It is said by somebody who wasn’t basically me that any time an artist draws a picture of someone, or paints a picture of someone, or twizzles a twizzle-snoot of someone… they are basically making a picture of themselves.
So, this Paffooney that I paffooned of a purple mouse in a Don Martin-esque style, is supposed to be Mickey the cartoonist. And Mickey is supposedly, basically me.
And here I am as Muck Man, the superhero. It is me because the super power he has is his horrible, non-adorable, and unrelenting stench. The horrible smell of him renders villains and bad people unconscious or worse… sometimes straight to the hearse. And using his olfactory assaults on evil as a way to make something terrible into something with a -someness of awe, makes him indubitably, indelibly basically me.
“Long Ago It Might Have Been”
And here is a picture of a boy who might’ve been my son if only I had been given enough good sense to fall in love with that first blond young lady who first had thoughts about making babies with me. I didn’t. I’m stupid. And now she has only girls. That makes it a picture too of basically me.
And this little not-me was me all along, and as the boy who sees colors, it’s really not wrong. Synesthetic they call it in a name that’s not long, but is resoundingly deep like the words of a song.
And you might argue this one and say that it’s true… “This one is too pretty to be a picture of you.” But you would be wrong on this basis, you see…
The monster inside me is basically me
And here I am all magic and purple, and I just blew the rhyme again, so this isn’t another danged verse. I drew this picture of Milt Morgan from an old school picture of me.
I often say the character in the stories is based on the Other Mike, the other boy I grew up with who was named Mike in my little home town.
But he thought like me, he acted a lot like me. He even looked like me, at least a little bit. So, if I am portraying him, I am depicting basically me.
And this is the naked me, as a nudist back in childhood in Rowan, Iowa, which I never was… not like this… but still am. Because I am a writer. And writers always write about their naked selves, showing the whole world what saner and more prudish people keep secret. If they were truly smart and wanted to keep their secrets to themselves, artists would never draw or paint or write about or twizzle about themselves. In fact, they would make no art at all.
Yes, one of the two models in this painting is me.He was wearing a Royals Little-League shirt, so I changed it for a better one. The ’85 Series was decided by an umpire!He was actually a she, wearing a bikini top, and Asian-American, not Native-American.You probably guessed already that she was not actually blue.The dog was real too.From a Yearbook photo, but Sasha wasn’t wearing a hat. She thinks I made her look like Charlie McCarthy.Only the girl in front wearing her Carl Eller Vikings jersey was real.The people were real, but the flag was photo-shopped behind them.
The most obvious aid that naturism has been to me as an author is how readily members of the online naturist/nudist community are willing to spread the word when my writings include things that they care about. They are much better at caring about my work, especially the parts of it that touch on naturism/nudism, than other portions of the online #writingcommunity is about any of my other work
The website I linked to twice above is a good example. (You might need a Spanish/English dictionary if you don’t normally read the English parts easily.) I have had summer boosts to views here on WordPress two Augusts in a row now due to naturists coming across my posts and linking to them so that their own followers can share in discovering me as an author who is friendly to naturism. My continued online contact with other naturists/nudists on Twitter continues to benefit me in book sales, exchanges of writing tips and tricks, and exposure to the good naturist literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that is out there.
Here are some of the authors who’ve had the most impact on me,
Ted Bun (his pen name) first discovered my nudist characters in Recipes for Gingerbread Children. He did the most to get me involved with other nudist-friendly authors. And his book The Boy On a Baker’s Bike is possibly his best story, out of many excellent ones, because of how much the main character reflects some of my own experiences with being nude around other nude people.
Will Forest edited the book Holiday in the Nudist Colony in which I was encouraged to add a story of my own. His book Co-Ed Naked Philosophy is a wonderful fictional story that works like an encyclopedia of the philosophies behind naturism, the practices of naturism, and the struggle of those actively trying to make the practice of it normalized. I am half-way through the book and finding it an absolutely enthralling story. I am definitely going to read more of his books.
Paul Z. Walker is one of the organizers of the group of naturist-fiction writers that I have become a part of. He also writes a variety of fiction with nude characters in it. I haven’t read any of his books yet, but I own some of them in e-book format and will correct that problem soon.
The drawings I have included in this post are all made from pictures of real nude models, all of them happy and pleased to be seen in the nude.
Of course, the biggest benefits I have gotten from naturism/nudism is not from merely observing it while clothed, but by participating and getting naked, despite the fears brought on by childhood trauma and the general disdain the public at large has for nudity.
