Sometimes people break,
And then, they fall apart,
And it takes a jigsaw master,
To Puzzle back their heart.
And if a foot falls off,
Quite busted on Monday’s hump
They may be legless, headless, limp
And lying in a lump.
But no face is ever busted
To a point of no repair,
And lips are pasted back in place
With a smile that wasn’t there.
I have just finished the final edit of The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. PDMI may not be ready for another novel from me, but it is ready for an editor or beta reader to be looking at it. I will not be making any further changes because of my perception of the shape, style, and meaning of the novel. I need input to proceed. I need to advance to publication.
This novel is about a lot of things. It is science fiction. It is a time-travel and alien-contact story. But the thing it is really about, theme-wise, is friendship. It is about the friends we need, the friends we have, what makes a friend, and how you treat a friend. It is about love. It is about love that has nothing to do with sex. It is about love between boys and girls, about love between boys and other boys, about love between a man who has lost his wife and son and a boy who has lost his best friend, and even about the love between family members who love each other even when they disagree and don’t like each other very much. It is also about love between a boy and his rabbit and how it changes when the rabbit is turned into a rabbit-man by the time machine.
Okay, part of the reason that all sounds so terribly complex, is because of the structure I adopted for this novel. This novel is a unique sort of sequel to Catch a Falling Star. I call it a Prequel-Equal-Sequel because it takes place before, during, and after the events of the other book. The primary characters are also different. The main protagonists in the first book are only minor supporting characters in this book. The supporting characters from Catch a Falling Star, the inventor and bicycle-wheel engineer Orben Wallace, and his next-door neighbor boy, Timothy Kellogg (also the grand and glorious and ludicrously uproarious leader of the Norwall Pirates, a small-town liars club of country boys), have become the protagonists.
It was all a very complicated process to write, but also strangely fun and deeply engaging to do. I originally assumed because it was overly complex and facetious, that it was really not that good.
Re-reading and editing, though, has caused me to think that it actually a very good story. I know that it is not as good a piece of writing as either Snow Babies or Magical Miss Morgan, but it has a very significant part to play in the over-all story arc of my home-town novels. It develops critical characters like the two protagonists, Mike Murphy, Blueberry Bates, Cudgel Murphy, Mary and her daughter Dilsey Murphy, and, of course, Valerie Clarke. So, this is a sort of celebratory post. I have finished another project and must now move on to the phase where I must try to get it published and publicized, packaged and promoted.
Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Spring cleaning is how I have spent at least a portion of my lonely invalid’s Spring Break. I get to walk the dog and clean the house while my family is enjoying the somewhat chilly beaches of Florida’s panhandle. Well, it isn’t all misery. As I was cleaning in the library upstairs, I came across a set of drawings from the 1980’s that I had been looking everywhere for. You have no idea what kind of treasure exists under stuff until you start putting stuff in other places. I picked stuff up, and low and behold… treasure. How long since I last moved that stuff? I have no idea. Stuff moves around in the library constantly. Some of the books fly off the shelves in the middle of the night, I swear it. But this stuff wasn’t books, so it was becoming a permanent accretion of stuff. Not yet icky stuff, but it was painter stuff, brushes and oil paints and mixing bowls and acrylic paints and linseed oil and all kinds of stuff that can become very icky in an upstairs room in Texas with no air conditioning.
So, let me give you a look at what I found before I start trying to turn it into writer’s stuff and Paffooney posts.
This first picture is called Bobby, because Bobby Zeffer sat for the portrait of the boy. (You are aware that I don’t use people’s real names in my work. So, Bobby, if you read this post and see this picture, you will have to remember that it is really you.) (No chance of that, though. Bobby is not illiterate, but I know he hates to read.) I could also call it Horatio T. Dogg, because that is the name of the talking dog detective who smokes a pipe and wears a hat and was the main character of a mystery novel that became too silly to finish. It turned out to be one of those stories where I reached the point of having a Tyrannosaurus leap out of a wormhole and eat all the main characters. I gave up on that story rather abruptly.
