If you have come to my blog in hopes of gleaning some key advice about how to write novels or tell a story, then the wisest advice I can give you is, “Do not take any advice Mickey gives seriously.” He used to be a writing teacher in public schools. That is true. But he is also the writer of weird surrealistic novels full of purple paisley prose. And he is not a successful novelist like Steven King or J.K. Rowling. His writing advice is probably only worth ca-ca poo-poo.
So, let me tell you how NOT to write a novel.
Each of the novels I have written and displayed here took me more than twenty years from the moment I conceived of the idea, through plotting, rough drafts, revisions, re-plotting, expanding the story, to finally publishing them in 2017, 2018, and 2019. I developed the stories from real people, real events, and real themes that were a part of my life and added to each of the stories as time passed. So, obviously, you should never take too long a time writing a story. It is true that Snow Babies is the best novel I have ever written, and I count Sing Sad Songs, The Baby Werewolf, and When the Captain Came Calling among my best work. And I only spent one year in the writing of Aeroquest, which is, ironically, the worst thing I have ever written. So, you can see that following any advice Mickey might give you about taking your time with writing is obviously worthless. I took too long writing and publishing my best books, and that is why I will die a penniless, unknown writer.
But I admit to having even more bad advice to warn you not to take. More, I think, than I can put into this one post. So, I will Part-Two this particular essay and take up the topic again in the very near future. Or forget all about it completely. It has to be one of those.
This is about being a writer, not a swimmer. But in a way, it is also about not drowning.
I have achieved some success as a writer. But my development economically is stagnant and I am treading water in the sea of money where sharks are circling intending to eat any value I may create.
I have, of course, created some value. If I had published my 21 books 25 years ago, and I had a contract with a major publishing house, I would be doing as well as some of the authors you see occasionally making best-seller lists today. I am not saying I would be a million-dollar celebrity author like Stephen King, James Patterson, or J. K. Rowling, but I would be a full-time writer making a decent living at it. I am not bragging. I have had a lot of literary education, and I know from input from professional editors and former employees of the major publishing houses that my skills as a storyteller are as good as, or even better than many of the traditionally-published authors today. I stood next to Terry Brooks (author of Sword of Shannara) in a MacDonald’s waiting for my Big Mac in Corpus Christi one time in the 1980s. As former English teachers both, we have a lot in common. But he started publishing in the 1970s, and he only taught for a couple of years. I taught for 31 years and only began seriously trying to get published in 2007.
Obviously, the publishing industry changed in the time between meeting Terry Brooks and getting published myself. Back then the major publishing houses were the gate-keepers, taking submissions and winnowing out the chaff to find the diamonds in the rough (Yes, that is a mixed metaphor, but either I don’t really care about that anymore, or somewhere along the way I have actually found a diamond or two growing alongside the grains of wheat.) If you wrote well enough to win a contract, they would offer you a standard twenty-thousand-dollar signing bonus and a book contract that would guarantee standard royalties for the duration of the book’s life in print. You would then be committed to whatever promotional book tours, lectures, and signings the publisher thought would be most effective, and your next book would have to be offered to them first. Of course, my first book would’ve been a commercial flop from the get-go, although that would probably not be the book I succeeded in publishing first.
Things no longer work like that. When I successfully got the first yes from a publisher in 2007, it was from Publish America. That was a total scam. They paid me one dollar to publish my book Aeroquest. But that wasn’t the scam part. They did publish the book, and they did pay me a dollar. But their attempt to make money did not come from that. I was supposed to do all my own editing and proofreading. They would do the formatting and the marketing. I had to compile a list of family and friends to receive a promotional letter. The only attempts they made to sell copies of my book were to those people on my list. They added typos to the final form of my book and then offered to fix all of that for a hefty fee. They made a couple of hundred dollars doing that. I got a total of six dollars in profits for myself. Publish America was sued out of existence in 2014, the same year that my contract with them was up and I got back the publishing rights to the book.
So, then, I vowed I was going to submit to a publishing house that was still open to submissions, and I found I-Universe which was an imprint for Penguin Books. I submitted a manuscript that they tepidly loved and agreed to publish, for a fee. It was explained to me that, in order to compete with things like Amazon, the traditional publishers were also putting more on their authors in order to guarantee they could still produce profits for shareholders and eliminate the risk from flops the way traditional publishing had always had to weather them. I would have to pay my own editors (company-provided professionals who were actually worth what they cost, I learned a lot from them.) I would also have to participate in and pay for marketing efforts. All told, it ended up costing me about five thousand dollars. And the pre-made cover they forced on me has no real connection to the story itself. (Nowhere in the comedy about aliens invading a small town in Iowa did any silhouette girl fly a kite at night. The girl characters were all green, fin-headed aliens.)
