The novel I have been working on since 1996-97 is finally a complete first draft. I finished the one novel I had thought I would never be able to complete And it doesn’t suck as much as I used to think. It is a very hard story to tell, but sometimes the Herculean effort is what makes it worth doing. Now it is on to revision, editing… and dare I think it… Publication!
Filed under announcement, novel, novel plans, Paffooney, Uncategorized
My grip on reality slips without notice. So let me slip this little reality check back into my blog again so that you might notice.
I often get criticized for talking to people who are basically invisible, probably imaginary, and definitely not real people, no matter what else they may be.
The unfinished cover picture is from the novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius which I just finished the final rewrite and edit for. All of the characters in that book are fictional. Even though some of them strongly resemble the real people who inspired me to create them, they are fictional people doing fictional and sometimes impossible things. And yet, they are all people who I have lived with as walking, talking, fictional people for many years. Most of those people have been talking to me since the 1970’s. I know some of them far better than any of the real people who are a part of my life.
These, of course, are only a few of my imaginary friends. Some I spend time with…
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My aunt died this July. The day after her 80th birthday, she had a massive heart attack and was gone with a suddenness that left us all apprehensive.
My summer sunflower, the one that came up voluntarily in the pile of extra dirt left behind by the re-setting of the retaining wall around our yard, a DIY project for 2019, had dropped over from lack of water while we were gone to Iowa and attending the funeral. I thought it was going to die.
The blossoms you see in the picture above all shriveled and died. But the thing is now growing again.
Watering the sunflower’s sad remains twice a day has yielded two new large and healthy blossoms growing upward from the decimated stalk.
We are not easily defeated, my sunflower and I. And neither of us can stay down and unhappy for long without being ourselves deceased.
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Someone late at night rediscovered this old post and looked at it. Didn’t like it. Just looked. So, here you see what they saw.
I was planning to write a piece about insult humor for a while, and then Don Rickles had to up and die… that danged old hockey puck!’
So the master of insults is gone, and it will be even harder to explain why calling someone a proud and prissy poo-poo head is not a bad thing to do. Because, really… strong language is not really strength and it takes intelligence to be a mean little picky-wit. (No pun intended… because no pun was used, Duh! How slow are you compared to molasses around Christmas time?)
You may have heard me say that I don’t like hurtful humor. I don’t believe bad words are required to make something funny. I don’t think humor should be weaponized. Jokes that make you die laughing are too much like murder, and people who have no sense of humor can’t be hurt by them anyway.
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We came back from Iowa, Corporal Dorin, the Princess, and I, to find the hot Texas sun had been scorching everything since the day we left.
The watermelon patch is now occupied only by brown and burned stems.
The grass is sick yellow with sparsely spread spots of green.
And my solitary sunflower…
…has gone down for the count.
I added water to the yard. Hopefully the plants will come back. But the heat is no friend to us anymore.
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An old post that is not really that old… not as old as me anyway…
As a rabid Dungeons and Dragons player, I have labored for years to build up my collection of miniature figures. Now, like the action figures and the dolls, the collection is growing so fast it may eat the house. So, in order to play with them and get some use out of them, I built a cardboard castle, complete with grid for playing D & D. It is a scene that can be used to play the game, but it is also a place to display my collection.
Toy companies have recently started putting out collectible miniatures in an almost D & D scale. They only cost about a dollar apiece. That makes them cheaper than candy bars. And I am diabetic, so I can’t buy candy bars.
I like to position them in my D & D background and take pictures of them, even though DC Superheroes are not…
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I still dream about being in school, both as a student and as a teacher.
I have delusions now that I am going to be a substitute teacher again this fall. I still have the skills. But will my body cooperate and not fail me in the classroom? I do not wish to die in front of students. That already nearly happened twice.
Still… I need to do something besides Uber. And teaching is what I know and love.
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This old dog needs to learn some new tricks. Uber-ing for extra dollars is getting to be too hard. Especially for someone with my health conditions who really should be behind the wheel less, not more. But more is the only way to keep up with rising expenses on food, insurance of all kinds, hospital bills, doctor’s bills, bankruptcy payments, and, thanks to Trump’s generally fascist tax policies, tax bills with penalties added.
A big part of the problem is how crappy of an employer Uber is. Let me correct that. I am not calling them “crappy” (a term that honors Thomas Crapper, inventor of the flush toilet) but “crappie”, the pugnacious little fish, a member of sunfish family. They are small and defend themselves mostly with bluff and spoof, pretending to be bigger and badder than they really are. Crappies, it may be noted, are predator fish that eat smaller fish, including the young of the muskellunge, northern pike, and walleye that grow up to eat crappies.
Uber doesn’t employ drivers, they make contracts with drivers as “independent contractors”. That means when tax time rolls around, you owe massive debts to the IRS because no monthly withholding has occurred. You have to maintain your own vehicle, pay for all the gas, mechanical maintenance, bottled water, and anything else needed to bribe passengers to give you a good rating.
And any chance of a bonus depends on that rating. But passengers when they are satisfied don’t often remember to give you five stars. You have to maintain a 4.85 star average. But the people who will not forget to rate you are the ones with some complaint or other. “He didn’t speed up to make it through intersections on yellow lights!” “He didn’t stop on stale yellow lights and risked going on red halfway through the intersection!” “The car smells bad!” “The car smells too much like air freshener!” “The driver doesn’t talk enough during the trip!” “The driver talks too much!” You get the idea. There is no winning at this game. Ones and twos kill your star average, and even fours bring it down.
And since I started Ubering as a way to make money whenever I felt well enough to work, I have to consider how little money I can actually make now that safe driving time is more limited by crappie health than ever (I may have meant to honor Thomas Crapper there.) I am now rarely well enough to deal with the red-haired alligators, alien spaceships, and man-eating muskellunges that you encounter in Dallas city traffic. I only made four dollars from Uber last week.
So, the solution is to find a new job. I could probably be the grinning door-guard greeter at Walmart on a part time basis. Maybe I can be a substitute teacher again a couple of days per week when school starts. Whatever, I do, I have to get away from driving for less than minimum wage.
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Today is a day spent with family. It is also a day I came down with a viral infection, a severe cold, or possibly the flu. I have had a fever and a headache for two days. So, I will not write or post anything today. At least nothing without a lot of irony in it. And, no, irony doesn’t cure headaches.
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My best writing advice is really probably bad advice. But here is more of it. I make up for what I lack in quality with quantity… lots and lots of quantity.
Teachers of serious writing will often tell you… or more correctly, give you the Word of God, “You want to be a good writer? You have to write every single day.” And having been a teacher of writing at the high school and middle school level, I am committed to passing that on to you also as the inviolable Word of God. You see, I have long been, well, not a serious writer exactly, more of a dedicated writer with warped notions of reality and a tendency towards goofiness. You can see by the view of my WordPress insights page that I have steadily, in five years’ time, been noticed and looked at by increasing amounts of thoroughly duped WordPress viewers.
10,373 visitors have viewed something on my blog 17,383 times in 2017. And I know that most are looking at the pictures and moving on. That’s how I…
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Catch a Falling Star 