Category Archives: Paffooney

November 27, 2018 · 7:54 pm

Aeroquest… Canto 41

Canto 42 – Agent Ace Campfield

     Arkin Cloudstalker had stepped out for a bit of a look around.  Castle Orpheum was too dark and mysterious for his taste.  He preferred a cockpit in space, or even the open air to this dim and dreary underwater place.  He missed his family, wife and kids who lived parsecs away on a moon of the wealthy residential planet called Bird World.  Being a corsair had driven him further and further away from his original vision of being a Galactic Hero.  He wanted to make the universe a better place to live, but more and more it seemed that all he could manage was to become a better killer and criminal.  The lamp-lit streets of Castle Orpheum were deserted at this time of the artificial day-night cycle.  Most intelligent residents were in bed asleep.

     Someone was walking towards him on this particular street. This someone had an orange Kevlar jumpsuit and a very big gun.  This someone clanked as he walked, metal striking the pavement to the beat of a slightly off-kilter step.  Arkin slowed to a stop.

     “Don’t stop on account of me, Cloudstalker,” said the figure. He pulled up short under a streetlamp so that Arkin could finally see his face.  It was an undead Mechanoidface, skull-like and one-quarter metal. The enlarged right eye was a glowing red computerized visual sensor.  “I came to see you face-to-face about a little matter of a bounty.  I am an ace bounty-hunter, Argo “Ace” Campfield.”

     “I didn’t call for any bounty hunter,” said Arkin, measuring the distance between them at about forty paces, easily within the range of the big gun the Mechanoid carried.

     “No, Count Nefaria hired me with money he got from a Galtorrian Knight he called Sir Saurol.  With Nefaria dead, I’ll probably get even more money for your severed head.”

     Arkin leaped for a nearby alley opening, rolling and coming up with his emergency blaster pistol, a one-shot plasma gun that he kept in his vest for occasions like this one.  Campfield’s deadly green beam burned leather, hair, and the top layer of skin off of Arkin’s left shoulder.

     “Gazzool!” groaned Arkin, using the only Bird World cuss word he still remembered, mild though it was.  He aimed unsteadily and fired his blaster.  The air sizzled with a beam of pure star fire and Campfield’s robotic right leg melted into two pieces.

     “Hah!  I laugh at losses like that!” growled Ace Campfield.  He hopped on one metal leg in Arkin’s direction.  “You may have slowed me down, but my sensors tell me you have no more shots left to take.”

     Arkin knew the undead death-machine was basically right.  He was slightly wounded and weaponless against an enemy who was tireless and had nothing left to fear from him.  He was as good as dead unless he did some very quick thinking.  The alley he had dodged into ended in a ladder that went all the way up into the subsea dome’s catwalks.  From there he could make his way to the submarine pens if only he could get out of range up that ladder before Campfield hopped into position for a good shot.  That would be a darn good trick, since the robotically enhanced senses of a Mechanoid were bound to make Campfield’s marksmanship superb.

     As swiftly as Cloudstalker could run, he bounded towards the ladder.  It was only a matter of moments before Campfield would lock on him as a target and burn a hole through his chest or back with that energy beam.   His heart pounded as he looked up the ladder into the distant grill-work of the catwalks above.  His heart almost stopped for a moment as he saw another face peering down at him over the edge of a catwalk platform.  Did Campfield have a partner?  Was he trapped as well as doomed?  The face was almost as unusual as Campfield’s skeletoid visage.  This new face had crossed eyes and a white fright-wig of frizzy hair crammed up underneath a black top hat.  The silly pink tongue, longer than the normal humanoid tongue, lolled out of the slack mouth.  Before Arkin could yell, the strange face dropped a coil of rope down on top of his head and motioned for Arkin to grab hold with one hand while he waved a skinny rubber chicken with the other hand.

     Having little other choice, Cloudstalker firmly took hold of the rope.  Instantly he was dragged upward by some high-speed winder that thumped him several times against the ladder, but pulled him up to the platform in a matter of seconds.  Campfield spotted him, but even robotic reflexes didn’t allow him to get a shot off before Arkin was safe.