I didn’t feel as cheated by I-Universe even though I spent a lot more money with them. My book ended up winning two awards from them, Editor’s Choice and Rising Star Awards. And I learned everything I know about the publishing world from the good people I worked with. They were square with me, telling me that the traditional publishing business was dying, and they were all worried about their own jobs going away. They keyed me in on how to effectively open and present a good fictional story. They started me writing this blog, and they would’ve included me in many more marketing ventures to make my book profitable if I hadn’t gone bankrupt in 2017 and had sworn off paying them more money in 2014. They still try to get me to invest more money in marketing schemes. They hate seeing my award-winning book sit unprofitably unmarketed. But the total earnings in royalties that book has made is only sixteen dollars, and they will not cut my first royalties check until that reaches $25. Not gonna happen.
Then I killed a publisher with my next well-written book. PDMI Publishing LLC was enthusiastic about publishing my snowstorm opus, a comedy about orphans freezing to death in a small town (or, actually only almost freezing to death, to be less snarky about it.) But as I finished that book with a rookie editor that the firm had newly hired, they had to go out of business from losing too much money in a single year. They were not the only publisher to collapse financially in 2016.
So, my publishing solution was to turn to Amazon, slayer of traditional and small publishers alike.
With Amazon KDP I am free to publish anything and everything I want to publish. But I have to do everything myself. Writing, editing, formatting, proofreading, illustrating, designing book covers, and marketing are all entirely up to me. There are many successful authors on Amazon. Some of them even make more money than they spend. Amazon pays you monthly royalties, even if you only make two cents because somebody read four pages of one of your books that month on Kindle Unlimited.
But Amazon can freeze or delete your account for any reason at any time. And some of those decisions are made more by algorithm than any actual reader of your books. They can accuse you even of plagiarizing your own books if you are not careful. The whole scheme behind KDP is to do none of the work themselves, but pay out as little of the profits as possible to the authors and keep as much easy money as the scheme can generate.
So, I am a published author… for now. Writing whatever the hell I want and not caring much about whether I make any money or not. That’s not the point of being an author. You can’t be a starving artist if you are not actually an artist… and you can’t be one without starving either.
This is a story about an innocuous piece of furniture in Great Aunt Minnie Efram’s house. It was a little brown loveseat with carved wooden monster feet.
As the story begins, the little loveseat was sitting in the parlor in front of the small black and white television. During the monthly Efram family card party, the love seat was the only place for the two of them to spend the evening. But he was ten and he hated girls. He had a reputation with the guys at school as a girl hater, and he couldn’t have it known that he was sitting on a loveseat with Uncle Henry’s stepdaughter, the one the guys all said they had seen eating her own boogers.
She was also ten, and in his class at school. She liked to watch him more than any of the other boys. But she didn’t know why. She liked unicorns and the color pink, but she also kinda liked the way boys looked at her when she wore shorts. And she liked seeing him in PE class at school, wearing shorts. He was athletic and often won games in PE.
After two years of monthly card parties happening during at least three different months every year at Aunt Minnie’s place, he had discovered that girls didn’t actually smell bad, and this one actually listened when he talked about playing football, and how it made him feel when he scored the seventy-five-yard touchdown. In fact, the more he talked about football, and the closer they sat to each other, the better she seemed to smell. He liked that smell.
She liked that he didn’t only pay attention to her at the card parties anymore. He actually said, “Hi” in public. And she liked his smile, even when he got braces. He let her pick the shows they watched on the old black and white television while seated on the loveseat. She actually worked up the nerve to tell him that she had told Jane at school to ask him if he liked her, and stupid Jane had completely forgotten to ask him, or maybe Jane was just too chicken to ask him and used the excuse that she forgot.
He said that if she liked him, he liked her. But if she didn’t, he didn’t either. “Like” her, he meant. Which he did because she did.
After two more years and six more card parties worth of scootching behinds closer together on the old loveseat, something different had happened. And it was about time too. Aunt Minnie had bought a puppy, and that not only was a bad thing for the seven cats that lived with old Minnie, but it was hard on the loveseat too. One of the little couch’s monster feet was lost, and the numerous instances of terrified cat claws digging in were beginning to have an effect on the upholstery. And that danged dog wizzled everywhere. The loveseat had one purpose in life, and it didn’t want to give in to wear and tear before achieving that purpose.
But the very next year brought disaster. He apparently told the members of the freshman football team that something had happened on that old love seat that really hadn’t happened. The football team was impressed because they all thought she was pretty hot stuff, and he was generally thought of as a lame-o dweeb. She heard about it from Jane who heard about it from Nanette’s boyfriend who was on the team. And she got mad. How dare he say something like that when it wasn’t true?
