I spent a good deal of my time as a game master for the Star Wars role-playing game in creating alien characters that fit the movies, the books I read in the Star Wars series, and the game materials. In this post, I will give you a mini-gallery of the aliens I drew for the game.
Chee Mobok was a space trader who had a problem with his own ego. He believed that he was a genius at language and could speak any language he had heard a handful of words from.
The Galactic Common speakers were always laughing at the things he said.
Huttese speakers like Jabba the Hutt were always trying to kill him for saying precisely the wrong thing.
Hethiss was the Jedi Master when my son’s Jedi character was still a padawan learner.
He was wise, but unable to keep his student from doing things in violent ways when a diplomatic solution was called for.
Merv was a potential terrorist and a suspect in a series of murders on a water planet. He was, however, the good badguy character. You know, the villain who has a heart of gold and whose actions redeem him in the end… As opposed to a bad goodguy who seems to be a hero and ends up betraying everyone.
Fisonna was a street kid from the same planet and same race as Hethiss the Jedi master. He had the potential to become a padawan learner. But he also used his Force skills to pull pranks on serious adults.
Odo-Ki was a Gotal with the ultra-sensitive cones on his head. He had a limited ability to see behind walls and predict the near future.
Nadin Paal was an actual pirate and terrorist with no redeeming qualities at all. The best thing about him was, that when the time came, he blew up really nicely. A colorful fireball.
Kehlor was a Herglic, one of the whale people who required specially built extra-large space ships and accommodations. He was also a gifted pilot. You can see that he wears the uniform of the Trade Authority.
And finally, Klis Joo was a Duro and a Jedi, a gray alien with considerable Force powers.
There were many more drawings like this as well. But these are some of the best ones.
My current free-book promotion is doing better than any I have done before. And not only have I given away more free copies than ever before, it has already yielded one five-star review.
But you have to pour a little cold water on your head whenever you get too happy about being an author who has readers. It ain’t all bluebirds and sunshiny days.
The Pubby review exchange thingy is continuing to operate worse and worse. I am not subjecting the new book to any of that pain and squirrel poop. You break your head to read a book in only four days and write a review to earn the points you need to get your own books reviewed. And a lot of books on Pubby seeking review are written by… um, not really genius-level writers. They don’t know how to craft a scene with a beginning, middle, and end that fulfills an actual story-crafting purpose. You know, advancing the plot, building a character with depth and complexity, establishing a setting, or advancing a theme. Instead, they flood the page with adjectives and adverbs, excessive but irrelevant details, going around the scene telling you what eye color each character has, repeated cliches, and other dumb stuff. But it makes you feel mean and petty to point out in your review what specific dumb stuff made you give their work of not-really-genius only a three-star review.
And when you submit your own precious book potentially full of irritating dumb stuff, they don’t bother to actually read it before reviewing it. They write their review based on what other reviewers have said about it. And sometimes they give you a bad review because somebody else gave you a bad review with a dire dyspeptic rant about all your irritating dumb stuff. And they have no right to somebody else’s dire dyspeptic opinion if they didn’t read those things in your book for themselves to be certain the other viewer’s opinion is not based on something their dire and dyspeptic imagination saw in your story that wasn’t really there. And how do I know they didn’t read the book? Well, Pubby allows you with extra points charged to request a verified-purchase review. So, if their review isn’t labeled a verified purchase, they did not even have a copy of the book to write a review from. Pubby simply refunds the extra points you spent when the verified purchase label is not present.
Honestly, the only thing you know about the people who read your books are what comes through feedback. And you get remarkably little of that. The most important part of that is when somebody you know in real life reads your book, liked it, and tells you so. Sometimes readers will connect with your book in a way that makes them want to write a detailed review and implore others to read and like your book too. I have had a handful of those along the way, whether from aspiring fellow authors who know what the things are that you have actually done well, Twitter nudists who are literate and hungry for stories that use the word “naked” a lot without being an erotic or a pornographic writer, or fellow teachers who appreciate the many ironic, humorous, and empathetic details you have applied from your own teaching career.
I will continue to write and write and write some more. That means life to me. And I will continue to do some of the things authors do to pursue readers, because feedback grows that life. But I am old and in poor health and will not be doing this forever. If writers ever become immortal, it is not because they ever found the philosopher’s stone. At some point even Shakespeare, Dickens, and Poe had to stop writing.
