouble writing today. I keep passing out for no particular reason. I know for a fact, if I go to the ER they will put me in the hospital and my tenuous hold on financial stability will go down that money drain. And my heart is not really the problem. My last hospital stay only yielded the theory that arthritis in my neck, in proximity to my spinal cord, is causing EKG machines to get false readings that suggest I am having a heart attack when I am not. It also complicated my bankruptcy situation. I cannot afford the health care I need. And I am not the only one in Trump’s America that has that problem. I don’t think I am going to die today. But there are no guarantees in life. Especially not in this hazy, cold morning in America.
Not everything is bad on this side of the mirror, though.
My family returns from Florida today. I have earned money from book sales on Amazon for the fifth month in a row, even though I am averaging less than two dollars a month. The sun is shining again in Texas after a stretch of arthritis-wringing pain from bad weather. I bought a gingerbread house kit at Walmart. I have at least one substitute teaching job this coming week.
I have passed the 35,000 word bar for my work in progress, long enough to qualify as a complete YA novel. But it isn’t finished yet, and probably going to be nearer to 50,000 words.
So, going forward, the world now looks very different. Thanos has been defeated. Trump is being impeached, though probably not removed. And though I am a pessimist, and am preparing for the worst, I am not unhappy about what the future may hold.
There is a reason why anything in my artwork starting with a rabbit is assumed to be autobiographical. I raised rabbits as a 4-H project from about the age of 10 and we kept rabbits in pens until I was finishing my undergraduate degree. (Rabbit chores fell to my little brother when I was away from home.) In many ways, I was a rabbit-man. My personal avatar as a school teacher was Reluctant Rabbit.
The panda known as Mandy in my cartoon world is an avatar of my wife, an immigrant from the Pandalore Islands.
There is often an exaggerated sense of adventure in my cartoonally weird Paffoonies, the very name of which is a fantasy word.
I have been known to actually believe gingerbread can be magical enough for gingerbread men to come to life once baked. It is the reason I bite the legs off first, so they can’t run away.
I have been known to see elves, fairies, and numerous other things that aren’t really there. In fact, a whole secret hidden kingdom of them inhabited the schoolyard in Iowa where I attended grades K through 6. They were all mostly three inches tall. The biggest ones, like dragons reaching only about six inches tall at their largest.
Of course I am afraid of death, evil, and… (shudder) mummies.I think of art and story-telling as a form of music. I am a troubadour whose songs (like this one) are often completely silent.My fantasy art tends to be more “comic book” than “art gallery”.
Canto 69 – Coffee Time on the Shadowcat (the
Blood-Red Thread)
My first meeting
with Ham Aero and the crew of the Leaping Shadowcat was in the Trophy
Lounge on the lower deck of the Shadowcat herself. The charming white-furred Lupin boy, Sahleck
Kim, led me there when I arrived from the White Duke’s shuttle.
“So, you’re the
cabin boy?”
“Oh, yes, Dr.
Marou. It’s hard to believe, I
know. I’ve gone in a matter of a few
weeks from Count Nefaria’s dungeons where I was destined to die, to working
aboard the space ship of the great Safari Master and adventurer, Ham Aero. My future is suddenly bright.”
The child’s eyes
glistened like an excited puppy’s as he told me his tale of rescue. He led me to a seat in the Trophy Lounge
where I could sit and eat one of Sinbadh’s sumptuous meals. There was a stuffed head of a dragon-mouthed
pakoollie beast from the planet Samothrace looking directly down on my plate,
trying his hardest to ruin my appetite with his ugliness.
“My
boy, do you have any coffee?” I asked.
Sahleck grinned
in a wide-mouthed way that only Lupins can manage. “It’s one of Commander Sinbadh’s
specialties!” He said.
“Bring me
some. Please.”
The boy hurried
to the mess. At that same moment, Ham
and Duke Ferrari entered.