In January of that year, Aunt Minnie passed away in her sleep. The loveseat was sold at auction to a farmer who liked to do re-upholstery as a hobby. It got re-done in red velvet and leather with wheels replacing the wooden monster feet and sold to a car dealer in Des Moines who placed it in the lobby show-room for customers to sit on.
But the story has a happy ending. She would later make his locker room lie into the truth on Prom Night (fortunately with protection) and then went on to marry him when they both were sophomores in college. Of course, it wasn’t always, “They lived happily ever after,” because they didn’t. They got divorced once and got re-married shortly after… to each other. They had three kids. And the loveseat didn’t ever learn any of that. Because it was a loveseat. You didn’t really think loveseats could know anything, did you?
Here’s a bit of the file called Novel Pix (illustrations for my novels);
from Stardusters and Space Lizardsfrom AeroQuestfrom Sing Sad Songsfrom Snow Babiesfrom Fools and Their Toysfrom When the Captain Came Callingfrom Superchicken
She was the size and shape of a blond-haired human girl of about fourteen years of age. She wore one of those tech-level 25 armored space bikinis, and Dr. Hooey had to admit she looked pretty appealing in it.
“So, they issued you that armored bikini instead of the usual Time Knight’s eccentric, colorful costume?”
“Oh, yes, by my special request,” said the girl. “It’s fully functional as a space suit, putting atmosphere around me inside an electromagnetic bubble that will also shield me from radiation, lasers, micro-meteors, blades, microwaves, nuclear blasts, and even slug-thrower bullets.”
“Ahem, yes…” Hooey wasn’t sure whether he should be harsh with his evaluation, or just charmed with her natural enthusiasm. Her enthusiasm alone was of a kind that could defeat space criminals, evade alien attacks, and charm world leaders. And that happy grin could certainly kill a grizzly bear at thirty paces. “Prepared for practically anything, aren’t we?”
“Well, being prepared is the key to everything you have accomplished Dr. Hooey. I studied you carefully while I was in the academy. You more than any other Time Knight we discussed. I prayed to the Seven Goddesses of the Pleiades that I would be chosen to be your companion on this next journey through time.”
“Ahem… your name is Spaceheart, I believe?”
“Yes. That is definitely my preferred moniker of the moment.”
“I suppose I can’t just call you Becky or Alice or something?”
“No, please. I like Spaceheart. It is a cool pulp-fiction sort of science-fictiony name.”
Hooey almost said, “Ahem” again, but he was running out, so he decided to save the last few for later.
“So, one of the main jobs of the time-travel companion is the keeping of order inside the time-ship.”
Spaceheart looked around at the mess inside the Star Wars. She shuddered. Wires were hanging from the dark space where the ceiling allegedly was supposed to be. Burnt panels covered the control console with melted buttons, charred thing-a-majiggs, and a grossly detached doodle-ma-whoop. You couldn’t make the chronometric time jumps without a re-attached doodle-ma-whoop. And you would need to replace every single thing-a-majigg in order to prevent the Time Knights inside the ship from prematurely aging or turning back into babies. A glitch in either direction could pop you out of existence without warning.
“It got damaged a bit with that last mission, huh?”
“Oh, yes. It actually killed me, so that I had to reboot myself with an entirely new and better-looking reincarnation.”
“But, the Lizard Lady was successful before she died?”
“Well, technically… Um, she’s not actually dead yet at this time… er, the relative dimension in time and space she currently inhabits.”
“Oh, that’s interesting…”
“Yes, um… she’s in position to help us win the battle at Outpost. So, our job is mainly to correct whatever goes wrong with the ancient device that Ged Aero is trying to send to another universe.”-
“I guess I better get started on the clean-up and repair procedures.”
“Ahem… yes, I didn’t mean to use up that one, but if you don’t mind… I would like to pull up a lawn chair and watch you work. Um, you are going to wear that armored bikini, right?”
“Um, yes…?”
“Can I take pictures too?”
Spaceheart smiled at the dirty old man who turned younger again.
Yes, I am a nudist. I am a member of the AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation). I have been publicly naked in places where other naked people are, and I will do that again if I can. But, if you are wondering why in the heck I want to be that, well, maybe I need to explain. Maybe, even, if you aren’t wondering that.
I have spent a lifetime overcoming childhood trauma. At the age of ten I was grabbed by an older boy, dragged off to a hidden place, de-pants, warned not to yell or tell anybody ever about what had happened, implying he would seriously hurt or kill me, and then he gave himself pleasure by twisting my private parts, making me hurt while being forbidden to call for help.
