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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…

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.