The final edited poster version.
The 3-D version was created with the help of AI Mirror.
The paper doll on its shelf.
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The Newest Paper Doll
It has been a while since I last made a new paper doll. But I am trying like heck to get back into the swing of the artsy-fartsy things I used to do: drawing, writing stories, crafting novels, collecting dolls, and combining things to make paper dolls. So, here’s the first paper doll I’ve made since I’ve been back in Iowa. Meet the Candy Kid, junior clown, nudist, and pen-and-ink doodle.
Of course, even if you draw the paper doll with clothes on it, it is still a naked paper doll; it is still naked until you make the clothes for it with the paper tabs.
So, here is Candy again, but with his paper clown clothes overlaid on top of the drawing.
And here he is with an added Picsart spooky background.
Here he is with his paper-doll friends on the paper-doll shelf.
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A Picture That Hasn’t Been Posted In a While
March of the Tin Soldiers
Here the forces of my imagination approach a battle with the coming darkness.
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Chess with the Reaper… ongoing
I have successfully moved to Iowa. But it is not a solution to every problem I face while trying to keep living for a while longer. I have got my extensive list of medical care needs transferred, mostly successfully, but I am still struggling with several important things.
Like the jester in the Paffooney, I have little control over the many strings I have to deal with in making the puppets work in my novel-writing projects. Arthritis hinders my fingers on the keyboard. I have lost my resistance to the power that ragweed pollen has over my lungs and sinuses. Too many Octobers in Texas have resensitized me to Iowa’s potent allergy-sufferer’s bane. Diabetes is out of control on some days now, too, for no apparent reason. Knight takes the king’s bishop and puts me in the hole. The Reaper grins at me across the chessboard.
I can’t change my current address on the Medicare website. I have to go through the Social Security Office to change it, and the federal government is shut down, so the Office is on unpaid vacation.
Queen takes King’s Rook. Oh no! I don’t actually have a legally written will.
But I have sold three books this month. So, maybe the game is not over yet.
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The Story is Never Safe
This is an old post, but still pertinent since the Pumpkinhead President is sending troops into Chicago and other American cities, planning on making himself a king, and tearing down a third of the White House while the government is shut down.
When you are a writer, you look for conflict constantly. It is a fact of the writing life that stories need conflict to drive them forward, whether they are non-fiction reports, biographies, or histories, or they are fiction stories full of made-up people and made-up events. But we are in a time in history where the conflict in real life is hitting everywhere. No place, in reality, is safe.
What do I mean about there being no real-life safety?
Well, barring a technological magic bullet and a complete revolution in the way corrupt capitalists do politics, the Earth will probably become a lifeless hot rock more like the surface of the planet Venus than any kind of Edenic utopia. If the Republicans take back power next month, kiss goodbye the human race in any form but zoo animals in alien zoos on other worlds.
And Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in the head with a hammer because of Don Cheetoh Trumpaloney’s Neanderthal political practices. Men in camo and bullet-proof vests watch polling places to presumably threaten non-white, non-Trumpy voters. Republicans are probably out-voting Democrats, thus sealing our fate. Republicans choose profits for themselves over life on Earth.
I, of course, am no more safe than anybody else. In some ways, as a writer of fiction, I am less safe than the rest of you. My imagination gives me near prescience about the bad things that can happen to me. And I write fiction about love and forgiveness and a sense of community good in solving the chaotic conflicts of life, All you have to do is get naked, figuratively and in reality both, in order to combat the dangerous world around you. But, of course, it means you have no sort of armor at all to protect you from the wounds of life’s many predators.
This last week, I faced a predator like that, in the form of a marketing service wanting to make my book Catch a Falling Star available at a library conference in New Orleans. Of course, only for the slight fee of $850.00. Now, it goes without saying, I could really use exposure like this to help sell my books. But the price is far more than I would ever recoup from royalties. And the salesman tried to hurry my decision. He offered to talk to his manager about giving me three payment installments, a used-car-dealer tactic. And he urged me to sign up before he would give me a chance to google his company, his emails, and his Better-Business-Bureau rating. He had no mercy for the fact that his efforts to keep me talking caused me to have a coughing fit. I ended the ordeal by hanging up on him. I did not answer when he called me back.
