Now, that’s a picture done right, Ruben. Good job!
Category Archives: Paffooney
Total Picture Time
Truth in Advertising… the Mickey Version
Here’s the thing… Mickey is to the art of advertising as Cassandra in the Iliad is to prophecy.
Cassandra, you may remember from the last time you read the Iliad in the original Greek, was gifted with true prophecy. What she foresaw was destined to come true. Unfortunately, she was cursed to never be believed by any she told the prophecy to.
Similarly, Mickey can tell a good story, full of imaginative storylines and compelling plots and themes. But anytime he launches an ad, here, on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere, it will not be seen, or, if seen, not responded to.
Case in point; I worked at reformatting, illustrating, and improving the following e-book. I set it up for a free-book promotion. Only four people bought one for free, and only one was brave enough to read and review it.
So, I will try again, but for money. It’s cheap.
Of course, I know that this has been a terrible weather week for Texas, and most of the nation. Reading a book about aliens is probably not the foremost thing on people’s minds. I can usually count on Twitter nudists to give my free books a boost even when there are no nudist characters or nudist ideas in the novel. But Friday is the day when Twitter nudists usually say, “Howdy!” to each other on Twitter, and I gave away none on Friday and only one on Saturday. This book has some nudism going on at one point on the apocalyptic hellscape planet in the story, but that is mostly a matter of naked aliens and plants. So, I can’t give copies of this book away to anybody, not even to fellow nudists.
Catch a Falling Star is the book that Stardusters and Space Lizards is a sequel to.
It is the story of the Telleron invasion of the Earth, landing in a small town in Iowa, invading in invisibility cloaking devices, and failing to even be noticed by most people in town.
The e-book is $3.99 on Amazon, so it is not as good a value as the free one.
This book is about fleeing aliens arriving by accident at a dying planet. It is a planet experiencing biosphere collapse just as Earth will probably do in the near future. And the alien characters, most of them tadpoles (Telleron children) take active steps to try to save the new planet so they, too, might have a place to live.
Anyway, buy the book. It’s cheap.
But since Mickey the advertiser is like Cassandra, I have to say the opposite. Don’t buy this book. It is awful. You will not love it. You will not think all your friends need to read it too.
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, Paffooney, publishing
A Bit of Naked Truth
As a nudist… well, I am not a very good spokesman for nudism, because I rarely get to be nude… and never really socially. I have seen a lot of nude people in my life. My own children, my nieces and nephews… I have at various times seen all but one of them naked. I have actually changed a lot of diapers, though that has been pretty much a long time ago. I have been around naked nudists a number of times. And I even spent an afternoon at a nudist camp one time. But this isn’t about being a nudist… even a never-nude nudist. It is about the morality of drawing nude people.
I enjoy drawing the nude human form. Man, woman, or child… nudes are beautiful to contemplate. But in our generally sexually repressive society, child nudes are a touchy subject. A lot of people who want to tell you what is wrong with your life and what to correct about yourself believe nudity is always about sexuality. And here’s a bit of naked truth about nudity… I am a victim of a sexual assault when I was a mere boy. Not an assault that provided any sexual gratification to me. I was sexually tortured and caused pain, both physically, and long-lastingly psychologically. It interferes with the entirety of my psycho-sexual development. I have never touched a niece or a nephew when they were naked, except when changing them as babies. I have trouble touching my own children, nude or not, as a result of what my attacker did to me. I have missed out on a humongous number of hugs and caresses, and maybe even kisses. My love life has always been a challenge, and it makes me approach child-nudity with great caution and trepidation.
The thing I have learned about the nudes I draw and paint, especially the child nudes, is that the pictures, no matter how innocent in concept, have a dark edge. They are not evidence of any sexual misconduct on my part. Considering the facts of my own life, I am determined to never be any kind of threat to any child. In fact, they are safer with me than with most other people. I know what can actually happen if you do not guard against it.
That is not the way some people will see them, though. I have been accused of being too fond of young boys before. But no kid who ever spent time with me as a mentor, dungeon master, or friend would fail to contradict that. Several did contradict that. I am provably not a homosexual, let alone a child predator threatening to boys. But this picture of Fernando Faun is not evidence of anything anyway. The actual model wore swim trunks in the photo I made it from. Only the face is Fernando’s, and I definitely changed his race and skin-color. And if anything at all can be learned about this picture, it is that, in truth, it is more a picture of me than it was of Fernando. It is about enjoyment of the naked part of being a boy, a zest for life and sensuality, that I painted because the fact of it was denied to me. I never got the chance to be like that anywhere but in my imaginary world where this painting is actually set.