“I
guess, with Cloudstalker’s departure, you are the Captain of the ship again,”
said Ferrari of the curly moustaches.
“Oh, I think you
still out-rank me,” answered Aero modestly.
“Hello… You must be Professor
Googol Marou.”
Ham offered his
hand to me and I gladly shook it. “Yes,
I’m honored to meet a man who has traveled almost as much as any explorer.”
“The
reputation has not entirely been earned,” said Ham.
“This
is YOUR ship, Ham,” said Ferrari, frowning slightly. “I think you should be the captain.”
Ham smiled. “I won’t argue that now, Han. Have you met Dr. Marou?”
“No, no… Nice to make your acquaintance, Doctor.”
“I too, am
honored,” I said. “I am not used to
meeting such powerful inter-planetary politicians.”
Ferrari looked at
me as if he were slightly annoyed. “You
know the White Duke. He’s a bigger light
in this galaxy than I am.”
“Well, if you say
so.” I know I must’ve been grinning ear
to ear to hear my own friend being praised in this way. I wonder how Ferrari actually took that.
Ham looked at me
quizzically. “Professor, what’s in all
the boxes you had installed in the skinning and mounting lab?”
“Oh! My invention!
I have to tell you about it.”
Gleefully I related everything they needed to know about the Marou
Ancient Light Holo-Assembler Telescope and maybe a tad bit more as well. I explained how my sheer genius had allowed
events to be viewed from light years away, and thusly, years in the past.
“Umm, that’s very
good, professor,” Ham said. “I guess
that will come in handy…”
He didn’t speak
with enthusiasm, but I knew he was actually quite impressed with me.
As a writer seriously immersed in a particular work in progress, I find myself talking more and more to certain people who exist only in my head. They are the characters in my novel, The Boy… Forever.
The novel is itself an epistolary novel. That means, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it is made up of letters, notes, diary and journal entries, and other personal writing of the central characters. It also means that I have to become the different people who write these things. At least while I create each individual artifact that goes into the mosaic of first-person narratives.
Anita Jones, pictured here, is the letter-writer who starts the plot in motion when she gets a very disturbing letter from her cousin, Icarus Jones.
Icarus writes about his problem with becoming a midget, and his response to it being a plan to kill himself. It seems that he simply stopped growing at the age of ten. Now, being a fifteen-year-old in the body of a ten-year-old, he writes a suicide note in the form of a letter, and then goes to jump off a bridge into the Mississippi River. But when he does, he survives. Or, rather, he succeeds, but cannot remain dead. He doesn’t know it, yet, but he has become a human mutation known in the secret world of unknown things as an Immortal.
Tian Long, the Celestial Dragon
Icky’s problem becomes worse when it is discovered he is being pursued by another immortal, a sort of vampiric immortal who needs to consume the essence of other immortals to stay alive. He is a three-thousand-year-old Chinese Celestial Dragon who is able to assume a human form.
Neither Icky Jones nor Tian Long the dragon, though, really needs to be in my head. Icarus himself only writes the first and last letters of the book. Tian Long, the villain, does not have a say at all in telling the story. The only part of it he writes are the wizard spells he uses to confound everyone, and most of those are in Chinese.
Milton John Morgan, the Wizard of the Norwall Pirates
Besides the letters that Anita Jones writes to her cousin in Dallas, Dot Jones, the story is also advanced in the journal entries of Milt Morgan, one of the leaders of the boys’ gang in rural Iowa known as the Norwall Pirates. He has been asked by the Freshman English teacher to keep a daily journal and write every day in 1976. This he struggles to do, but gains writing and typing skills as he goes along, especially when he befriends Icarus and learns about the dragon pursuing Icky.
Milt is full of imagination and a sense of adventure, a thing that makes him an unreliable narrator, not above embellishing the truth as he writes his not-so-much- daily-as-infrequent journal entries.