Yes, I am a coot. I became a coot in 2014 when I retired. I have the hair in the ears to prove it. I sometimes forget to wear pants. The dog is learning to hide from me on days when my arthritis makes me cranky.
So I am a practicer of the ancient art of being a cranky old coot. I have opinions. I share them with others foolishly. And I am summarily told to, “Shut up, you danged old coot!” And, of course, I don’t shut up because that would be a violation of number five in the by-laws of cootism. Obnoxiousness is our only reason for still being alive.
Lately, my group of coots on Facebook (who call themselves a “pack” like wolves, but, in truth, a group of coots is called an “idiocy”) are talking about politics… very loudly salted with firmly held opinions, beliefs, and bad words in several languages. I mean, it’s texting each other on memes we disagree about, but we do it LOUDLY, like that, in all caps. We also do it in such an infuriating manner because, if no one ever bothers to tell us to “Shut the hell up!” we will begin to suspect we have actually died and gone to purgatory where we are still being obnoxious, but nobody knows we are doing it. That is rubbing coot fur in the wrong direction.
The radical right (otherwise known as coot paradise) have been cooting up a storm about school shootings and gun control of late. They have more or less turned their ire on me because, knowing I was a school teacher, they have seized on the Coot in Chief’s notion of arming teachers to protect schools. Obviously a majority of old coots agree that requiring a few “volunteer” teachers to conceal carry and learn how to handle a school shooter crisis situation with a gun instead of the way teachers are actually trained and practiced on handling such a situation, is the only economical way to defend schools from crazed lunatics with assault weapons. Of course, it is definitely more economical than hiring full time police officers to handle security because “volunteer” teachers does not mean that they are necessarily willing to do it, but rather that they are doing it without pay. And of course they shout at me things like, “Why don’t you just admit that you are too scared and unpatriotic to carry a gun as a teacher, and cowardly allow some female teacher with a big pistol to step in and do the job for you?” That is a very coot thing to say, and is hard to adequately counter, because if you try to argue using logic other than coot-logic, like the notion that since a majority of teachers in this country are female, you are asking women who are fierce enough to do the job (and I have known more than a few who would take it on no matter how hopeless their prospects) to take a handgun that the principal bought at Walmart with money from the Coke machine in the hall and face down a suicidal maniac with an assault rifle, you will not even be heard over the cacophony of coot braying and chest-thumping, let alone be understood.
And, for some reason, coots love Trump. Maybe because they feel he is truly one of them. He is older than dirt. He has an epicly bad comb-over to hide his bald spot. He says bad words very loudly in front of women, children, and everybody. He says, “Believe me,” a lot, especially when telling lies. And he’s not afraid to fart in public and blame it on the dog. I admit to insulting Trump in front of them only because I like to see coot faces fold up in extra wrinkles, and coot heads turn various shades of angry red and apoplectic purple.
So, yes. I am a coot. Not proud to be one… that I can remember, but a coot never-the-less.
No, Mickey is not dead. So, don’t worry… or if you are celebrating, stop it!
I just got to thinking that since I am feeling ill again, and every time I have a cold or flu or a Covid variant it could easily be the death of me with my six incurable diseases, I really ought to have the chance that Tom Sawyer once got to eavesdrop on his own funeral.
Of course, there would undoubtedly be more laughing and joking at my funeral and less crying than there was at Tom’s.
The purple mouse-man would begin the service. He would be wearing his best polka-dotted bow-tie. And he would say, “We come here today not to praise Mickey, but to bury him. He was nothing like Julius Caesar. In fact, he was nothing like anybody we know of from history, recorded newspaper accounts, or Shakespeare plays like Julius Caesar. He was a novelist and an amateur cartoonist. And the best thing that can be said about him is that he was a public school teacher for many, many, many, probably too many years. And he never killed a student (that we can prove,) and he never made a student leave his class dumber than he was on the day he entered the class (and Jorge is not an exception to that statement because the drugs he took that melted his brain came from a San Antonio drug dealer, not from Mickey’s wonderful teaching.)”