What does that have to do with being a nudist? Well, as you can probably imagine, what remained of my childhood and all of my puberty was turned into a nightmare. I shut down the memory of the incident as a defense mechanism, but it was still with me to the point that I would wet my pants during seventh grade classes rather than risk going to the bathroom in a school where there were eighth grade boys bigger than me. PE showers after class were a nightmare I wasn’t allowed to avoid. I not only had to conceal my privates as much as possible, but also the burn scars on my back that I gave myself as a punishment for any sexual urges I might have experienced. I lost the ability to be comfortably naked anywhere that I might’ve been seen by others, especially girls. This was a horrible, self-hating sort of thing that brought me to the brink of suicide in high school. Thank god for the Methodist minister who provided me with actual sex education and my friend Ronny who talked me out of killing myself without ever knowing that that is what he was doing.
I missed out on a key time in my development as a boy when others get an unmolested chance to wrestle with their own sexuality and identity. I had to struggle with the things I learned about child molestation. Of particular concern was the notion that victims of sexual molestation can grow up to be molesters. And a good deal of religious education tries to make you believe homosexuality was a grievous sin that could cause you an eternity in Hell. I spent too many hours fearing I would become exactly what I didn’t want to be.
But starting when the Reverend Aiken taught me about the biological science behind the facts of life, I began learning the truth about sexuality and what had happened to me.
I fully remembered the whole of my childhood trauma when I began studying human sexuality in college (and I mean book-learning, not the kind of hands-on practice that went on in the dorms.) I learned that those who become abusers after being abused were mostly children who were routinely molested, not the one-time-only sort of assault that I endured. I was not set up mentally to become some sort of sexual predator or pedophile. Instead, I was drawn to a career path in education where I could use what I had learned to prevent such things from happening. I did not try to have my abuser arrested and punished for two reasons. One, because I was still vulnerable and reporting that you had been assaulted like that was probably even harder at that time for a boy than it was for a girl. And it was hell to be a girl confessing to having been raped. But also two, because I knew my abuser was married and had children, and I had never heard any other reports of him having done such a thing to anyone else. It wasn’t for him that I didn’t report him. My family and his family were friends. They were good people whether he was or not. And protecting them is the reason I still will not name him as the person who assaulted me. Now that he is dead, and I have forgiven him, no one needs to know.
I need to be naked now in the telling of these inner secrets that no one but me knew for so many years. I need to not be shy about any of this. Primarily because anyone who has ever undergone such a thing as I did can benefit from knowing what I went through and survived in spite of. That factual nakedness is here in these paragraphs for anyone who needs to see it. It is the naked truth.
The first person I told about what happened to me at ten was the former girlfriend who actually introduced me to nudism and naturism. She was a coworker in the Cotulla school district who, like me, had family living at the time in the Austin, Texas area. We would spend weekends in the Austin area with me staying at my parents’ house in the Austin suburbs, and her staying with her sister’s family at a clothing-optional apartment house on Manor Road in downtown Austin. We would enjoy seeing the sights in Austin, taking in the available nightlife, restaurants, and things to do in the 1980s. We also enjoyed time spent with family. Of course, the uncomfortable thing was that spending time with her family meant being surrounded by naked people. They allowed me to remain within the clothing option, but they worked on me and reasoned with me about why trying nude living was a good thing.
They made it clear how being nude leads to many good and healthy things. Sunshine provides Vitamin D which is necessary to be happy and fend off depression. They made it clear how being naked makes it easier to trust others and feel trusted by them. You learn, even with clothes on, that you should connect with people eye to eye. Genitals were never the focus of your attention, and practicing that relieved a lot of the body-horror my ten-year-old mind had imposed on my soul.
They say that dolphins, living completely naked in the oceans are surrounded their whole lives by sensory joy and a zest for life unmatched by most humans. And they also say being a nudist wrapped only in sunshine and gentle breezes is nearly the same thing.
So, I eventually tried it for myself. (Only after I retired from teaching, though, as many parents and principals would not be particularly keen about a nudist English teacher teaching their precious ones.)
My wife is not overjoyed with my choice to be a nudist. It’s not so much that she disapproves, but she is completely devoted to a religion that does. And my children are embarrassed by it and don’t want to talk about it. But it has become a good thing in my life never-the-less.