Brent “the Cat” Clarke
The story is also taken up by Brent Clarke, the leader of the Norwall Pirates. Brent wants to be a policeman or a detective or something like that when he grows up. He takes careful investigation notes on everything, and he is the first one to become suspicious of the Chinese man and his step-daughter who pick a house in the town of Norwall that they want to live in right before the actual owner and occupant of the house mysteriously dies in a falling accident. Brent befriends the local Sheriff’s Deputy and sets out on a serious possible murder investigation that yields some very disturbing results. His notes are very detail-oriented and generally fact-based. He carefully records his own eye-witness accounts of everything.
Sherry Cobble, the nudist, calls herself the smarter and more beautiful twin.
Sherry Cobble, the more outgoing of the identical twins known as the Cobble Sisters, is a happy nudist with a very positive body image for herself and her twin sister. She is a very positive person over-all. She and her sister Shelly had started out keeping a “Lovely Nudist’s Diary” between them, but Shelly is not nearly as interested in writing and storytelling as her sister. So, Sherry takes over the diarist duties with the same sort of glee and enthusiasm she has for promoting nudism to her friends, especially the Norwall Pirates. It is her goal to eventually see all of the kids in Norwall naked and happy just as she and her sister Shelly always are.
Those four different character voices are the main voices I have to work with in telling this fantasy adventure story in much the same way as Stoker tells the story of Dracula.
So, if I begin to seem like I have a disordered mind full of multiple personalities, it’s because I am a novelist, not a mental patient or a vampire or even a Chinese dragon in human form. I am simply trying to tell a story by allowing four distinctly different characters to live inside my head.
I have been working on a new story that I have been writing in my head for at least twenty years. The novel was originally untitled. But I started working on it by calling it the Forever Boy. But that made it sound like a super-hero sort of comic-book story. So, I adjusted the title to The Boy… Forever.
I had the idea for a cover when I turned the villain’s primary hench-person into a character formerly used in a Dungeons and Dragons game.
Her name is Firefang, but as she enrolls in the Belle City High School freshman class, she is known as Fiona Long, whose name the gang shortens to Fi. The reason for the name change is that Fi is actually a red Chinese dragon disguised in a human form, a teenage girl.
Her stepfather is secretly a thousands-of-years-old Chinese Celestial Dragon disguised in human form. His name is Tian Long. And in order to stay alive for another twenty years, he must consume the essence of an immortal human being. That immortal happens to be Anita Jones’s young cousin Icarus who became immortal at the age of ten.
So, I tried putting those last two images together to make a cover. As you can plainly see, that didn’t work very well. The dragon seems to be coming out of Fi’s hair like a giant cootie. So. I tried to make it more of a collage.
That was still not good enough. So, I tried even harder to make it look like a collage.
I added the main character, Icarus Jones, and some color contrasts.
To me, that’s better. You are welcome to criticize. It will still be a while before the story is done. I may still change it more. But I am basically satisfied… not Forever… but for now.
Yesterday I went once more into the breech, willingly, stupidly, but also bravely. I put in a whole day of Pre-AP English classes for 8th-grade smarty-bunnies. I know those kids are supposed to be the good bunnies. And many of them were. But Pre-AP classes can also contain many little snarky bunnies who are smart enough to carry out evil plans and do truly sinister and wicked things.
Yes, snarky bunnies can eat you, and some will not even spit out the bones when they are finished.
A good share of the problem was that the weather had turned rainy and cool in the early morning hours. That cranks up the pain input on my arthritis meter and makes me feel cranky and out of sorts. That also makes it harder to control what stress does to my diabetic blood-sugar levels. Yelling at kids makes the blood-sugar levels shoot upwards, and then my stressed body chemistry will make everything crash. Bummer. Pity the snarky bunnies. I took it out on them. (I should here point out that I am one of those teachers who calls it yelling when I quietly recite a sin-list to a snarky-bunny perpetrator and run down the menu of possible consequences just to make him or her squirm before taking them back out of the hallway after forcing them to choose the behavior they will excel in rather than suffer the appropriate consequence. They often don’t realize their actual peril because I tend to smile and enjoy pronouncing sentences.)
