When you are small, there is something intimidating about a man in strange clothes and a garish pattern of white and red and blue all over his face. What is he hiding? What does he want? Why does he squeeze off a blast from that ridiculous little horn with the big red squeeze bulb right in your little-boy face? His big floppy shoes suggest monstrous feet. Why does he have such a big mouth with red paint all around it? “The better to eat you with, my dear!”
But clowns have a purpose for those of us who are no longer frightened little boys. They parody our actions and exaggerate everything. They look like us, sound like us, and behave like us if only we are able to look at ourselves times twelve or thirteen. They are essential to our lives and our happiness. Why, you ask? Because, my friend…
This is my latest clown picture, inspired by my newest fascination with Puddles’ Pity Party on YouTube. Like all my clown pictures, I am fairly sure that my number one son will tell me it’s a creepy clown. He has never liked clowns. When he was still small we took him to the pre-show at Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus which at that time was Meet the Clowns. We met the men… and women… and dwarves… in the face paint with the loud personalities and huge red smiles. I was charmed, as always, but number one son spent most of the time behind my pantleg, peering around for sneak peaks at the clowns. He was actually shivering most of the time.
But me, I love clowns. Always have. Especially the sad clowns. The hobo clowns. Red Skelton playing Freddy the Freeloader, Charlie Chaplin as the Little…
One really weird thing that teachers do is think about thinking. I mean, how can a person actually teach someone else how to think and how to learn if they don’t themselves understand the underlying processes? Now that I have retired from teaching and spend all my time feeling sorry for myself, I thought I would try thinking about thinking one more time at least. Hey, just because I am retired, it doesn’t mean I can’t still do some of the weird things I used to do as a teacher, right?
This time I made a map to aid me in my quest to follow the twists and turns of how Mickey thinks and how Mickey learns. Don’t worry, though. I didn’t actually cut Mickey’s head in half to be able to make this map. I used the magical tool of imagination. Some folks might call it story-telling… or bald-face…
This post is about writer doubt. And Stephen King. Do those two things go together? If they don’t then Mickey is an awful writer and does not know how to do what he does. It would mean Mickey is icky.
I used to think Stephen King was a totally over-rated writer. Back in the early eighties I read Carrie, King’s first novel, and got halfway throughFirestarter, and had to give up. Partly because the book was overdue at the library, and also because I found the books mechanical and somewhat joyless in the writing. I thought he suffered greatly in comparison to writers I was in love with at the time like Ray Bradbury and Thomas Mann. I began to tell others that King was somewhat icky. But King was obviously also somewhat successful. He began to get his books made into movies and people who don’t…
This story told from the point of view of a piece of furniture makes me happy, though it is probably a terrible example of how to tell a story… and therefore a good example of how NOT to tell a story.
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 am wondering now if it is appropriate to call what I do in my writing and my cartooning humor. I tell stories. As a school teacher in both junior high and high school, I told stories in class and made kids laugh. (Okay, I admit, kids that age mixed with hormones, experiments with sex and alcohol, and under-developed frontal lobes in their brains will laugh at practically anything. I know a teacher who crosses her eyes when talking to kids about their mistakes, and she has them rolling on the floor with giggle-fits. This is now my fourth longest parenthetic expression, also known as an aside. They would probably laugh about that.) But is it fair to call that humor?
I write stories filled with feel-good crap. I’m as likely to make you cry as I am to make you laugh. (At least, that is my intention…
My computer is misbehaving again in a rather large way, so let me share with you this old post about what happened once before when my computer inserted itself into my novel-writing by misbehaving.
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…
So, now that I have finished another novel that I have been working on for more than twenty years, I have decided to turn away from the hometown novels and take up some science fiction/humor again.
And I, of course, am not smart enough by any stretch of the imagination to avoid choosing my disastrous first novel from 2007, AeroQuest. This particular novel is spectacularly in need of a serious overhaul and re-write.
First of all, it has too large of a cast with new characters introduced in almost every Canto (what I inexplicably re-name chapters). Likewise they are interacting in too many different settings and planets and spaceships without enough individual explication of each. It screams out in agony to be divided into smaller chunks and both expanded and simplified.
The first book, Stars and Stones, will be centered on the planet Don’t Go Here. That, of course, is a bizarre world populated entirely by sentient beings who were marooned on the planet by pirates and space wolves. Even more bizarre, the populous has responded to a growing population with limited resources by adopting a caveman culture based on a lone cartoon holovid of The Flintstones.
The characters and the plot-lines will be pared down and simplified.
And, having done some work on AeroQuest 1 already, I also got a headstart on AeroQuest 2 by creating a cover for it.
My daughter, the Princess, created this space background for me.
So, you can clearly see that my daft plan is to re-write that simply awful book as a trilogy. A Sci-Fi trilogy? Wherever did I get a foolish idea like that?
Well, I always claimed that the original was half-inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy, and half-inspired by Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So, that should make for one seriously off-kilter mutant amalgamation of a book series.
Catch a Falling Star 