And then there would probably be former students that wanted to say something. Clint would probably say something like, “I never had a teacher as funny as him. We would put tacks on his chair, and he always would see them before he sat down, but he would yelp even though he had secretly removed the tack first so that he could tell by which one of us was laughing hardest who was probably guilty. But he never blamed me for the ones I did. He blamed Robert for those. He only blamed me for the ones Robert put there. And Robert put more of them than I did, so it was not fair that I had to talk to the principal more than Robert did. That’s why I ratted Robert out and we both got put on in-school suspension for a week. And then, when we both came back to class, he was laughing harder than I ever saw him laugh before. And I began to suspect he was really evil then.”
And then Leopard Girl would stand up and say, “He was also a good teacher for imaginary students. We would be exposed to all kinds of books and stories, and we had to read and have opinions about stuff. And if we liked a character in a story, he would make us write an imaginary conversation with that character and argue with them about treating the environment better, or being nicer to other people, and think about things from the story that impressed us the most. And you know what? I think sometimes he tricked us into actually learning things.”
And then it would be the talking dog’s turn to speak. And he would get up front, sniff the podium, pee on it, and say, “He was not very smart. He thought dogs could actually talk to people. Like this one time we were walking in the park and this German Shepherd started barking at him. He tried to tell me that the dog was saying good morning to us and inquiring about Aunt Mabel’s lumbago. I told him the dog was barking in German, so he couldn’t understand what it was saying. He claimed he took three years of German in college. I told him that what the dog really said was that if it could get off of its leash, it would come over and eat us because we smelled like burglars. He told me that I was a dog and didn’t actually understand German, and that the word actually meant a person from Hamburg in Germany. I told him I was just a dog and I didn’t actually speak English either!”
I have to admit, my funeral will be nothing at all like this. My sisters wouldn’t stand for having a dog talk at my funeral. And my wife would want to have me cremated and put into a coffee tin to save money, forgoing the expense of an actual funeral so she would have a bit more money to spend on shoes.
Here I am again with another novel done and published, and soon to be promoted, and nothing else exciting me enough to write about it today. What do I need to talk about that I haven’t burbled and babbled about enough recently?
Valentine’s Day recently happened. But I don’t celebrate it because of my wife’s holiday-hostile religion. Though I did take her and my daughter out to dinner last night. It wasn’t really a celebration, just an acknowledgement that we are all still alive and a family and need to eat good food.
Writer’s block doesn’t really exist for me. I have four novel projects I could work on. One is merely editing a finished manuscript. One is further revision of a novel that has to be revised. One is a fresh idea already started on a rough draft. The fourth is sitting only in my head. So, you can see I could choose any of those to work on.
But this blog is the problem. What do I write about for today’s post, number 363 in row? I have to write something. Is this nonsense post going to be it?
Getting to school and back by bus every day was tough. Especially when you are feeling rather down and blue. Now that she was a senior in high school, she no longer had Danny Murphy to sit with on the bus. Mary Phillips and Pidney Breslow had graduated four years ago and were in college now, soon to graduate from Iowa State University. Danny had graduated from high school last year, and had told her during that summer that he and Carla Bates would be getting married in the near future. Well, maybe not as near as anticipated since they still hadn’t picked a date. But no more Danny on the bus to tell her jokes or drive her home from Belle City High in that incredibly old 1950s car he inherited from his Grampy.
She sat alone in the far back of the bus now. Every day. The bus ride to Norwall seemed endless, even though it was only ten miles as the crow flies… a really slow crow named Joe with half of his tail feathers missing. But on this day, Dilsey Murphy, Danny’s younger sister, moved to the back as soon as she got on the bus. She was wearing that old purple Carl Eller jersey, number 81 from the Minnesota Vikings of the 70s.
“Um, Valerie… do you mind if I sit with you on the way home today?”
“I may be kinda grumpy company. But sure.”
Maybe the younger girl could lighten the mood for her. But, then again… probably not.
Dilsey had straight black hair which she sometimes wore with a barrette on the right side of her bangs because her mother’s fashion sense reeked of the 1960s. Otherwise, ignoring the hair and the barrette, Dilsey was dressed like a boy. Vikings’ jersey, denim pants, and boys’ sneakers.
“Um, Val, I have a favor to ask.”
Oh, boy. Here it comes. The real reason.
“Please don’t be mad at me, but…”
“It’s all right. I promise not to bite… at least, not very hard.”
“Yeah, um… you know Mrs. Patricia Zeffer?”
“Ray’s mom. Of course, I know her.”