It has made me whole again to be a practicing nudist. It has helped me heal and overcome self-hatred. It has helped me overcome depression. It has also helped me understand the kind of honesty and innocence that life requires of us. Nothing bad remains hidden forever, and sunlight heals many moral problems that were festering before being exposed.
This girl was happy with the original pencil sketch of her that I turned into this pen and ink. Her parents were pleased that it did not look so much like her that she could be identified by non-nudists.
This is not supposed to be the same girl, though Katie says this looks more like Naomi than it does her. I suppose she is right. (Neither of these names are the names of the real girls.)
.
,
.
.
.
The most critical thing I learned about naturism and living life naked is that is not about porn or sex. You can see from the drawings I have put in this post that none of the pictures are sexual in content or in any way essentially erotic.. They are merely naked and happy. That is how life should be. At least, in my humble opinion. And I will continue to write stories about it.
Since I have so far miraculously survived the 2020 pandemic, I have nothing better to do then to relate the whiff-a-typical story of the world’s smelliest superhero as he makes his semi-triumphant return to the public eye… like a horrific mud-ball to the face.
If you recall the newspaper accounts of mild-mannered reporter Dark Bent, or even if you don’t, we recall that Muck Man was put into a community-imposed exile until such time as he would actually take a bath with soap and water. Being unable to find soap and water that was even willing to get within a quarter mile of him, MM started with sand baths in Death Valley until he was finally able to sand-blast away the outer hard crust of his personal odor.
You need to remember too at this point that MM’s super power is olfactory based. He alone among heroes had a personal stench so powerful that criminals would swoon into a coma at the mere mention of his name.
But after significant sand-baths, and once that horrific outer layer was gone, the water spirits were unable to determine who MM really was, and so allowed him to bathe in Lake Michigan where the water’s own funkiness managed to partly hide MM’s rancid smell. His super-scent finally hidden in the folds of Lake Michigan’s highly-polluted, almost water-like contents, MM’s country-encompassing foulness no longer was detectable to MM’s arch-nemesis.
The Monkey King, Dumbold J. Trumpaloo.
Meanwhile the nefarious villain known as the absolute pinnacle of oleaginous corruption, the Monkey King, had hidden his swamp-monstery monsterness in the swamps of Washington D. C. where they were barely discernible in the midst of swamp gas and elephant ideas. His plan to take over the USA was going swimmingly. The Pachyderm Party was uniformly aligned behind him ready to blanket the countryside with toxic elephant poo. And, believing that if they could hold onto power long enough for elephant poo to fossilize into stone, they planned to dominate everything forever.
So, in secret, in his newly smell-reduced Muck Lair, Muck Man began planning the greatest stink-assault ever launched.
“But wait just a second, Dad!” cried Muck Lad. “You will be defeated again if you don’t come to the realization that your super-power and his super-villain’s power are really the same power. You can’t fight stink with stink.”
“Well, then, how do you defeat a super-evil super-villain with super-stink power coming out of his mouth directly from his very good brain?”
“Well…” said Muck Woman (who insists she is Muck Woman, NOT Muck Girl, even though she’s MM’s daughter) “You don’t fight fire with fire… you have to use water. So, get almost-squeaky-clean Uncle Joe B. to hold a convention before his about how the next president should help the country come out of the pandemic with fewer additional deaths and help the economy to recover by taxing the people who can afford to fix the problems, and let the American public compare it to the Monkey King’s elephant-poo festival. That way the villain can practically defeat himself.”
And so, according to mild-mannered reporter Dark Bent, that’s what Muck Man did to defeat the super-villain again. This time without generating a super-stench. And hopefully that will lead to a less-smelly world.
“But…” complained Muck Man, I was left holding on to the the world’s largest weaponized super-fart. And it exploded in my pants. Now, I have to live with consequences.”
” At least we can take comfort in the fact that Mickey is somehow still alive. And a cleaner world is better for all of us.” proclaimed Muck Woman.
Once I was finally able to scan pictures again, I did some scanning of old pictures that only got the camera treatment before on my blog.
But why stop a drawing at just the pen and ink, when there is potential for so much more?
So, I took the Microsoft generic paint program and my generic photo editor to not only this pen and ink of the Jungle Princess, but a few other pictures as well.
,,,
,,,
…
…
…
This is what she looks like after being attacked with color by my arthritic old hands. (There was a day when I could have handled intricate details more cleverly, but that was many, many days ago.
Anyway, I have added new dimensions to Leopard Girrrl with color.
Now I need to add more complications to the basic story of the picture.
…
…
”’
…
…
…
…
Here is an older pen and ink.