The second picture is rather obviously Robert Newton playing the part of Long John Silver in the Disney version of Treasure Island. I was still in my twenties when I drew this. I was inspired to try my hand at further portraiture because the picture of Bobby turned out to actually look like him.
The third picture is the reason I was desperate to find these old drawings. It is one of my prescient pictures. I drew it in the 1980’s from an image that haunted my dreams as a young teacher. I later realized how remarkable it was while I was teaching in Cotulla in about 2000. The girl was in my seventh grade fifth period English class. I can’t tell you how many times I had to dig this picture out and stare at her face. Almost twenty years before, six or seven years before she was even born, I drew this girl, and it looks exactly like her. I became even more mystified by this portrait when the boy walked into my classroom last year. He was from Africa. Eritrea to be precise. He was a wonderful, soft-spoken, highly-intelligent boy with a deep Christian faith in God. I almost went crazy searching for this picture so I could compare what I had drawn to the real boy. It turns out he has a bit less hair in real life and a small scar above his left eye. How did I not see that in my dream?
The last picture was designed as a cover for my graphic novel Hidden Kingdom. I have recently revisited that project and I am thinking now more strongly than ever of trying to finish it. I can do a lot of drawing with my arthritic hands as long as I only do a little bit at a time. And this whole drawing thing, this raging addiction, has finally become fun again now that I am retired and have the time to do stuff. Not icky stuff… Treasure!
There are a number of really, really goofy facts about me that I will reveal in today’s post… No one is trying to blackmail me over these things, believe it or not. I have no money. And I have no reputation to protect. I am nobody. Just a silly, goofy, loony old nobody. But I have a few chuckles now and then at my own expense.
Revelation #1; The clown nose in the picture was a souvenir from Cirque du Soleil. We went to see them in a parking lot in Frisco, Texas. They had an actual circus tent. When I was five, I told my parents I wanted to be a clown when I grew up. Nobody believes me when I say it, but I achieved that goal. They say, “But you were a school teacher!”
And I say, “How is that different?”
Honestly, I have worn a clown nose and played harmonica in front of a classroom full of twelve-year-olds. I can make teenagers laugh so hard the principal has to check to make sure they are not gleefully setting me on fire or duct-taping me to the wall. (Duck-taping sounds funnier, but you have to be accurate when describing real events from modern schools.)
Revelation #2; I am a closet nudist.
I used to be associated with the AANR, a nudist/ naturist organization in the latter part of the 1980’s, I met the nudist publishers through stamp collecting and they tried to recruit me. I bought books and videos from them. I have actually been naked for an entire day… once. I knew nudists in Austin where a former girlfriend stayed over several weekends with her sister who lived in the clothing-optional apartment complex on Manor Road. I am not brave enough to walk around physically naked in front of people on a regular basis though. So, I am a closet nudist. Only a nudist in my closet. I get a lot of mileage out of naked jokes in my fiction, though, because, well… naked is funny.
Revelation #3; I keep scrapbooks filled with collages made of pictures from magazines, newspapers, photos I’ve taken, pictures I drew myself, poems, short snippets of things I find funny or ironic or autobiographically important, and secrets like I am sharing with you today. (The picture of Goofy seen here is one I colored myself from one of the old coloring books left over from my kids’ coloring book days. I hate to see unused coloring book pictures go to waste.) I call these my magical tomes because I use them as source material for the spells I weave in my fiction. I also use many of the images for drawing and painting as models. I also discovered I can borrow whole images and make new art using my cheap-o substitute photo-shop program.
Revelation #4; It is totally by accident that I have come to look like the most important character in Snow Babies, the novel that PDMI is slowly publishing for me. Catbird Sandman is an old hobo who wears a coat that has so many patches on it that it 
has become a patchwork crazy quilt. He wanders around the country, appreciating the world and its people, and using his considerable store of mysterious abilities to charm, help, and change people. He carries around a book, a well-worn copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and quotes from it, treating it like a sort of Bible-like source of spiritual wisdom. The character looks like Walt Whitman. And now, though not intentionally, so do I. I grew the beard and long hair because of psoriasis. It attacks me under the edge of my jaw line and all around the back of my head. It is easily scratched and bloodied, and then infected when someone cuts my hair or I try to shave. So I have given up that battle and gone all hippy-dippy. It sorta fits with the whole jobless, shiftless, former nudist sort of persona that I have been cultivating as an author.