I have learned to accept my body as it is, and my past experiences as they are. I know I am not a homosexual, though I also know it is not an evil thing to be one. I know I am not a sex-fiend or a pedophile because I have committed no crime that would make those labels apply to me. I haven’t, in fact, ever committed a crime that I was aware of. I am aware of the beauties, especially in art, of the nude human form. I am also aware, having seen other nudists, that no amount of wrinkled or saggy or freckled or sunburnt or boney or fat actually takes away from that inherent beauty. I like to draw naked people, as you have often seen in this blog. But I am not the sort of nudist who has to show you constant nude photos of myself. I am not an exhibitionist or an advocate of nudism that thinks his own nudity is the best advertisement there is for being naked.
But I need to be naked. Naked stories, naked essays, naked confessions, naked pictures… because being naked is a good thing to be.
This is a class exercise moment, not monkey-house behavior.
Schools are starting this school year with too few teachers to adequately do the job. I got a call asking if there was any way I could come back to work, even as a substitute teacher. But it just isn’t possible. I am still alive, but far short of well enough to teach for even a single day. And I have spent the entire week watching teachers on YouTube telling the world why they have quit. It’s complicated. I have watched teachers tell angry stories. I have watched teachers cry. I have watched teachers make jokes to keep from crying. And this isn’t just the same old thing about low pay for an extremely difficult job. Chuck Todd says the problem is a 280,000 teacher shortage nationwide.
A painting of my first year as a teacher
Kids’ behavior is surly, rude, and out of control, but nobody explaining why they quit as a veteran teacher named this as the reason for leaving . They still love the kids. Nobody who becomes a teacher and lasts for more than five years does the job without at least secretly loving their students more than money, fame, and peace of mind. Realistically, if the kids don’t eat a teacher alive by the time five school years have passed, they secretly love that teacher too.
As an experienced middle-school teacher, I realize that every kid with their hand up in this picture got a candy bar after the photographer clicked the photo. And the empty seats in the back would be filled except the principal doesn’t want the actual class sizes revealed. Floor sitters and window standers have also been removed.
The biggest roadblock to veteran teachers in red States is interference from the radical MAGA governor who wants to burn some of their school library books and edit what words come out of the teacher’s mouth over things they have basically made up like, “Critical Race Theory,” “Don’f Say Gay ,” or “Sex is something that exists.” And this comes with additional threats at school board meetings, school assemblies, or sometimes even surrounding the teacher’s or administrator’s home with torches, signs, and AR-15s because MAGA parents don’t just get angry, they do something about it.
Another huge factor comes from the way that schools are funded… or not funded as is increasingly the case. Back when Rick (I’m smarter with glasses on) Perry was Emperor… err… Governor of Texas, he had a multi-billion-dollar rainy day fund at the same time when school districts in Texas were all suffering from a lack of funds. Rainy day, right? Not according to the Emperor… err… Governor. While he fiddled with presidential-run preparations, he let schools cut arts programs and lay off teachers and increase class sizes. Teachers were encouraged to pay for classroom supplies out of their own pockets. Teachers were required to do more with less.
And then there was the pandemic. My time as a substitute teacher came to an end as teaching became potentially a death sentence for me. My wife got the opportunity to teach kids by Zoom calls, and then teach both in the classroom and by Zoom calls at the same time… for which no additional pay was offered, though the added requirements for the teacher’s efforts were all mandatory.
So, education in America is in extreme crisis. You can go be a teacher if you have some college hours in any subject area. and you can be a substitute if you are still alive. I don’t know if they would accept a zombie or not.
And it looks like everybody is soon going to get everything they deserve… except teachers, of course.
Part of the joy I find in the family Dungeons and Dragons game is in making Paffoonies, the story-based pictures that illustrate and elucidate the characters and other things that enter spontaneously into the game.
I don’t invent every part of the image and concept myself. Some inspiration comes from the game books and published adventures, while others come directly from the players and the way their imaginations shape characters and events.
Many of the Dungeons and Dragons Paffoonies began life as character sheets. That’s why there are numbers, strength numbers, intelligence numbers, character levels, dexterity, skill sets, and magic items listed all around the character image. They more or less morphed over time into illustrations done in colored pencil on colored paper.
I enjoy drawing wizards and apprentices, warriors in action, castles, and dragons. I have used the game as an extended excuse to draw vast quantities of them. And now I have a resource to mine for Paffoonies to lace my blog with. They provide a sort of sugary spice that I love the taste of, and I will continue to share them until the end, even if they disagree with you and give you reading indigestion.
I am working on a new piece that is D & D Paffooney- related. I will keep you apprised of the the progress here until it is finished or until you get fed up with it. Whichever comes first.
Paffoonies are my own thing… pictures and stories melted together… loony, cartoony, balloony, pink baboon buffoons brewed together in a big pot. And I will continue to use them for acts of Dungeons and Dragons nonsense.
Catch a Falling Star 