I tell off a snarky bunny, though forgetting to draw the plewds of nervousness… on him.
I actually only had a handful of snarky bunnies to sharpen my teeth on. Too many good bunnies inhabit Pre-AP classes. But there were two in 3rd period, and a handful in the last 7th-period class.
I told them the story of how English teachers, especially old ones, are often afflicted with Lycanthropy. (That is… werewolf disease. I had to define it for them, as well as the word, “afflicted”. Pre-AP students, yes, but only 8th-grade little ones.) I told them that they didn’t have to worry because the full moon was last week and that I hadn’t actually eaten a misbehaving student since 1863 (at least, as far as I could remember.)
“Are you threatening to kill us?” one bright snarky bunny said.
“No, of course not. I am just warning you that I do not like afternoon misbehavior, and I am capable of growing my fangs in the late afternoon class.”
They were mostly quiet and busy little bunnies. But two of them, who were actually best friends, started arguing with each other just after the last bell. Instead of scurrying home to afternoon carrots and gruel, one pushed the other with two hands, and then that bunny lost control and hit the other on his shoulder-blade with a slap-fist. I got to keep them after class for more sin-lists, confessions, and good-behavior-vows.
So, all in all, I had a good day at Field Middle School. I enjoyed chewing on some snarky bunnies. And I thanked the teacher thoroughly for being out and giving me the chance. Oh, and I think I earned at least a couple of dollars for doing it.
It was difficult
enough to piece the whole story together before Artran left his parents, but
it’s about to become even more difficult to follow. Let me try to straighten you out about the
plot of this history. Well, maybe
straighten out isn’t such a good term. It’s
more like having a giant Gordian Knot of colored pipe cleaners without being
able to cut it apart with a sword.
Instead, you have to follow the ins and outs of the different colored
strands and try like hell to make out how it all fits together. That is by way of analogy, mind you. Don’t go thinking that this entire history is
made of literal pipe cleaners.
The thing is, it
started out as a straight-forward tale with two brothers leaving Imperial space
because of persecution. They were
determined to make a new and better home somewhere out in unknown space.
It’s surprising,
though, how quickly the unknown becomes a part of the known, and how the known
can become a heavy anchor that pulls you back to weighty things.
When Ged sent Ham
in the wrong direction, back into the Galtorr Imperium, we have the first fork
in the plot. Then came the Corsairs’
determination to work together, all except for the evil Monopoly Brigade, and
then, following that, Tron and Arkin and Razor and the rest all get split up
again. More forks in the path. In fact, everything gets pretty much all
forked up.
I see the story
going plot-wise in two directions at once, then with a couple of curly-cues, a
loop-the-loop, and a full back flip. It
gets even more complicated as Dr. Hooey and the Time Knights get involved. I mean, they started meddling with events
themselves, backwards and forwards in time.
It gets pretty hairy in an ugly, back-hair sort of way.
So, even though I
started this chapter in my history as a way to clarify how and where things are
going, I am more confused than ever myself.
You’ll have to forgive me.
Anyway, little
Artran leaving his parents for the first time is important because of the
result. He would fly off from the
impending Battle of Outpost and into history as one of the most
important explorers since Martin Faulkner himself. You’ll see what I mean as the story goes
along, that is, if I don’t get so balled up in it that I meet myself going the
opposite way and forget to tell you that part.
This is not just
a record of the doings of the famous safari masters, Ged and Ham Aero. It is not just a record of the rebellion by
pirates and politicians. It is a story
of how a small boy gets separated from his parents and discovers worlds
undreamed of in our philosophy. Oh, and
don’t forget about the “Teachers in Space” parts of the story. That’s important too.
But this Adagio
is entitled “Pathfinders” for a reason. Admittedly,
not a very good reason, as the path is very hard to follow. But hang in there. The story gets better later. I promise.
