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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…

I have rather regularly been revising and editing old writing.  One thing I have discovered is that I am capable of the most gawd-awful convoluted sentences filled with mangled metaphors and ideas that can only be followed while doing mental back-flips or managing miracles of interpretation.    That last sentence is a perfect example of purple paisley prose.  Paisley, in case you didn’t know this, is a printed pattern on clothing or other cloth that makes an intricate design out of the basic twisted teardrop shape borrowed from Persian art.   The basic motif, the teardrop shape, is a leaf or vegetable design often referred to as the Persian pickle.  I write like that.  You can pick out the Persian pickles in this very paragraph.  Alliterations, mangled metaphors, rhyming words, sound patterns, the occasional literary allusion, personification, bungles, jungles, and junk.  “How can you actually write like that?” you ask.  Easy.  I…

I want to talk about a living artist for a change.  I know that the artists I have talked about on this goofy blog-that-doesn’t-seem-to-know-what-it-is-really-for, Norman Rockwell, William Bouguereau, Paul Detlafsen, Thomas Kinkade, Fontaine Fox, and Maxfield Parrish, are all quite dead.  But conversely that is a good thing because it means their art has stood the test of time.  But today I want to plug a working artist I find absolutely fascinating.  This is the first artist I ever seized upon as an example of a true master whose chosen medium is primarily digital art.

This is Loish.  You can find her at http://loish.net/ or http://http://loish.deviantart.com/.  Her name is Lois Van Baarle and she is a Dutch citizen by birth.  She has worked as both an animator and a commercial artist/illustrator.  She has lived all over the world in countries like France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States, but…

I was trying to write a post and my computer had to have a brain fart and blow it to pieces.  It began because the mouse pad froze and I had to try to do everything by key commands while trying to save what I wrote.  That’s gone, however.  In its place is a cryptic question in German that asks if you want to be a swan.  How did that happen?  More than one wrong key got pressed.  As I write this, two people have already liked the computer brain-fart post.  Let’s see how this will get fixed.

  I intended to write a post on my attempt to finish my novel in November, the novel The Magical Miss Morgan.  I was inspired to do that because my niece, Stephanie Bisinger, is currently involved in the NaNoWriMo project to write 50,000 words in November and complete a rough draft…

My first published book was a Science Fiction novel called Aeroquest.  It was a story that came about because as a young teacher I liked to play pencil and paper role-playing games with kids.  It started with Dungeons and Dragons in 1981, but because I was in South Texas at the time, Baptist and fundamentalist Texas, I had to change away from any game associated with dragons and demons.  I turned instead to the RPG called Traveller, a space game inspired by Star Wars and other Sci-Fi of the time.  Most of the characters in the book, especially the Mutant Ninja Space Babies, were actually the kids I played the games with.  They are characters that were created by them and given life by me.

So, I sent this book to a new publishing company in 2007 called Publish America.  They seemed excited to publish my work.  They paid me…

As terrible as my first published novel turned out to be, I have not given up on the idea of Aeroquest.  I am interested in whipping a part of it into the shape of a graphic novel.  So I bought a sketchbook and noodled down some Baby Mutant Space Ninjas gunk into it in full color.  But it is only a rough draft.  It is not finished artwork.  I can’t get over how pretty and colorful it is turning out to be.  I thought I would show you how it is going so far.

There are obvious signs that the dialogue and text boxes need to turned into a more finished form.  And serious editing decisions probably need to be made about moon shots.

Here is what it looks like to use computer editing to try to fix some of the problems.

I will continue to work on it…