     Face to face with his weird rescuer Arkin tried to thank the man.  “You saved me from certain death just now,” he said, gasping for air. “May I know your name?”

     The man, his tongue still flopping out of his mouth, shook his head yes and handed the rubber chicken to Arkin. 

     “What does this mean?” Arkin asked.

     The man pantomimed turning something over.

     “What?”

     Looking stupidly impatient, the smiling fool took the rubber chicken back and now slapped it forcefully down in Arkin’s hand.

     “I don’t have time for this.  What are you trying to tell me?”

     The man pantomimed turning something over again, then slapped the feet of the naked rubber bird.  Finally realizing something of the nature of the message, Arkin turned the rubber chicken over in his hand.  There was a name written there in purple crayon.  It said, “White Dook”.

     “The White Duke sent you?”  Arkin was incredulous, yet at the same time amused.  The fool grinned and handed him a second rubber chicken.  He turned it over to see the word “YES” in purple crayon.

     Below them, Campfield was at the base of the ladder.  His robotic muscles pulled the one-legged bounty hunter up hand-over-hand at a frightening speed.

     “We’d better get going!” said Cloudstalker.

     He received a third rubber chicken.  When he turned it over, it said, “You said it, sister dear!”

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November 26, 2018 · 10:53 am

Dump the Trumpy Grump

This is the best Trump cartoon I have done of him so far, so I will use it multiple times.

The current President of the United States initially seemed to me to be a gift from the gods of comedy.  I figured it would be easy to make humorous blog posts about a clown who wears orange face paint, wears super-long red ties, and is more cartoonish behavior-wise than Yogi Bear.

But the Grumpy Trump leadership style is more depressing than even that of Rodeo Clown in Chief, George W. Bush, though Trump has managed to be accused of fewer war crimes by international tribunals.  He is so relentlessly inhuman in his every deed that you can’t use exaggeration humor against him.  The reality is too far over the top for that.  And you can’t rely on insult humor, because he does it so much more often himself than any comedian can,  and he really MEANS it.  He doesn’t tell or comprehend jokes unless it makes a good excuse to claim he was only joking.

One of the things he does that bothers me the most is the use of criminals in his cabinet and departments that do all the dirty work.

Sleepy McBoing-Boing, the HUD secretary seems to be in his job to screw things up for poor people who were barely hanging on and turn them into homeless people while he commits crimes to put an expensive dining table in the HUD office for his personal use.  “Let ’em eat cake,” right, Ben?

Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke, heads of the EPA and Department of the Interior are so busy spending Federal budget monies on personal uses that their departments are falling apart, and so the air we breath and the water we drink are now more at risk than they were under Obama, where it was a very real crisis having very real effects.

I think I am through posting criticisms about Trump.  Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers do so much better at skewering the pumpkinhead than I ever could, so look to them for actual political humor of the thoughtful kind.

The only thing I want from Trump now… Now that his tax cut has cost me extra money and his healthcare meddling has made the price of insulin out of my reach… Is for the whole thing to end.  He won’t resign.  You can’t expect Ebola Fever or brain tumors will go away on their own.  But it is so obvious that he has committed impeachable crimes that, for the good of us all, the Congress needs to get rid of him.  The Dark Lord with White Hair, Mike Pence, though deeply evil, would be better.

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November 24, 2018 · 5:41 pm

Hidden Kingdom (Chapter 1 Complete)

Chapter 1

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November 23, 2018 · 4:49 pm

Blogging Advice

The only advice I am actually qualified to give here is… don’t take any blogging advice from me as worth more than diddly-squoot.

Life is like moose bowling because… In order to knock down all the pins, you have to learn how to throw a moose.

That being said, my blog views are gradually going up year after year.  I am followed by readers all over the world, and some of them actually read my blog regularly, rather than just looking at the pictures and occasionally hitting the like button.