I really can’t claim, though, that young girls would be as safe around me as boys are. I would never actually touch one, or even intentionally make her feel uncomfortable if I could help it. I could not promise, though, that my old brain would be completely free of all lustful thoughts.
But the whole point I am trying to make is that we are naked in more ways than just the physical. There is a need to be naked more. And by that I mean, we need to shine lights on our inner selves, to show the world who we truly are. I should not hide myself or my work from the sight of others. Letting you see these naked pictures, and at the same time, talking about my naked fears, is a kind of naked honesty that helps me to talk about what happened to me once upon a time. And it helps me heal. Repressing such things does harm to the soul.
How Computers Actually Work
This is how computers actually work. I swear that it is true. I know, I know… I have on occasion stretched the truth just a bit… like down the block and around the corner where I tied it around a lamp post. But in my defense, I write fiction. This is not fiction. This is a narrative of actual experiences that I managed to live through and learn from.
You see, as I was working on my writing, I underwent a plethora of computer malfunctions that made me really, really mad. I took my rubber stress ball and threw it at the far wall. It bounced back directly into my left temple, making me see stars, and then, apparently, summoning a genii. He was standing there grinning at me.
“How can I be of service, master?” he said with magical sparkles in his white teeth.
“Oh, I just wish I could see inside the computer to know why it does these terrible things to me every time I press a key.”
“Your wish is my command, master.” He poofed me in a pink and blue cloud of genii magic, and suddenly I was tiny and digital, able to walk inside my computer and take a look.”
“What makes you the most mad, master?” the genii, whose name I learned was Computus, asked me.
“When it deletes stuff for no apparent reason…” I began.
“Ahh! You need to see the Desert of the Deletion Dervishes.”
So he took me to a digital field of file flowers, where all the files that contained my best saved work were growing peacefully. There were all the maniacal digital dervishes on digital horses, busy slashing the stems of my file flowers with their digital scimitars.
“Aagh! No!” I cried. “Why are they deleting my stuff?”
“Oh, do not worry. They are focusing on the files you use most and deleting only those. They are very efficient in carrying out their orders.”
“And who gives them these orders?”
“Why you do, sir. When you give the computer orders from a drop down menu, you are rarely clicking on the order you intended to. And “Save” is close enough to “Delete” to make our work simple.”
“And why do I keep having new windows opening up randomly where I don’t want them to?”
“Ah, the Public Pool of Pop-up Peris! Let us go see that too!”
So he poofed me into a pit of electrical fire filled with electrical fire beings who were busy crafting evil pop-up windows to plague me.
“So, these creatures are filling my screen with ads for hemorrhoid creams and Asian dating sites?”
“Yes, and surveys about why you love President Trump and thought Obama was terrible.”
“And why when I click on the X’s to get rid of them, do two more appear?”
“Oh that’s simple. They purposefully make the X’s so tiny and the surrounding area so sensitive that if you don’t hit the exact center of the X precisely, then it knows you want to see two more ads chosen specifically for you by the mind-reading genii.”
“But the ads are always the opposite of what I actually want to see!”
“Well, of course they are. Computer genii are the kind made entirely of fire. We call them Efrits, and they are the most powerful evil jinn we have available.”
So then I awoke with a painful knot on my forehead and a new understanding of why this post was so difficult to write. The computer treats me so evilly because that is precisely what it was designed to do.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
It is, of course, one of the most powerful, masterful, and best-known pieces of music ever written.
Mozart completed the “little serenade” in Vienna in 1787, but it wasn’t published until 1827, long after Mozart’s untimely death.
The Serenade is incorrectly translated into English as “A Little Night Music”. But this is and always has been the way I prefer to think of it. A creation of Mozart written shortly before he hopped aboard the ferryman’s boat and rode off into the eternal night. It is the artifact that proves the art of the master who even has the word “art” as a part of his name. A little music to play on after the master is gone to prove his universal connection to the great silent symphony that is everything in the universe singing silently together.