The world is ending. I am living in a house that threatens to fall upon my head at any moment. And two book-marketing schemers have now contacted me, one to scam me out of my publishing rights, and another trying to get a lot of my money for very little real value.
How will this story end? I have yet to learn how the conflict will be resolved. But I know it will not be safe.
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The Final Picture
Here it is, finished with final corrections added. Why am I still not satisfied?
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Playing Cowboy in the Barn
This picture is built from a photo of two paper dolls that look almost nothing like this. I used AI to create it, but not by simply giving it text and asking for it to do the entire artwork.
I first took a photo of the two paper dolls and removed the background. The cowgirl Woody was originally a drawing of Annette Funicello done by me, then turned into a paper doll. I turned the Mickey Mouse Ears into a cowboy hat and dressed the figure as Woody from Toy Story. The little blonde girl paper doll became the brunette girl seated on the table. The background of the inside of a barn was generated around the characters with Picsart AI Photo Editor.
This is an intermediate step in the process described above. I like how the cowboy Woody figure was transformed by Picsart, but I don’t like what it did to the hands of the girls. I should have fixed the hands in the step below, before generating the background. I also don’t like how the seated girl’s left eye expanded. This problem was caused by my trying to avoid the AI program making her cross-eyed when it added the background.
Here’s an alternate background. I, of course, am not satisfied yet with the picture. Maybe I will work on it more tomorrow.
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Warming to New Home Hearths
I have returned to the scene of my youth and childhood. I am now living in the farmhouse, which was once the home of my grandparents and great-grandparents before them. The farmplace has been in the family for over a hundred years.
It takes a lot of getting used to stuff that I have not been exposed to in a very long time. Living in Texas since 1981, I am not weather-proofed for Autumn in Iowa. It is already the kind of cold that is actually winter cold in Texas. Harvest is finishing up. There’s a lot of dust and ragweed pollen in the air to reignite allergies of olden days. I haven’t seen any ring-necked pheasants, but I have seen deer wandering through the cornfield stubble. Those are Autumn images I used to live for because they herald the coming of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Of course, Halloween comes first. These are things that, as a Jehovah’s Witness, I wasn’t supposed to think about from 1995 to 2014. I can think about them now.
I am living in the house my parents and grandparents lived in before me with the older of my two sisters. My wife, not divorced from me but separated from me by a job she’s not ready to retire from for four more years, remains in Texas in possession of her strict Biblical faith. The Witnesses are good people, but being away from them is liberating since I am a Christian Existentialist, and being considered an atheist by their measure can be daunting.
Of course, President Pumpkinhead has killed off the soybean and corn markets with his beloved tariffs, and we may face losing all our farm income… and eventually the farmhouse. He is using AI jet planes to poop on protesters in his TikTok imaginaries. And he is also firing all special education teachers, drilling for more toxic oil, and working hard to kill off the biosphere. So, the end of the world is coming soon. At least Edgar Cayce predicted that once the Builder had brought destruction to the government and country, the Mender would arise and lead the population to heal and reunify in a hatred-removing campaign for love and renewal.
Who knows where it goes from here? But we shall see who decides and what we can choose to happen next.
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Oops!
I found out this weekend that I am a terrorist and hate America.
Oops! How did that happen?
I confess that I am an ANTIFA.
I lost a great uncle (my grandmother’s brother) in a destroyer’s gun turret during World War II.
It was a training accident. But he was training to fight the Japanese in the Pacific.
I had another great uncle (my other grandmother’s brother) who landed in the second wave on Normandy beach.
He was fighting the German fascists. A potato-masher grenade blew him up into a tree and disabled him for life. He was never able to tell war stories. He could still talk, just not about that.
So, I was born ANTIFA.
Of course, I understand the Pumpkinhead’s family came from Germany.
Maybe that’s why he identifies me as an enemy.
Nobody ever recruited me to be an ANTIFA. I have always known I was one since I first learned about World War II.
But I shouldn’t be surprised. The Pumpkinhead quotes Hitler, admires Hitler, and wishes for German Generals. No wonder he hates anti-fascists.
I am now a terrorist. To prove it, I wrote this post. Please tell me in the comments how many people have been killed by reading this post. It is the only terrorist act I committed this weekend.
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