I have not yet, however, learned to throw the moose.  I started this blog in order to promote my published writing.  I now have seven published books available on Amazon.  I made $2.60 in royalties during 2018 so far.  So, as a marketing ploy, it has been a total failure.

But as a tool in my writing life, here are some things I definitely count as benefits;

Writing a blog post every day makes the ideas flow more easily and does away with any threat of writer’s block. 

Writing every day is practice and it makes me a better writer.

I have learned how to engage with an actual audience.

I am able to try out various writing ideas without worrying about success or failure.

So, all of these things add value and keep me at this blogging thing which didn’t exist in my early life when I was planning for becoming a writer when I left teaching.

If you are tempted to make the huge mistake of following my advice and emulating me, I would warn you, I do not make a living as a writer, and I never will.  I am a writer in the same way I am a diabetic.  I can’t help it.  I wouldn’t change it even if it were possible.  I have a body of work that I intend to continue to build on until I am no more.  The creation of it is a necessity of my existence.  And I certainly don’t regret a single syllable, though what happens to it when I am gone is not important to me in any way that matters.  I hope my children will keep it as a legacy, but I only do it because it shapes the story of my life.

And so, I continue to throw meese (or mooses… or moosi… or whatever the hell the funniest plural of “moose” is) and continue not to knock down any pins.

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November 22, 2018 · 7:59 pm

Another New Novel Cover

My morning was used up making a cover for The Baby Werewolf out of old works of art and art-editing programs.  I will soon start the final edit and formatting of the book, and I hope to publish it in December.  It is a related story to the one I just published, Recipes for Gingerbread Children.  The two books share some of the same characters, events, and even dialogue.  The two stories, however, have a very different focus and thematic approach to what happened.  It is a gothic novel with humorous overtones.  The Baby Werewolf himself is not really a werewolf.  He is a boy with hypertrichosis, the werewolf-hair genetic disorder that gave Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy his carnival freak all-over fur.  The story is a first-person narrative told by three different characters who all were in Recipes.  Torrie Brownfield, the Baby Werewolf himself, is one of the three narrators.  I can’t wait to see how this two-novel story arc comes together, and if anybody at all will actually read it.

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November 19, 2018 · 4:04 pm

Closing In On It

I am reaching the point that I am almost ready to self-publish another novel.  I am only 30 pages away from having Recipes for Gingerbread Children fully edited and formatted.

Do you know that feeling of dread you get when you go back to a completed manuscript that you have left in the cooler for a bit?  You don’t?  Is it because you have never done that?  Or because you have never dreaded it?  I was terrified that, as good and wonderful as I thought the story was when I wrote it, the impression was a false one based on self-delusion and narcissism.  I dreamed in my nightmare about re-reading it and realizing it was total garbage and a total re-write would be necessary.

Well, I was worried about nothing.  On rereading it, I discovered that the things I was sure I had messed up on were executed well.  The story was precisely the way it was supposed to be after mulling it over and plotting for more than twenty years.  The structure I built it on still seems to work beautifully, and the key themes are still present for the reader to interpret as he or she sees fit.

There is nudity, violence, and horror in this book, but not done in a way that leaves the wrong message in a young reader’s mind.  In fact, it answers questions about life that, as a former school teacher, I strongly believe are on young people’s minds.  It has characters who are nudists and want others to become nudists too.  It has stories about Nazis and concentration camps.  It also has fairy tales that are almost as gruesome as those of the Brothers Grimm.  

The main character and focus of the story is an old German woman who is a Holocaust survivor, a story-teller, and a baker of gingerbread. The character is based on an old woman who lived in our little town when I was a boy.  But though the character is inspired by a real person, the real Old German Lady was not a nudist, nor, as far as I know, a storyteller.  So, most of what you learn about Gretel Stein in this story is really about a story-teller who is me.  I promise, however, that I did not wear a dress at any point while researching for this book. 

It will be a story about fairies fighting to have a place in the modern world though they have shrunken in importance to the size of mice and insects.  It is about finding the courage within yourself necessary to survive a terrible thing like the Holocaust.  It is about self-sacrifice.  It is about love.  It is also about baking cookies and telling stories.  There’s a werewolf in it.  There are also two twin sisters in it who are nudists and spend a lot of the story naked.  It is about standing up for yourself and becoming the hero of your own story.

