Category Archives: Paffooney

April 5, 2015 · 9:17 pm

First Novel Yuckishness

One of my biggest regrets as a writer is that I started doing it before I had any earthly idea how to do it well. I know as a former writing teacher that you have to start by starting and you learn to write better by writing. There is no substitute for that redundantly repetitive redundancy of practice. And that is the mistake I made with the first novel… not the first one I ever wrote… the first one I ever tried to get published. I finished slapping the stupid thing together in primarily superfluous paragraphs and short chapters, and then sent it off to a publisher before I lost all willpower to try. The mistake was in choosing a publisher that was revolutionizing the publishing industry with cheap-o flim-flam tricks. If you have ever considered Publish America as an option… don’t. They work well as a way to get your students published and excite them about writing, but you can send them a bag full of grocery lists and they will publish it, telling you they have no intention of changing your unique style… all editing is left up to you. It is a crap guarantee that guarantees crap, no matter how good a writer you are. If I had wasted one of my good babies on the venture, they would own the rights to it for seven years. They do diddly-do-dah to promote or market your book. Everything is up to the author. They don’t even read the book. They make some effort to contact your family and people who know you and hawk the book at ridiculous prices that I wouldn’t pay for Hemingway and are satisfied with the profits they make selling a dozen copies.

Now that the term of my contract is up, I have to decide what to do with this novel. It is a hog-slop mish-mash of words and weirdness that no one could every truly appreciate as literature. It is juvenile blather that I would be truly ashamed of if more people had bought it and wasted their time reading it. (I don’t regret my friends and relatives reading it. They deserve that fate for one thing or another over the years. No one is without sin.)

You can see that I have made some attempts already to adapt it into something somewhat more-or-less interesting by using my rights to adaptation to make it into a graphic novel (These panels are merely rough draft form. If I do this, it will end up in a much more finished, web-comic form.) I am able to reclaim the entire book as of October of 2014. I just haven’t decided yet if it is worth the effort.

It was a learning experience to do this Aeroquest book-like thing. I learned a lot about what not to do. But I did end up $12 dollars in the black from the experience. The second book was a much more expensive proposition. I paid I-Universe for editing, proofreading, and training in marketing and promotion. They took the time to teach me all the proper steps and how to work towards eventual success. They even set up this blog for me and trained me how to do it. But I had to pay them. At this point, three years later, I am still in the red with this book. And they never mention that to be a success as an Indie novelist, you have to write more than one of these danged novel-things. Hoo-boy! But I am on it. I will write to my last breath, and I guarantee you that I will tell some stories.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as adventure, Aeroquest, artwork, autobiography, first novel, graphic novel, humor, ninjas, novel writing, Paffoonies, publishing regrets

April 3, 2015 · 12:22 pm

Family Stories

If you’ve read any of my posts so far in my thousand-mile journey as a blogger, you have probably already noticed that when I write, I am definitely a story-teller. I can’t go a day without telling somebody a story. I usually tell lies when I write because I tell fiction stories. The names of the characters are never the real names. Sometimes the events are not the real events. That’s what fiction writers do. We tell lies. It can’t be helped. But in the midst of those lies, the truth usually comes out. The characters and events are shadows of what is real. But the feelings, the understandings, the moments of revelation… those are essential truth… the truth that fuels the very mind of God.

One important revelation happened to me yesterday, a black day that added to a long list of very black days that buffet me with heartache and worry as I struggle to raise children in a system designed to defeat me. We were in a local restaurant after a long day of school withdrawals and doctor’s visits, Henry, the Princess, and I. I won’t call the restaurant by name because that would give Taco Bueno free advertising that.they didn’t pay for… um, okay… that was a mistake. But I’ll probably remember to edit that out later… probably. Anyway, we were sitting at a booth in Taco Good-o waiting for our bean burritos, chips, and dip, and the Princess, whom you sorta see in the paffooney today, began telling me about Atlantis Alpha. It seems Alpha team is having trouble keeping all their members alive. The leader has a brother and a sister. She believes they have both been killed, but it turns out that the brother is actually alive… Well, you get the idea. The Princess is writing a script for an animated cartoon she means to produce in the future with her friends in Anime Club at school. It all sounds very tense and exciting. And it means that just like me, she is a story-teller, bent on relating something important through science fiction and fantasy.