This is Dorin Dobbs, one of the dueling plotlines’ protagonists from the novel Catch a Falling Star.
But, of course, Dorin is a more complex character than this old black and white.
So, color needs to be added.
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
,,,
…
I had this one actually already painted in…
But in order to use it in this project, I needed to enlarge it to make it fit into the other picture.
Making this unlikely pair work together in a story is one of the challenges of doing surrealist stories. They have to be grounded in realism, but also bring jarringly different things together. Like the Jungle Princess going on an adventure with Norwall’s Lying King.
But, putting these two together is still not enough. Let’s try some other things.
The Jungle Princess together with Tomboy Dilsey Murphy is an unusual pairing.
Or what about the blue faun from Laughing Blue?
Or even Annette Funicello?
Ridiculous, I know. But don’t they look like satin sofa paintings?
The biggest debate in the arguing about forming the New Star League had been about which planet was the best place to host the capitol of the newly formed multi-star government. The idea had formed around the planet Don’t Go Here, which was entirely too provincial and had never had a space-faring tech level before. In spite of its sentient orbiting space port, the Ancient construct known as Frieda, retrieved from the device made by the Ancients called the Crown of Stars, it was determined that the planetary system was simply not equipped to be an interstellar capitol.
Tron Blastarr, leader of the pirate space forces establishing the new union of solar systems, wanted his home base of Outpost to be the new capitol, but the main inhabited planet, Outpost itself, was an airless rock with no room for much beyond Nebulon colonies and military installations.
Xavier Tkriashav, the political leader who had brought all the worlds of the Psion exiles and the Lupin pirate hordes into the union wanted his home world of Zarane to be the capitol. But that world did not really have a central enough location to work well.
So, the leaders, meeting on the centralized world of Gaijin with its hybrid Gaijinese people and relatively high tech level, decided to build the new capitol in the city of Kiro on the planet Gaijin.
Tkriashav and the bald immortal Dr. Naylund Smith both retired to the Gaijinese tea garden behind Dr. Smith’s house with their cups of steaming white-stork tea.
“Well, Dr. Smith, it seems that everybody got what they wanted in the meeting. The constitution is practically written already.”
“Yes, you, it seems, got the choicest position, making yourself Senator Prime.”
The turbaned Zaranian smiled. “You will be my Number Two, so you will succeed me if anything happens.”
“Yes, but it was not a looked-for opportunity. I have other matters that urgently demand my time.” Dr. Smith stared into his cup of tea.
“But you are an immortal. Surely if anyone has all the time they will ever need to do anything, it is you.”
“I go on living practically no matter what happens to my body, it is true. But my precious daughter is not immortal. Even now, Sara is with Ged Aero on a mission she may not return alive from.”
“But she’s only one of how many children you have sired over your three-thousand-year-plus lifetime?”
“She may be only one of many, but they are all gone now in the well of time, and I vowed that her mother would be the very last woman I ever loved and then outlived. That kind of loss is taxing to the soul.”
“Yes, the sentiment is certainly understandable. But it is a great thing we are undertaking. Never before have so many different sentient species come together to form an interstellar planetary alliance. We have always been ruled in the past by the members of the Earther Human Race and the Human-Galtorrian Fusion Race. But now there are the Molluscan M’uduai Race, the Japanese/Sylvani Race we are now calling the Gaijinese, the Psion Race of Zarane and her sister worlds of the Old Psion Empire, the Pale Humans of the Geonee Race, the deep-space Nebulon Race, the Lupins, and the Dion Saurian People, as well as all the Genetically Altered Races of the Faulkner Genetics Worlds.”
“An impressive list to be sure. But can they hold together as one people with common interests in this new government?”
“I don’t see why you would doubt it?”
“Maybe because of the endless warring and race-hatred of the many human races. You know how the Imperium is. Zombie like Mechanoids, dead bodies brought back to life artificially are the backbone of their armies, space marines, space navy, and special forces. The ruling elite see all alien races as expendable and exploitable. They don’t even treat Dions and M’uduai as worthy of being called people. And they enslave and exterminate Nebulons and Lupins.”
“Yes, and we are not them. We are not Imperials. We will hold ourselves to a higher standard.”
“You have no idea how often I have heard that same sort of pronouncement come out of the mouths of well-meaning world rulers and empire builders. It almost never goes the way they see it in their glorious visions.”
“It will be different this time. The Prophecy of Xhan says it will be so.”
“I too have studied the prophecy, Xavier. I have also studied much too much history firsthand to have your confidence.”
