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the picture above : Davalon and Farbick near Mars (by Leah Cim Reyeb)

I am constantly bubbling over with ridiculous ideas and dreams.  After writing the book Catch a Falling Star, I was asked by an editor what happens next to some of the characters.  The Morrell family, changed into children, travel into space with the Tellerons aboard Xiar’s Base Ship.  Harmony Castille, the elderly church lady who falls in love with the Telleron Commander Biznap marries him and travels with the aliens too.  The task; find a new home world and start a mixed civilization.  Since the aliens have no inherent religion or morality, it falls to the humans on board to make Christian values the norm for the Telleron frog people.  That is a challenge old church ladies can’t resist, but also can’t manage without help.

So what can I do with this story?  Where can…

A while back I transmitted a weird alien poetry contest through this blog to the people of Earth.  It was a contest for bad poetry.  And obviously we only write good poetry on this planet as no entries from the native clothes-wearing primates of this planet were submitted.  If you are unclear about the contest of which I speak, here is the link;

The Interstellar Bad Poetry Challenge

While no Earth primate entries were actually submitted (Magilla Gorilla’s entry was disqualified as he is a cartoon character and copyrighted by Hanna Barbera) we did get some entries from illegal aliens.  Their contest entries are submitted here for your perusal.  However, it is bad poetry.  By definition, if you don’t have your Galaxian bad-poetry-reading glasses handy, you should proceed with extreme caution.

This first entry is from a random Space Goon.  It is exceptionally bad poetry, and apparently the Goon who…

The nightmare is always about standing in front of class naked.  I had that nightmare as a kid.  I have it still as a teacher.  Why do I so fear having everyone see what I most don’t want them to see about me, and all of them really don’t want to see… especially if they have any ghost of an idea what that might actually look like in real life?  I would make an extremely poor nudist.  People would go blind.  Honestly.

And yet, I find myself writing about naked people far more often than is comfortable.  Why?  What’s the matter with me that the topic keeps coming up in my silly little fiction stories?  Why was it a part of my boyhood fixations that just won’t go away?  I am not a pornography writer, er, I mean erotic fiction writer, like some of the indie novelists I have…

Yesterday I posted another maudlin doomsday post. I probably gave you the opinion that all I do with my time is mope around and think about death. And maybe write a little creepy black Gothic poetry. But that’s not me. I am a lover of the humor in stories by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Kurt Vonnegut. I am a former teacher that managed to teach the entire zoological range of possible middle school and high school students in Texas and did it without being convinced to hate them rather than love them. Yes, my heart is full of mirth and love and memories of weird kids and troubled kids and kids that could melt the meanest of hearts.

My passion is writing fictional stories about the kids I have taught, including my own three, and setting it in a fictionalized version of my little town, the place in Iowa…

I have been taking note of the Republican approach to science as displayed repeatedly in Congress.  I decided that this is the kind of science that can best explain the dog-poop phenomena, since it is, ultimately, about how the data feels more than measuring and quantifying and dealing with, you know, those fact thingies.

You see, the problem comes in with the fact that my dog, Jade, is producing dog poop at record levels, and it is all becoming rather a burden.   Now the dog-poop literature, (yes it does exist, since dog lovers write about anything and everything to do with dogs), says that it is not uncommon for a healthy young dog to poop as much as 5 times a day.  But my dog seems to poop exactly one time more per day than the number of times you take her for a walk.  If we go out…

Last night I watched again Part I of Ken Burns’ Mark Twain.   I think it reminds me of who I am as a writer.  No, I am not being all big-head arrogant and full of myself.  I devoured certain writers as a youth, consumed them whole.  Charles Dickens was my first passion, followed by J.R.R. Tolkien, and then Mark Twain.  Of all of them, Samuel Clemens is the most like me.  He was from the Midwest, born and raised in Missouri along the Mississippi River.  I am from the Midwest, born and raised in Iowa along the Iowa River.  He endured hardship and tragedy as a youth, losing his little brother in a riverboat accident, and he dealt with it by humor.  I endured a sexual assault from an older boy, and dealt with it by… well, you get the picture.  We are alike, him and I.  We both…

I miss being a teacher.  But even if I was suddenly healthy enough again to return to the classroom, I would have to think twice… or three times… or twelve times about it.  I know excellent teachers who are being driven out of the education field by the demands of the job in the current educational whirlpool of death and depression.  My own children are very bright and capable, but they face State of Texas mandated tests this next couple of weeks because that’s what we do in Texas, test kids and test kids and test them some more.  If we don’t stress them out and make them fail on the first round of testing, there will be at least two more to get the job done.  And believe me, the real reason for all the testing is to make kids fail.  It sounds harsh, and like one of my…