It is basically what I myself am laboring now to do. I have been dancing along the edge of the abyss of poverty, suffering, and death since I left my teaching job in 2014. I will soon be taking my own trip into night aboard the ferryman’s dreaded boat. And I feel the need to put my own art out there in novel and cartoon form before that happens.
I am not saying that I am a master on the level of a Mozart. My name is not Mickart. But I do have a “key’ in the name Mickey. And it will hopefully unlock something worthwhile for my family and all those I loved and leave behind me. And hopefully, it will provide a little night music to help soothe the next in line behind me at the ferryman’s dock.
Filed under artwork, cartoons, classical music, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, Hidden Kingdom, magic, metaphor, music, Paffooney
Talking to Nobody
I entered the classroom silently. Death doesn’t have to make any sound when it enters a room, but I remember many times when I entered a classroom in a fully enraged-lion roar. Probably too many times.
This time it was a small lesson to a small class. Little Mickey, ten years old, was sitting there in a front-row desk. He was wearing that stupid purple derby hat that he always wore in his imagination. And he was wearing nothing else besides.
I gave him that old death-eye stare of disapproval. He grinned and shrugged. “Hey, I like to write about nudists, okay? They tell the truth more than most people.”
I simply nodded.
Sitting the next row over, in the front seat also, middle-aged Mickey was slumped in his seat like the cynical, world-weary teacher-thing he actually was. I nodded disapprovingly at him too. “I know, I know,” he said. “My time is running out. I have to get started on my writing plan for real this time. My stories will never get written if I don’t.”
The third seat in the third row contained Old Coot Mickey with his wrinkled clothes, his long Gandalf-hair, and his frizzy author’s beard. He grinned his goofy grin at me and nodded at me cheekily. “I’ve got fourteen novels written and published now. Taint my fault that nobody ever reads ’em. They are mostly good stories, too.”
I rolled my eyes at the dark ceiling.
On the chalkboard I wrote out. Today’s Lesson Is…
“I know! I know!” shouted little Mickey, naked except for his purple hat. “The next novel is A Field Guide to Fauns. It is all about nudists in a nudist camp. I am definitely down with that!”
“Is that really a good idea, though?” asked middle-aged Mickey. “I think I was meant to be a writer of Young Adult novels, like the ones I taught so often in class. I know how those books are structured. I know their themes and development inside and out. I know how to write that stuff.”
“But the little naked guy has it right. You have ta be truthful in novels, even as you tell your danged lies.” Old Coot Mickey made his point by punctuating it with a wrinkled hand thumping on the top of his desk. “You have written novels with characters forcing other characters to make porn films in The Baby Werewolf, and sexual assault of a child in Fools and Their Toys, and lots of naked folks, and betrayal and death… All of that is the kinda stuff kids really want ta read. And them stories don’t glorify that stuff neither. Stories can help fight agin that stuff.”
“Remember, that stuff is hard to write about because I actually went through some of that stuff in my own life. It’s possible for even a fiction book to be just too real for a YA novel.” Middle-aged Mickey had entered fighting mode with his fists on his hips.
“But the underlying truth is why you had to write those stories to begin with. You have truth to tell… But in fiction form,” argued little Mickey.
“And horrible experiences turn into beautiful survival stories and heroes’ journeys with time and thoughtfulness and art,” said Old Coot Mickey.
I agreed with all three of me. I nodded and smiled.
“But you are Death, aren’t you?” asked middle-aged Mickey.
“And you’ve come to take away at least Old Coot Mickey!” declared little Mickey.
“You’ve got me all wrong,” I answered all three of me. “I am not Death. I am Nobody.“
The Art of Contemplation
I believe one of the primary reasons that art exists at all is because we are thinking creatures with a need to spend serious time in deep minding of the consequences of existence. We need to question everything. And art helps us do that by depicting the thoughts that existed first in the mind of the artist, and then must be translated through experiencing into the mind of the viewer.
Filed under art criticism, artwork, imagination, insight, Paffooney
The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 9
Canto 9 – Mr. Mephisto
Mark and Shandra were both hanging up against the theater wall by their strings. Both were naked. But they were no longer real children. They were now both jointed wooden marionettes.
“Mark? Can you still talk?”
“How did you say that without moving your mouth?”
“You must have some idea, dummy. Your mouth didn’t move either.”
“Yeezus, Shandra, what happened to us?”
“That damned toy man changed us into Pinocchios.”
“Oh, no! Does that mean we have to get swallowed by a whale in order to turn back into human beings?”