So what is the equation Goofy Squared all about? Well, if you take the square root of the four Goofy revelations in this post, you come up with Goofy times two. So Goofy obviously equals one. And I think I have clearly proven that I am the goofy one.
I have to admit to having cheated on my first love. But I have come back now to be faithful from here on out. Last Summer I bought one of those free-refill cups at RaceTrac. But it was unfulfilling. You only get 20 oz. in the free refill cup. And the free refills expired at the end of July. So I have come back to the daily, or even twice daily, 32 oz. cup of Diet Coke from QT. You knew that’s what I meant, right?
I know all the employees at QT at least by sight if not by name. I don’t even have to tell them any more that the plastic cup I am using is a carefully saved and cleaned cup so that I deserve the refill price. (I am not a curmudgeon who has to save ten cents on every purchase. I do it to re-use and recycle and save the planet Earth from wasted plastic. Really I do.) They also know without my saying that even though it says “debit card” on the front, it works as credit. (Except for that one kinda stupid guy who only works the really late and really early shifts.) One of the workers there is a neighborhood kid that was in my class for two days when I was a substitute history teacher at Long Middle School nine years ago. He’s changed a lot from when I first knew him. He has turned from a goofy, bean-bodied twelve-year-old with big brown myopic eyes and a fly that never stayed zipped into a massive hulk of a twenty-one-year old service station associate worker. He doesn’t even realize that I knew him when…
Grandma, Henry, and the Princess on the Beach
…and I know it is kinda pathetic that I am now so limited in my contact with the rest of humanity, especially with the family away in Florida for Spring Break, me stuck at home with illness and a pooping dog, and being retired without any working-man’s daily duties any more, that a visit to QT is the highlight of my day. But it isn’t. The highlight occurs when I start writing. I enjoy laughing at my own funny-bits in this post, and the novel that I am working on… well, flights of fancy is putting it mildly. I have been up in World War I biplane, in the midst of a dogfight between a promising young Allied pilot for the Lafayette Escadrille and a German ace who represents evil incarnate and is being controlled by an evil alien-designed robot from the future. I also have been in the tunnels under Castle Sinistre, or Château Sinistre as it is known in the Somme. There I have been with the time-travelling heroes who are trying to rescue a rabbit-man created by an evolutionary science experiment gone wrong and an insane brother-in-law of the scientist who created the rabbit-man. My imagination breaks free of the stifling cage my old, lame body and my current life have become.
This little essay quite accurately reflects what I write and why I write it. Happy people and healthy people and normal people would all be on the beach instead of where I am now. They would never be home-bound Emily-Dickenson writer-people whose daily highlight is a cup of Diet Coke from QT But I am in the clouds now, somewhere over the rainbow, and I am content, because that’s the corner I’ve written myself into.
Filed under feeling sorry for myself, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
The Photo Paffooney I have provided for today is one I have been sitting on and pondering over for several months now. It isn’t the cloud formation that is troubling, it’s the light. You see, the problem is, it was early morning. The sun was in the east, not far above the horizon. This picture shows two bright lights glowing behind the clouds in the southern sky. So, what were they? Lights that merely hovered there. We are in the zone flown over both by DFW and Love field. These weren’t airplanes. I checked UFO reports continuously. Three times unidentified objects were reported in the Dallas Fort-Worth area. The reports were online, but not covered by local media, newspapers or TV. In fact, they rather swiftly disappeared from You-Tube. So, what does it all mean?