The younger man smiled and softly slapped the old immortal on the back. “Fear not. There is much in the Prophecy of the White Spider yet to be realized. We are making history. But it is history that is foretold and will certainly come true.”
“It will if Ged Aero succeeds in his quest. And it will if the space forces on our side can get it all together to fight off evil old Admiral Tang, and the darker forces behind him. You would be wise to prepare for at least some parts of your prophecy not to come true in the way you are expecting.”
There was no doubting that Dr. Smith had a point. And even Xavier’s clairvoyant Psion abilities couldn’t remove the darker clouds from among all the cumulus constructs of the possibilities that lay ahead.
Mickey prefers to be red. In fact, during baseball season, Cardinal Nation Red. But on this day when he has reached 550 days in a row with at least one post, Mickey is blue. Blue with the rain and the pain and the failure to gain, not Toronto Blue Jays blue.
Mickey is lost at sea when it comes to the question, “What should I write about today, tomorrow, and the day after that?” He had some big ideas to write about… but they seem to be too big for his little head to really get around.
He wanted to write something about sex and sexuality and sex education. But you already know why he’s a clueless idiot on this particular topic. His sex life was screwed up at ten and further messed over by religious teachings, and even more religious teachings when he tried to change his religion. So, he really has no wisdom to share on the matter. He is better off sticking within his innocent little pre-pubescent mindset where he can be perpetually no more controversial than a twelve-year-old. But by now you have probably learned enough about Mickey to know that he is enough of a real writer to not be able to stay within the safe zone. You will probably be pretty upset with him over some post in the near future. (I know that is partly wrong too. Being upset is never pretty.)
This weekend he actually had an uptick in views on WordPress, probably due to making the Twitter Nudists aware of his post called, “Why I Need to Be Naked.” They went and read it and looked at the pictures and told Mickey via Twitter that it was good (apparently not realizing you can Like things on WordPress.) And they also looked through his old posts for the other nudist things on Catch a Falling Star. “Free to Be Naked” and “Nudist Notions” got dug up and read again and again. And I should warn you, more nudists than ever are following Mickey on Twitter now. He will probably bore you with more nudist-friendly stuff.
Now that Mickey is finally clear of bankruptcy, he started buying and collecting dolls again. Chilly Willy is not a plastic doll, but the rest of these are new since the bankruptcy ended. There is a good chance he will write about this subject again too, though clearly, it is a sign that his mental stability is going South fast. Old coots on Medicare should probably not be playing with dolls so much.
But Mickey is still blue, though he longs to be red. Arthritis pain, diabetic problems like sores, memory loss, and low blood sugar all work on his mood in very bad ways. But you never know when the sun will come out again. And, since we have been scorched by hot weather for more than a month, a little cool blue might be better than red hot anyway.
Ah, Reluctant Rabbit using the big pencil in the front of the classroom. What could that be a metaphor for? How about teaching kids by showing them how? You teach writing by writing in front of the class, talking out loud about your process, editing yourself, and polishing your writing in front of those who need to learn those skills.
So, here is the metaphor in action. Me teaching 7th graders.
Is an avatar not a metaphor for me?
Mr. Dickens, Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Disney, and Mr. Poe… do I really need to explain this metaphor?If the horns are the metaphors, what does that say about my boys?What’s the meaning of the metaphors here?Foolish bravery, positive thinking, and terrible circumstances (That’s not a parachute in his backpack, it’s the picnic lunch he would share with Gretchen after the mission.)
Yesterday, in Part 1, I tried to convince you that, “You should never take too long a time writing a story” because I have written some twenty-plus-year-long novels that took me forever to write, and I am an unsuccessful writer. So, you should not do things the way I did. (Some might accuse me of trying to use a little too much irony, claiming I am a bit too obscure about what I am actually telling you that you should actually do… But, remember, I advised you not to take advice from Mickey. And you need irony in your diet anyway to avoid irony-poor tired blood.) Therefore I am going to advise you further that, “You should never make your characters too complex and interesting.”
After all, there are Mickian characters that are literally blue with red patches on their cheeks that absorb harmful gamma radiation and make those characters immune to radiation sickness from exposure in deep space. You don’t want to make readers so curious about a character that they waste time reading more and more closely to discover more about that character.
Junior Aero, the alien Nebulon boy in the AeroQuest stories is just one example. Not only is he a member of an alien race that are belittled as “Space Smurfs” and treated to racial bigotry based on skin color and not being able to speak English at first, but he is also gifted with mental “Psion powers” that allow him to telepathically read computer minds, even the sentient and intelligent ones.