“Gawd dang, Mark. You are such a child. We have been cursed by some kinda monster devil-man. We are screwed.”
The curtain opposite the two puppets parted and a man came through. It was the man who had pulled them out of the toy man’s magic box.
“Well, well… awake again, are we?”
“What are you doing to us, devil-man?” shouted Shandra.
“You are a feisty one, I’ll give you that. It’s no wonder the archangel asked me to hide you two.”
“That’s what you be doing to us?” asked Shandra.
“You need to not have Poppa Dark find you for a while, am I right?”
“Well… yeah. But you changed us without our permission.”
“And you made us naked too,” whined Mark.
“Oh, shut up, Mark. You ain’t suffering by being naked. You don’t even got no little wooden dick on you as a puppet.”
“She has a point. While in this guise, you can more-or-less be anything or anyone by simply dressing you up in new puppet costumes. Want to be a girl for a while Mark? New wig and a gingham dress, and voila! Mark becomes Mary.”
“Do I gotta be a girl? Or can I be like a pirate?”
“Or maybe a soldier?” said the man.
“Oh, yeah. That would be neat!”
“Now, wait just a minute, devil-man. Who the hell are you? You gonna help us? Or cook us and eat us?”
“Now, Shandra, my dear, if I were going to eat the two of you, would I have turned you into wooden puppets? Kind of harder to chew that way, don’t you think?”
“Well, how do we know you don’t like to eat wood like a dang beaver?”
“I have no plans on changing myself into a beaver.”
“Who and what are you?” Shandra sharply demanded.
“My name is Nicholas L. Mephisto. I am the owner of Aunt Phillia’s Toy Emporium. And you two have been changed into marionettes to put on a few shows before we try to solve your collective problems.”
“Well, whatever you gonna do to us… you better at least put some clothes on us. And don’t you dare touch my private parts while you are doing it!”
“Shandra, you don’t any longer have any private parts,” reminded Mark.
“Oh, yeah.”
Mr. Mephisto smiled at the girl marionette as he picked out for her a nice red dress with white polka dots and a frizzy blond wig to complement her ebony black-painted skin and super-sassy attitude.
Filed under horror writing, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Authors and Books You Need to Read
Me!
Of course, I am recommending my own books. These are some of my best.
I also drew all of the pictures you will see in this post.
Authors and their books who made me who I am…
Terry Pratchett… any Discworld Novel and Good Omens (written with Niel Gaiman)
JRR Tolkien… The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Ernest Hemingway… The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Harper Lee… To Kill a Mockingbird
Mark Twain… The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Charles Dickens… David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities
Thomas Mann… The Magic Mountain
Thomas Hardy… The Return of the Native
William Faulkner… Light in August
Rudyard Kipling… The First Jungle Book
Robert Lewis Stevenson… Treasure Island
Authors you will love if you try them
Mitch Albom… The Magic Strings of Frankie Pesto, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Paulo Coelho,,, The Alchemist
Willa Cather… My Antonia
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry… The Little Prince
Any books by these Science Fiction Authors;
- Theodore Sturgeon
- Ray Bradbury
- Arthur C. Clarke
- Frank Herbert
- Douglas Adams
- Michael Crichton
Any books by these Fantasy Authors
- C. S. Lewis
- David Eddings
- Michael Stackpole
- R. A. Salvatore
I have avoided including anything that I haven’t personally read yet. And I haven’t included anything by William Shakespeare, although you should read any play of his you have ever heard of.
Filed under old books, Paffooney, reading, Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 
Into the Spring
The weather, amazingly, is more than fifty degrees Fahrenheit better than it was a week ago today in Texas.
The sun is now out.
“Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day...?”
‘Of course not. It is not Sonnet 18 out there.
It… “art NOT more lovely and more temperate.”
And William Shakespeare is just a pen name.
But I saw a pair of Robins in the park while walking the dog.
And I don’t mean Robin Williams and Robin Hood.
I mean the red-breasted birds that herald the arrival of Spring.
Though it is not Spring. And I have trouble sitting here and writing this due to painful hemorrhoids.
Still, it seems like something new is starting.
It has now been an entire three years since the start of the pandemic. More than a million people have died. Including my cousin Karen and my high school friend Tim.
It is definitely time for something new, something better, to begin.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, birds, commentary, healing, humor, Paffooney