I am just guessing here, but I believe the story-teller gene came from my Grandpa. He was my mother’s father and he was a farmer who could tell a funny story with the best of them. He used to tell us stories all the time about the infamous Dolly O’Malley and her husband, Shorty the dwarf. It was my understanding that these were real people. There were houses in the southeast corner of our little Iowa farm-town, the infamous Ghost House was one of them, that were collectively known as Dolly-ville because she had purchased all four at some point, probably with the idea of profiting off real estate, and had let them all collectively rot into ruin. But, as with most of my Grandpa’s stories, their sheer veracity was always in question. Not only did I get my penchant for changing names (and I have used no real names in this story… forget about the Taco Bueno thing), but I got my knack for embellishing to make it funnier from him too. The story I remember laughing about the hardest was the time that Dolly and Shorty had gotten into an argument about politics. Apparently Shorty was using a string of bad words against some stupid thing that President Truman had done, when Dolly, not known for using color-free language herself, got tired of his invective and physically threw him off the porch. Of course, the second or third time I heard that story, Shorty landed in the middle of the hog pen in the front yard, and being a small man, nearly drowned in pig poo. What can I say? I was maybe seven. Pig poo was funny. (I know I used a real name in this paragraph, but honestly, you don’t know it wasn’t really President Eisenhower.)

So let me tack on a hopelessly disconnected conclusion to give you the moral of the story. Story-telling, like the appreciation of pig-poo humor, runs in the genes. And I shouldn’t worry so much about those times when things go wrong for my children. They are story-tellers too, and can probably lie their way out of any dungeon of doom.

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Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as autobiography, clowns, family, grandpa, humor, Paffoonies, story-telling

April 2, 2015 · 12:14 pm

Doing the Devil’s Dance

We live in world that is profoundly unkind to non-conformity, weirdness, or even basic differences. How do you explain to a child that his school doesn’t want him there any more because his uniqueness is too much of a bother, a pain to deal with, an issue too complicated for a school administrator to get their little gray minds around? I can’t tell you the details of what we are going through right now. Too many privacy and legal issues get in the way of complete candor. But Texas school systems do not handle issues of exceptionality well. They are designed to crush originality and individual differences and grind out a workforce that will be compliant, that won’t complain when they are underpaid or mistreated, that will all be alike in many important ways. They would also like to turn out students who vote Republican, but it is all right if they turn out to be the type of citizen who won’t or can’t vote. Your life can be turned upside down over minor infractions. It is a law that Texas students must be in attendance over 90% of the time. If not, they are going to hound you, fine you, take you to court and even jail you. Because students must all fit into the same mold. No square pegs allowed. They do make exceptions for health problems… but only the right kind of health problems. Stomach cancer. okay, panic disorder, not okay… There are laws in place to protect those of us with special handicaps… but this is the de-regulation State. The city of West, Texas blew up in a fireball because too many regulations means lower profit margins. Of course, they don’t hesitate to apply regulations against me and mine. That is another matter (and the profits flow the opposite direction, offender to State).

So, what will I do now? I will do the best I can. I complained about it here to the best of my ability. The child even remarked that one day he will be wiser and more experienced than others because he went through this. There are other means of education, even if I have to do it all myself. And I can take the frustrations and turn them into future funny fables that will ring true, because they are.

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Filed under autobiography, Paffooney

Tagged as angry rants, autobiography, education, paffooney, pen and ink, self pity, Texas politics

March 29, 2015 · 1:34 pm

Art Self-Edited

I have been working at illustration and drawing for the majority of my life, but it took computer technology and digital photography to allow me to maximize the use of my abilities. Let me go through a couple of case in points.

The Red-Haired Girl picture is a good example of what I can do. I originally drew the picture to illustrate a Charlie Brown poem. Here is the poem if you don’t remember it. (A convenient excuse to re-post something and fill this post with words already written.)

Little Red-Haired Girl