And some of my characters are green with shark-like fins on their heads. They were born on Starships and orbiting artificial satellites like the one going around Barnard’s Star. They are like George Jetson here, named after his father, Xiar’s, favorite Earther cartoon show character from the 60’s. Not only is he a green-skinned amphibious humanoid life-form from a different star system, he learns a lot about himself in the adventure he has in the novel Stardusters and Space Lizards. He goes from being a narcissistic space-pilot wannabee into becoming a humble crash survivor and expedition leader who helps save an entire planet from ecological disaster. And he even gets a girlfriend out of the deal in Menolly his nestmate and fellow survivor.
Characters like that are far too interesting and developed to be good for your reputation as a serious producer of money-making fiction stories. And you certainly don’t want to waste time on developing the same characters in multiple books.
I used the character of Valerie Clarke in the book When the Captain Came Calling as an eleven-year-old protagonist who loses her father and has to rely on older kids and good friends to save herself from depression and the trash-pits of despair.
I used her again as a main character in Snow Babies where she befriends a mysterious stranger and also finds a runaway boy who makes her think seriously about life and young love, all in the middle of a deadly blizzard.
She’s also in the book Sing Sad Songs where she learns to negotiate love with a boy who also lost a parent, in fact, both parents and a twin sister, in a car crash that made him a lonely orphan. She not only has to face the loss of her own loved ones, but has to help somebody else to face the same thing, in fact, more than one other somebody.
She’s also a character in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and Fools and Their Toys.
It is unthinkable to use a character that much and make her grow and change in so many different ways. She should be used only once in a simple and clear way. Like, maybe, Mark Twain’s use of Huckleberry Finn.
Huck, as a character was only used in the books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective… and… never mind. Forget I even said anything about Huck Finn. In fact, maybe this whole post is so ironic it’s making my story-teller gears all rusty. Never-the-less, let me threaten you with a possible part three.
Catch a Falling Star 
Naturism and How it Helps Me
The most obvious aid that naturism has been to me as an author is how readily members of the online naturist/nudist community are willing to spread the word when my writings include things that they care about. They are much better at caring about my work, especially the parts of it that touch on naturism/nudism, than other portions of the online #writingcommunity is about any of my other work
https://histonudismo.wordpress.com/2021/04/17/preservar-la-historia-nudista-una-entrevista-con-naturist-vintage/
The website I linked to twice above is a good example. (You might need a Spanish/English dictionary if you don’t normally read the English parts easily.) I have had summer boosts to views here on WordPress two Augusts in a row now due to naturists coming across my posts and linking to them so that their own followers can share in discovering me as an author who is friendly to naturism. My continued online contact with other naturists/nudists on Twitter continues to benefit me in book sales, exchanges of writing tips and tricks, and exposure to the good naturist literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that is out there.
Here are some of the authors who’ve had the most impact on me,
Ted Bun (his pen name) first discovered my nudist characters in Recipes for Gingerbread Children. He did the most to get me involved with other nudist-friendly authors. And his book The Boy On a Baker’s Bike is possibly his best story, out of many excellent ones, because of how much the main character reflects some of my own experiences with being nude around other nude people.
Will Forest edited the book Holiday in the Nudist Colony in which I was encouraged to add a story of my own. His book Co-Ed Naked Philosophy is a wonderful fictional story that works like an encyclopedia of the philosophies behind naturism, the practices of naturism, and the struggle of those actively trying to make the practice of it normalized. I am half-way through the book and finding it an absolutely enthralling story. I am definitely going to read more of his books.
Paul Z. Walker is one of the organizers of the group of naturist-fiction writers that I have become a part of. He also writes a variety of fiction with nude characters in it. I haven’t read any of his books yet, but I own some of them in e-book format and will correct that problem soon.
Of course, the biggest benefits I have gotten from naturism/nudism is not from merely observing it while clothed, but by participating and getting naked, despite the fears brought on by childhood trauma and the general disdain the public at large has for nudity.
It has made me whole again to be a practicing nudist. It has helped me heal and overcome self-hatred. It has helped me overcome depression. It has also helped me understand the kind of honesty and innocence that life requires of us. Nothing bad remains hidden forever, and sunlight heals many moral problems that were festering before being exposed.
.
,
.
.
.
The most critical thing I learned about naturism and living life naked is that is not about porn or sex. You can see from the drawings I have put in this post that none of the pictures are sexual in content or in any way essentially erotic.. They are merely naked and happy. That is how life should be. At least, in my humble opinion. And I will continue to write stories about it.
Leave a comment
Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, Depression, drawing, nudes, Paffooney, publishing, strange and wonderful ideas about life