And the most exciting thing for me is, soon this book will be available from Amazon.

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November 18, 2018 · 5:41 pm

Resolving Unsolvables

This week saw two difficult problems arise that took a whole lot of problem-solving, panic, and unbelievable luck to solve.  I had considerable evidence that my laptop computer was fatally infected with a trojan virus in spite of the subscription I had to Norton anti-virus software.  And on top of that, I had to renew my driver’s license since yesterday was my birthday.  And not an ordinary renew-by-computer sort of thing, but a dreaded trip to the horrid hated DMV.

The DMV was a thorny problem because Texas is a Red State and fully committed to keeping certain people with the wrong color skin, the wrong sort of last name, or the wrong size of bank account from acquiring picture IDs for the purposes of the foul crime of voting for Democrats.  So, specifically, of the long list of things you were supposed to bring to get a license renewed, the birth certificate was a problem for me.  I have a birth certificate, but because of a courthouse fire in Iowa in the 1970’s, it was only a photocopy of a handwritten replacement document.   They had warned me when I called and asked that this would never do.  I had to have an authenticated copy issued by the records department of the State of Iowa.  So, I spent 50 dollars on an expedited official document by express mail, still likely to arrive after the expiration date of my license.

Of course, once I lucked out and received the document only three business days after I requested it, I discovered that the DMV had been moved from the location I had relied on for almost ten years.  And when I did find the DMV office and waited in the cold in the early morning for the doors to open, I discovered that the DMV I had found didn’t actually issue driver’s licenses.  Bummer.  I had to try again the next day ten miles further away in Lewisville. 

I fully expected to be turned away again that day for some unforeseen and petty reason.  Instead, I found the opposite to be true.  They saw an old white guy walking with a cane and thought, “Oh, Republican voter!”  I was moved to the front of the line.  The Indian lady ahead of me was not given a license because she did not have both a birth certificate and a valid passport.  But I got my license with only the expiring license to prove my identity.  They didn’t even need to see the birth certificate.

 The computer virus was just as frustrating.  The only option was to try to find the right software to remove the bug by using the infected computer to purchase one online.  Since Norton had been overwhelmed, I went with McAfee and, fortunately, got a year’s subscription for 60% off the regular price.  I downloaded it, spent three agonizing days on a full scan, then got a result of zero problems found and fixed.  So, as further programs began crashing, I called their tech support and got a guy with a heavy Indian accent to remotely fix the problems for me.  In three hours of time, he miraculously restored my computer and even removed some other unwanted programs slowing my computer which I had been unable to remove myself.  It turned out that the problem may have been caused by another anti-virus program whom I accidentally downloaded with another program package, but then I refused to pay for the upgrade when it reported that it had found five seriously infected files on my computer.  You can’t be too careful when downloading things from the internet, though being careful and vigilant is almost impossible when there are so many horrible things out there that you never suspected people might be capable of.

Anyway, I survived both ordeals and still managed to finish a novel manuscript and got closer to publishing another one. 

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November 13, 2018 · 5:59 pm

Aeroquest… Scherzo 4

Aeroquest banner a

Scherzo 4 – Rolling a Twenty

“So, Trav Dalgoda does it again.  Your total roll of the dice with your skill of plus eight added to it is an impossible success of twenty.  You fly the burning spaceship into a curly-patterned rendezvous with the Leaping Shadowcat.”

“That’s a load of bull-puckie, Mr. M!” said Arturo.  “He always rolls a perfect twelve on two six-sided dice!”

“You agreed that he could use his jack-of-all-trades skill to do this.”

“But it’s a plus eight!  That is just too unfair for a skill you can use to do almost anything.”

“You let me spend all my adventure points on that one skill,” Eddie said.

“He’s right you know.  And besides, if he were to fail that role, then the two ships could crash, killing your two characters as well as his.”