“Well, I normally babysit for her on Saturdays when she needs to go out. But this week I can’t…”
“Mrs. Zeffer has a kid that needs babysitting services? She has a kid that young?”
“Well, yes… it’s her grandson, actually.”
“Oh, of course. But why is little Troy living with her now?”
“Uh, well… You know that family has a bit of trouble since…”
“Since Ray disappeared six years ago.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t be asking, but… I have a date on Saturday.”
“You do? But you’re only…”
“Almost sixteen, and a sophomore in high school.”
“Sure. I wasn’t trying to insult you or anything, but your mother…”
“Trusts me more than she ever did Danny.”
“Of course, she does.”
“Aren’t you going to ask who the date is with?”
She didn’t really, exactly… well, care. But…
“So, who?”
“Tim.”
“No! You have gotta be kidding me! Tim the Terror? Dim Tim? Rim-tin-Tim? The stinkilicious leader of the Norwall Pirates?”
Dilsey giggled awkwardly. “I’ll have to remember those names. They may prove very useful.”
“Why would an otherwise, very pretty girl waste her time with Tiny Terrible Tim? He’s my cousin, and one of the grossest human beans in all of Iowa. In fact… all of the Midwest.”
“You know he is a good person at heart. He’s only an icky boy on the outside. Inside he’s…”
“Only icky ninety-nine percent of the time. I do know my own cousin.”
Dilsey laughed a little more easily this time. Of course, Val wasn’t entirely sure she was joking. The brat could really get on your nerves sometimes.
“But… you don’t really think that…”
“That you shouldn’t be dating him? The girl who once told him that he was the worst, most two-faced person she ever met?”
Dilsey’s face was suddenly crestfallen. She looked like her whole positive little self was being crushed and was about to crumble into a weepy pile.
“You think it’s a mistake if I think I might be falling in love with him?”
“A boy who is a year younger than you are? One who is way less mature than you are? Way meaner too?”
Tears were forming in Dilsey’s dark eyes. Valerie had gone too far. Who was the meaner cousin now?
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said any of that. I have been feeling outa sorts and kinda depressed for a while now. I didn’t mean to take it out on you or Tim either. Forgive me?”
“You’ll take the babysitting job for me?”
“Of course. Little Troy Zeffer? He’s such a little cutie.”
“Do you really think it’s something a normal human being would do to like Tim and go see a movie with him? He wants to watch Mrs. Doubtfire with me.”
“With Robin Williams in it?”
“Yeah. The Murphy family wants to see it together too, so, if I go with Tim, I’ll be watching it twice, probably in the same weekend.”
Val chuckled softly. “That sounds good. You make sure you tell Tim I am taking this sitting job for you to be able to go with him, so he owes me. And if he tries to sneak-kiss you, hit him in the nose really hard.”
Dilsey laughed. Val knew she intimidated the younger girl. Dilsey had never been a cheerleader. Never been the leader of the Norwall Pirates. And never lost a boyfriend before. And Val envied her those things.
“Valerie? Do you need to be alone in this back seat every day on the bus ride home?”
“Are you offering to sit with me regularly?”
“Yes. Especially now that Tim is on the basketball team and has practice every afternoon.”
That was right. Now that Valerie had given up cheerleading, there was no longer any reason to stay in Belle City after school, and no reason to ride the late bus.
“I had thought I wanted to sit alone this year, without Danny here to entertain me. But I think sitting with his sister will be just about the perfect thing to take the place of that.”
How does an artist know himself? Now there’s a difficult question. I spend all my time looking at the world with the eyes of imagination. I don’t even seem to be able to take photographs in the normal way other people do. Maybe I should consider this self-think through the medium of pictures I have made with captions added to them?
Mickey is not actually me. He is my “other” me, my pen name, my goofier self.
I was born in a blizzard in Mason City, Iowa in the 1950’s.
I have learned about dog poop five times a day since 2011 when we found Jade, our dog.
I was a middle school teacher for 24 of my 31 years of teaching. I love/hate 7th Graders.
When things go wrong, I tend to make a joke about it.
I like to draw students as I saw them, not as they really were.
I always see myself as the one with the BIG pencil.
If there is goofiness around here, it is all my fault.
In spite of the title, I don’t know how to disappear.
I love everything Disney.
I tend not to be very much like other people. I don’t think like they do.