Well, you know I am a nut-case. If you’ve read any of my tinfoil hat posts, you know I think the Roswell incident revolved around at least one crashed ship from another star system. I also think the primary proof that we have that we are not the only intelligent beings in this universe is the very fact that the government has worked so hard to convince us that it is not so. Liars tend to protest too much. And there is an ever-increasing pool of whistle-blowers that have risked everything to come forward with tales of close encounters and government programs to conceal the science we have learned from back-engineered alien space-crafts. You don’t have to believe me. Look up the Disclosure Project and Dr. Steven Greer and Astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Hear it in their own words on You-Tube. I am a kook, but I’m not the only one… and some of them have impressive resumes.
Am I claiming, then, that my picture shows UFO’s from outer space? Of course it doesn’t. It is an unidentified phenomenon that would be easily explained if I just had a few more facts… like the amount of facts I have looked at that make me think that We Are Not Alone.
So, was the purpose of this post merely to remind you that I have an idiotic faith in flying saucers? Not at all. I am in the midst of week of total isolation at home. My family went to Florida for Spring Break to visit my oldest son. I stayed home with the dog (somebody has to feed her and pick up poop). Actually, I am not well enough to travel and I convinced them that it would be okay to go without me. And it is okay too. I may be full of self pity and feeling lonely and blue right now like some sort of fool, but I am not alone. By myself, sure, but not alone. I got to thinking about all the people my life has touched over the years. I have known teachers in four different school districts, people in five different communities, workers at QT where I buy my Big Q cup of Diet Coke every morning, family members by the freight-train-full, cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, great aunts, grandparents long gone, and over 2,500 students who sat in my 31 years of classrooms. I guess I know a few people, huh? And none of them have truly left me… not even those who died. As I continue to deteriorate and die… and continue to put my wealth of life experience into silly fictional forms, I realize they are all still with me. It is the only real wealth a human being ever has. I, like you, like all of us, am never alone.
Filed under aliens, autobiography, being alone, Paffooney
I have been doing an edit on a completed novel called The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, and I have discovered that I have grown quite a bit as a writer since I first began practicing the craft. This particular story has been rattling around in my brain since 1977. The mad scientist who is the title character, Orben Wallace, is based loosely on me. It is also to some degree a favorite science teacher from high school mixed up with a rather eccentric college professor whose bizarre nature led, apparently, to some really profound insights about the scientific reasoning process and how a person thinks rationally. From this character recipe I have learned the scientific method of experimenting, observing, theorizing, and testing theories works in all areas of life, including the complex mess that is our social life and relationship muddle. Order can be imposed on chaos, and even when chaos is not controlled, it can still be tamed.
I have learned also a thing of two about writing science fiction. I have made this story very science-y by adding elements of time travel, UFO’s, and conspiracy theories… as well as genetics, nutrition, black holes, and history from 1916 (World War I). I have done significant amounts of research because, even though the science is all about big, black, hoo-haw lies and prevarications, it sounds a lot more realistic and palatable if the science is right.
I have learned a few things about writing sequels and tie-ins. This novel is technically a sequel to Catch a Falling Star. No, that’s not right either. It is a prequel-equal-sequel because it happens before, during, and after the previously published book. I have learned to pick up scenes from the other book and rewrite them from the point of view of a different character than the story before. The dialogue is already fixed, but the interpretations and commentary on everything is from a whole different perspective. Not easy to do, but very enjoyable and educational.
I have learned that even though I am basically writing a comedy it also has to have its beautifully sweet-sad moments of melancholy to achieve balance and depth of theme. Two beloved characters die in this book, whereas in Catch a Falling Star only the villain dies without getting a last-second resurrection at the end. We do terrible things to our characters sometimes if it gives the book deeper meaning and resonance with reality.
I do still slavishly rely on the ridiculous. One of the characters in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is a rabbit who bites a high-tech carrot attached to the time machine and morphs into a rabbit man. Millis, the pet rabbit, is the second Paffooney I am repeating for this recycled sort of post.
I have also learned that by using my obsession with that which is surreal, I can actually write things that make me laugh even though I’ve read and re-read them ten times, and am now reading them again. Humor comes from word-play and cleverness as well as from situations full of slapstick.