For one thing, I myself, Professor Googol Marou, am about to enter this story.
These are ESL portraits, a quiet Chinese girl and a pencil-chewing Hispanic girl inspired these two, but they look nothing at all like this picture.
I have been doing most of these Saturday art posts from my WordPress library of images. I generally try to organize around a theme. Having exhausted myself at Vivian Field Middle School yesterday, school-ish pictures are my theme for the day.
I have a tendency to think in pictures, and these are all school thoughts of one kind or another.
Basketball practice when I was a high school freshman inspired this picture of Brent who was an athletic young friend of mine I went to practice with.Being a school teacher is also being a story-teller. That is essentially what this picture is about.If this much-used picture looks familiar, it is because this is what teaching looks like through my eyes. Reluctant Rabbit holding the big pencil is me in my teacher-self. The students are Amanda, Ruben, Fernando, and Flora.Kids don’t literally go to school naked, but metaphorically they do. They have no secrets from a teacher who knows them well from talking to them and reading their classroom journals. Talking about themselves out loud or in writing is how little people make themselves into bigger people.This classroom portrait is a picture made from my own classroom in Garland, Texas.Some of the characters in my school-ish pictures are actually me and my own school-aged classmates and friends.
Some of my favorite students over the many years in the classroom were major nerds.
I liked them mostly because they were the same exact species as I was when I was a monkey-house-aged student.
Monkey-house is a synonym for Middle School.
Wally shared my obsession with Japanese anime and could draw them better than I could. He was a major nerd. And a totally enthusiastic learner whom other students treated like he was radioactive. I always had time for him when he needed to talk to someone. He was a teacher’s kid at a time when my own son was still little.
This is a class picture from AeroQuest, a novel series about a teacher in space. All of these kids were based on real-life students I had in class once upon a time. One of these kids, pictured as a blue alien, was actually Wally. So, now I need to post this post as there are next things happening on my schedule. Like these silhouette students, I need to get there on time.
I am not, at this writing, feeling very spry anymore. I substituted for an ESL teacher in Irving yesterday. I enjoyed it. But the frosty cold weather took its toll on me, as did the misbehavior of clownish 11th graders. I am left exhausted, and thoroughly convinced that huge high school classes averaging thirty kids in them are not something I am well enough to deal with anymore. I probably need to decide against taking any future high school sub jobs. They make me deathly tired and inspire creepy poetry about mortality in me. Anyway, it caused me to do some picture-making, and some silly poetical complaining.
Catch a Falling Star 
Stepping Through the Looking Glass
I am having trouble writing today. I keep passing out for no particular reason. I know for a fact, if I go to the ER they will put me in the hospital and my tenuous hold on financial stability will go down that money drain. And my heart is not really the problem. My last hospital stay only yielded the theory that arthritis in my neck, in proximity to my spinal cord, is causing EKG machines to get false readings that suggest I am having a heart attack when I am not. It also complicated my bankruptcy situation. I cannot afford the health care I need. And I am not the only one in Trump’s America that has that problem. I don’t think I am going to die today. But there are no guarantees in life. Especially not in this hazy, cold morning in America.
Not everything is bad on this side of the mirror, though.
My family returns from Florida today. I have earned money from book sales on Amazon for the fifth month in a row, even though I am averaging less than two dollars a month. The sun is shining again in Texas after a stretch of arthritis-wringing pain from bad weather. I bought a gingerbread house kit at Walmart. I have at least one substitute teaching job this coming week.
I have passed the 35,000 word bar for my work in progress, long enough to qualify as a complete YA novel. But it isn’t finished yet, and probably going to be nearer to 50,000 words.
So, going forward, the world now looks very different. Thanos has been defeated. Trump is being impeached, though probably not removed. And though I am a pessimist, and am preparing for the worst, I am not unhappy about what the future may hold.
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