In grade school, I was deeply in love with Alicia Stewart, though I never told her that, and that is not her real name.
My high school art teacher told me that when an artist draws someone, he always ends up making it look a little bit like himself. That is because, I suppose, an artist can only draw what he knows and he really only knows himself. That being said, this post should really look just like me.
Mickey, how can you possibly talk about being illogical?
I intend to use magic.
But magic is not scientific or even factual. It’s not logical!
Voila! That’s the plan!
Oy! At least I understand why you led with the duck thing.
Yes, a large part of creativity is taking things that don’t go together and finding a way to put them together anyway to make something surprising and new.
Like two girls from outer space wearing high-tech bikinis in Avery’s south pasture?
Of course! Girls in bikinis are always good.
So, that explains the recent obsession with paper dolls, huh?
Especially the Annette Funicello doll, even with no bikini.
And it also explains turning Ricky and Stacey dolls into Butterfly Children.
Getting to make art with full-frontal nudity without worrying about exposed genitals.
That comment is a bit worrying.
Hakuna Matata, silly dialogue voice.
So, you could say, “Beauty is in the eyes of the illogical idiot?”
Catch a Falling Star 
Cranky Old Coots Complain and Don’t Care
Yes, I am a coot. I became a coot in 2014 when I retired. I have the hair in the ears to prove it. I sometimes forget to wear pants. The dog is learning to hide from me on days when my arthritis makes me cranky.
So I am a practicer of the ancient art of being a cranky old coot. I have opinions. I share them with others foolishly. And I am summarily told to, “Shut up, you danged old coot!” And, of course, I don’t shut up because that would be a violation of number five in the by-laws of cootism. Obnoxiousness is our only reason for still being alive.
Lately, my group of coots on Facebook (who call themselves a “pack” like wolves, but, in truth, a group of coots is called an “idiocy”) are talking about politics… very loudly salted with firmly held opinions, beliefs, and bad words in several languages. I mean, it’s texting each other on memes we disagree about, but we do it LOUDLY, like that, in all caps. We also do it in such an infuriating manner because, if no one ever bothers to tell us to “Shut the hell up!” we will begin to suspect we have actually died and gone to purgatory where we are still being obnoxious, but nobody knows we are doing it. That is rubbing coot fur in the wrong direction.
The radical right (otherwise known as coot paradise) have been cooting up a storm about school shootings and gun control of late. They have more or less turned their ire on me because, knowing I was a school teacher, they have seized on the Coot in Chief’s notion of arming teachers to protect schools. Obviously a majority of old coots agree that requiring a few “volunteer” teachers to conceal carry and learn how to handle a school shooter crisis situation with a gun instead of the way teachers are actually trained and practiced on handling such a situation, is the only economical way to defend schools from crazed lunatics with assault weapons. Of course, it is definitely more economical than hiring full time police officers to handle security because “volunteer” teachers does not mean that they are necessarily willing to do it, but rather that they are doing it without pay. And of course they shout at me things like, “Why don’t you just admit that you are too scared and unpatriotic to carry a gun as a teacher, and cowardly allow some female teacher with a big pistol to step in and do the job for you?” That is a very coot thing to say, and is hard to adequately counter, because if you try to argue using logic other than coot-logic, like the notion that since a majority of teachers in this country are female, you are asking women who are fierce enough to do the job (and I have known more than a few who would take it on no matter how hopeless their prospects) to take a handgun that the principal bought at Walmart with money from the Coke machine in the hall and face down a suicidal maniac with an assault rifle, you will not even be heard over the cacophony of coot braying and chest-thumping, let alone be understood.
And, for some reason, coots love Trump. Maybe because they feel he is truly one of them. He is older than dirt. He has an epicly bad comb-over to hide his bald spot. He says bad words very loudly in front of women, children, and everybody. He says, “Believe me,” a lot, especially when telling lies. And he’s not afraid to fart in public and blame it on the dog. I admit to insulting Trump in front of them only because I like to see coot faces fold up in extra wrinkles, and coot heads turn various shades of angry red and apoplectic purple.
So, yes. I am a coot. Not proud to be one… that I can remember, but a coot never-the-less.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, grumpiness, gun control, humor, Liberal ideas, oldies, Paffooney, teaching
Tagged as coots, gun control and coots, obnoxious coots, old coots