“And mine too!” said Amanda.  “Trav rescued Madonna from the slaver pirates of Mingo remember.”

“Yes,” said the game master, “and her little blue son too.”

“Aw, that little bugger is just an NPC that you put into the story.  I really don’t care if he dies.”

“Eeuw, cold-hearted woman!” said Eddie.

At that moment, Dr.Hooey opened the front door of the young teacher’s apartment.

“Oh, hello.  My time machine must’ve had another brain fart and brought me to the wrong time and relative dimension.”

“Wait a minute,” said Eddie, “Who the hell are you?”

“Yes, exactly, but maybe hell is a bit too strong.  My name is Dr. Hooey.  I am looking for a place to leave a baby from the distant future.”
“A baby?” Amanda gasped.

“Oh, yes.  And who are you, young lady?”
“I’m Amanda Lilliput and this is my boyfriend Arturo Castrovalva.”

“Would you like to raise a baby from the future?”

“Um… no, thank you.”

“May I ask what you people are actually doing?”

“It’s a science fiction role-playing game.  These former students of mine are all playing space-faring characters in a space adventure set in the distant future,” said the goofy-looking teacher.

“Oh, my.  That is somewhat worrisome.  Are you sure you don’t want a space baby from the future?”

“Oh, I do!” said Eddie.

“No, he really doesn’t,” said the teacher.  “Thank you anyway.”

So Dr. Hooey left and closed the door behind him.

“That was weird,” said Arturo.

“Mr. M, I need to make a new character for the game,” said Eddie.  “He will be a time traveler, and I will call him Dr. Hooey.”

”

 

 

 

‘

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November 12, 2018 · 5:03 pm

Living On After Writing

I finished a novel over the weekend. It was one of those novels that you have to write before you die because anything short of finishing it would leave your whole life incomplete.

So, now that it is finished, I can go ahead and die, right?

4clownsWell, of course, it is not as simple as that.  I created a cover for it.  But it is not proofread and formatted and I have to give it time to cool down, being fresh out of the oven, before I read it over again, make adjustments, and publish it.  And I have two other novel drafts that haven’t yet reached the published state of being.  So, I better put off dying for just a bit.  Any clown can tell you that giving birth to a novel that you have been composing for 4o years and writing down for six months takes a lot out of you.  And you have to stop and take a breath.  At least one.  Before you forge ahead with the next one.  I do have Recipes for Gingerbread Children already formatted and I am working through the final edit.  I am still in poor health yet and could drop dead at any moment.  My computer is all funky from some sort of virus, hopefully not computer flu… or computer black death.  So, I am still in a mad rush to beat an unknown deadline beyond which I am really dead.

I don’t have the luxury of dying yet.

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I have to deal with the death of another beloved character,  I can’t seem to write a comedy adventure novel without killing somebody at the end of it.  Shakespearian comedies all end in marriages, and it is the tragedies that end in mass deaths.  But like any clown, I have most things backward in my life.  You learn that as a teacher in public schools, you really are just another form of professional fool pursuing your profession foolishly.  That is kinda what life is for.  And it doesn’t change when you retire and try to become a foolish writer of foolish novels to leave behind as a foolish legacy to a whole foolish world.

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But, as for the question of whether there is life after writing… I really don’t know, and I am still not ready to find out.

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November 11, 2018 · 7:23 pm

Another Novel Done

Sing Sad Songs cover a

I finished another rough draft novel last night.  And when I say rough draft, I really mean I have pieced it together at a rate of about 500 words a night, about two nights per Canto (What Mickey inexplicably calls a chapter), with revisions and editing already complete.  Of course, there is no such thing as a final draft.  The majority of my novels have been plotted and planned and created over the last 40 years of my life.  I will continue twiddling, correcting, and messing with all of my novels until I drop dead.  But this draft I just finished is actually 95% finished and almost ready for publication.  The books I have lined up now for a final effort are Recipes for Gingerbread Children, The Baby Werewolf, and finally including Sing Sad Songs.  Look for all three of them soon.

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