So, whether you can stand my purple paisley prose…or not, I am definitely working towards throwing a new novel out there… into the world of publishing… or am I throwing it at your head instead?
Filed under NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Be warned… this is one of those art things that people use to post naughty pictures on the internet. Some of my conservative Christian friends will tell you that the local art museum is one of the most atrocious sources of pornography and images of naked people you can find. It is a terrible thing. People being exposed to what people look like if they take their clothes off! How could I do such a dastardly thing as to draw people… naked?
It is difficult to rationalize my terrible crimes. I mean, the “Beauty and the Beast” picture is clearly the depiction of mental depravity and sex addiction from the mind of a fiend. There could be no other explanation of it, right? I mean, Beauty’s stark nakedness can’t possibly represent fearless innocence in the face of ugliness… or a compounding of meanings that have to do with the notion that true beauty exists also under the outward ugliness of the Beast. After all, I am a cartoonist. How dare I think that I have the same right to draw naked people as some great painter or long-dead artist?
It doesn’t count for anything that I had art training in college and sat through at least two courses in anatomy drawing where I not only drew skeletons and body parts and clothed people, but also sat down in front of live nude models (mostly fellow art students, but all were paid for modeling… I think I posted elsewhere about what happened when it was my turn to model… but I also think you have to search my posts yourself if you want to know more about that embarrassing episode).
I must also confess that I have had some experiences with naturists. Here we are talking about those crazy hippie-inspired folks who go camping in the wilderness with their kids, take off all their clothes, and go hiking and biking and playing volleyball in front of real bears. It was there that the artist in me first noticed there was a difference in anatomy, shape, color, and form between bare kids and bare adults. There are distinct differences between my pictures of Eve and Artemis here, based solely on the fact that one is an adult and the other a child.
I am not trying to depict something evil and horrible that will strike you in the eyes and corrupt your very soul. I am not a pornographer or a pervert when I create these drawings and share them with you. They really represent only about one per cent of all the drawings in my portfolio. They represent mainly my need to get the form and lighting right on the most fundamental level. They are an attempt to share something about what is like to be human. Being naked is a part of the life of everyone except the most monumental of prudes who don’t ever get naked and probably wear long underwear in the bathtub even in the summer. Let me end with the first paragraph of Kenneth Clark’s 1956 book, The Nude; a study in ideal form.
“The English language, with it’s elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word “nude” on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central object of art.”
So, you see? I am not merely making excuses for posting naughty pictures on my blog. At least, not unless all artists are making the same excuses and there is a vast world-wide conspiracy to put pornography in every art museum… Conspiracy? Wait a minute… let me think about that some more.
I am trying to hold everything together. I have made my plans, including plans for dealing with irrational things that some people might do. And so, it is time to go visit the rabbit people.
The Rabbit people represent the people and personalities from my past, fortifying me with good memories and pleasant thoughts. I depend on my interior mental life more and more as my body breaks down and my present life is more and more limited.
The hero is a younger me, leading the way to places I have been before and ready to defend me with old truth.
But there is no such thing as a perfect sanctuary. No castle of willpower and mental toughness is ever impregnable.
A thousand things now assail me. Unpaid tax bills, surprise expenses, continued struggles with illness, and other horrible goblins of chance and bad fortune continue to hound me.
The battle is not over. I have not yet lost, though I have not won yet either.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, rabbit people
On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in. (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.) And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people. Rabbits are people too. So, I have been walking among the rabbit people. Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people. They are not trying to profit off you. They are not trying to get everything they can off you. They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.
I often see myself as a rabbit person. In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.
As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students. If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”
“Oh, no, thank you sir.”
“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight. You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”
“Oh, no sir,” they say. “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”
And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody. Teaching is like that. You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.
And so life goes on like that. Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.
I have started on the final edit of my novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis. During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident. He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person. He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.
So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit. That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you. You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul. (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup. Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)
Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, rabbit people
