Category Archives: Uncategorized
My Heart is Broke
This is a repost. She has been gone for a year now.
Dogs can’t live forever. Not even as long as a people can. And believe me, she believed with all her might that she was a people. She ate enough people food, mostly stolen, that she convinced herself she was turning into a human girl. But one people year is seven years of dog-year aging. And she was 98 by that measure. And she had doggy breast cancer, complete with a big nasty tumor.
Yesterday, in the veterinarian’s office, she laid down and went to sleep, leaving me and my daughter and my two sons and my wife behind. My fur baby passed away as I stroked her precious head for the last time ever.
She will be writing no more blog posts for me when I am not feeling well. She will no longer be thinking about running over neighborhood cats as she is driving the car. The local rats will fear her no more. And I will never be able to prove to anyone now that she was a talking dog.
We picked her up off the street as a lost puppy fourteen years ago. She apparently escaped from the local pet store and was written off on an insurance claim before the vet could even suggest that that is where she came from. A free Cardigan corgi puppy. She was a priceless part of our lives. She loved us as only a dog can, with ferocity, throwing tantrums and tearing up the trash can when we left her alone in the house.
I shall miss her until the day I die. Sleep well, Jade. You have earned your rest.
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More Art Smart
Susu in the cornfield.
The girl from San Antonio
The cat girl with the rainbow colors.
Again, these pictures were made with the assistance of Picsart AI Photo Editor and AI Mirror programs.
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My Last Book?
I finally got the novella above published this June. It was only delayed by emergency heart surgery. I had a pacemaker put in at the end of May. And I had considerable trouble getting it published. Amazon regularly resets all the formatting and printing rules to make it harder for us to publish with the actions we used before to control the process. I still have only the e-book published. And it may well be the last thing I get published.
It is getting hard to write with increasing health problems.
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Maxfield Parrish Pictures
Much of what I draw is inspired by Maxfield Parrish, the commercial artist who created stunningly beautiful work for advertisers in the 1920’s and 30’s, and went on to paint murals and masterworks until the 1960’s. He is noted for his luminous colors, especially Parrish Blue, and can’t be categorized under any existing movement or style of art. No one is like Maxfield Parrish. And I don’t try to be either, but I do acknowledge the debt I owe to him. You should be able to see it in these posts, some of mine, and some of his.
Mine; (In the Land of Maxfield Parrish)
His; (Daybreak)
Mine; (Wings of Imagination)
His; (Egypt)
Believe me, I know who wins this contest. I am not ashamed to come in second. I will never be as great as he was. But I try, and that is worth something. It makes me happy, at any rate.
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Sad Times Down in Toonerville
I have to come to terms with not having much longer on this Earth. And things go wrong more than they go right because I am old, have had arthritis for fifty years, and am losing my eyesight. I dropped my meal in the bowl I was using to make it this evening. I had to settle for a toasted cheese sandwich. I have to give up my library and a lot of my doll collection to move to Iowa, a move that was delayed at least two months by my heamrt problem. There is war with Iran to ponder, which may kill us before the climate-change weather does. WWIII? I am feeling doomed in any case.
On the good side, I got my novella done and published… finally. But Amazon has changed rules again on the paperback. I can’t publish in paperback until it reaches 72 pages. I still have to figure that out.
However, the essential fact is that I have achieved my life’s purpose. 25 books published. The authorities worry about male teachers hugging students. Republicans holler about “groomers.” I never offered a hug or asked for a hug in 31 years as a teacher. But they hugged me well over a hundred times. Both boys and girls. Because they wanted to, or needed to. That is proof you made a difference in the classroom.
I do still feel like crying anytime I remember the kids who hugged me that are now dead by their own hands, dead by alcohol or drugs, or institutionalized for poor life choices. There is more than one in each category. But they are the exceptions, not the rule.
My family is all still alive and healthy, no simple task that. My wife is still teaching. My three kids are now all functioning adults.
So, there are sad times now in Toonerville, the place Mickey lives in his own stupid head. But that’s okay. The universe is unfolding as it should.
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Quietly Peaceful and Mostly Bare
Still in recovery, I think that I need to turn to what soothes me and helps me to heal.
Drawing something helps. Nude meditations help even more.
I can’t show this picture on Facebook, but it is here because I love to draw naked innocence and the
bared connections of humanity with the natural world.
This is not pornography. This is deep and honest plumbing of the depths of my creative well.
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How to Deal with Being a Writer
No matter how good or how awful you are as a writer (and the truly awful ones think they are good, which makes them truly awful), when the manuscript is finished, the publishing and marketing options you have are not even as effective as a roll of the dice… where you throw six of them and have to get six sixes to prove a winner. This is why I will never be a popular and profit-making author. Of course, I might be truly awful and just don’t know it yet.
I started the publishing game with a publisher that paid a dollar for the rights to publish my first publishing attempt. Publish America turned out to be a scam and held onto the rights to my space opera, AeroQuest, for seven years. They have been prosecuted as criminals and sued out of existence since then in 2007. I took my novel rights back in 2014. It was a learning experience. I learned at that point that I was a truly awful writer. The precious few relatives that read it and liked it were not literate enough to recognize awful novelistic garbage with too many characters, a meandering plot, and totally goofball thematic nonsense. After four and a half rewrites, it is still a pretty awful mess.
I tried to get the next one published by one of the major publishers. I landed Catch a Falling Star with I-Universe, a print-on-demand imprint of Penguin Books (at least that was who owned them then in 2012.)
This was, of course, another blunder in the publishing world where no author-friendly options still exist. I got to work with a professional editor who had worked in the publishing industry with McMillan for twenty years. She told me that my book was well done and better than many financially successful but awfully written books. And then she let me in on the terrible secret of publishing in the internet era. The publishers make money by charging the author for everything. And most books make very little money for the author, the royalties being only a small percentage of the price.
Working with the professionals at I-Universe was worth the thousands of dollars I paid them because of all the things I learned about writing and publishing. But when I tried a cheaper publisher, Page Publishing, they were totally not worth the money. Their editor made changes in Magical Miss Morgan that were not merely worthless, but forced me to re-edit the whole thing myself and change everything back. The publishing cooperative I tried, PDMI Publishing, was a much better business model, but couldn’t compete and ended up going out of business before they could publish Snow Babies.
So, it turns out that the option Denny suggested as the Spirit talking to Moitle’s Delicatessan is the only one I can afford. And I am doing everything myself. But as a marketer, I have nothing to work with to make myself a successful author. I have to be satisfied with being a good writer that nobody will ever read.
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Survivor’s Guilt
I am still alive after another Friday the 13th. Should I still be alive? With eight incurable illnesses and conditions? Ten years ago I would’ve told you that I expected to die by 2020.
I will not look this gift horse in the mouth, though I am aware it is fully capable of being a Trojan Horse with a mouth full of Greek soldiers.
Tomorrow is a new day… a new life.
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Catch a Falling Star 