This is the weekly graphic novel update. I apologize for the shortcut, but editing and reblogging last week’s post saves me a lot of work.
If you want to see the complete Chapter One to catch up on the story, here’s the link; https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2018/11/24/hidden-kingdom-chapter-1-complete/
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Music that you have to hear even though you may not want to hear this spiel again.
You know how in movies and on TV they play a soundtrack behind the action of the show? And how, sometimes, if the movie or TV show is any good, it enhances and underscores whatever is happening to the main theme of story and the action that expresses it on the screen? Yeah, that. A complex idea that lies just under the surface of consciousness, a something that somebody sometime thought up that actually works and can work quite well. But why does it work?
Put as simply as I can say an idea that is so layered and complex, it is because that is how real life works. Yeah, there is music in the background of every life. It plays almost unnoticed until that point where you suddenly realize how it defines your very soul.
Through childhood and junior high and high school, I used to joke with my…
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Here’s wishing that Christmas elves find you this day. The Santa’s elf in the Paffooney is holding up greetings from snowflake elves and storybook elves to help you feel entertained, mystified, and victimized by elfshot. This season of Tchaikovsky Nutcracker elves and Fantasia elves and jolly old Saint Nicholas is constantly trying to frizzfry your senses and make you have feelings that pierce the hard-hearted feelings of everyday usual people living life with no magic and no imagination. Nuts to that! Christmas nuts! Nuts roasted on an open fire. Jack Frost nipping at your nose. Nuts carolling in the snow outside your door hoping you have some hot cocoa to spare because they were nutty enough to go out singing on a cold night with Jack Frost in a nipping frenzy already before they even began putting their nutty noses at risk. (Okay, maybe I don’t wish Jack is one of the Christmas elves that find you. They are not all wonderful.) And that magic that elves bring is the magic of being together with family, the magic of love. So here’s wishing that elves find you on Christmas, and you’ve run out of Scroogie elf repellent just in time to feel the love the season brings, and before the mangled elf-metaphors melt in the light of reason and rationality that take hold of us all the rest of the year.
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It doesn’t matter what you believe in. This time of year is special. People are generally in a good mood, upward turns at the corners of the lips, singing out loud, or even singing in the heart alone. The magic we all believe in comes from the people we love and turning our attention to them.
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It’s that time of year again.
No, that is not a typo. I only meant “gifts” in pun form. Sometimes you don’t feel much like talking and, after all, the “picture can be worth a thousand words”, especially if the picture moves.
As you can see, I am spending the day with the Ghost of Christmases Past. Have a wonderful holiday, however you may celebrate it. I will offer more goofy stuff by Mickey after the Ghost of Christmases Future gets done with me.
As things heat up for old Trumpy, I decided to re-post this old Smurf tale for no good reason whatsoever.
Trumpy Smurf and General Kelly Smurf, his chief of staff
Right now I think this country needs a good lesson in how to avoid a fascist dictatorship. And we can’t look to 1930’s Germany to get an example. They didn’t avoid it. They got Hitler even though he did not have a Twitter account to use for making himself der Fuhrer.
So let’s tell a story about fascists and infringe on copyrights at the same time by telling you a Smurf story.
There was a time in Smurf village when their local politics became entirely too polarized into only two factions. One side was made up of the good-time Smurfs who had all the money. They called themselves the Pub-Lickins because they liked to win elections by cheating and through massive donations from the richest Smurfs among them, and also because they loved to lick up all the liquor at…
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My novel, The Baby Werewolf, is in the process of being published. The Kindle e-Book version is already approved. The paperback is pending.
I was actually beginning to worry that I might not live long enough to get this one published. But it has turned out to be a very good book. I am pleased with the story, themes, and sense of depth and complexity. It is a young adult novel, basically because the characters are young adults. Well, thirteen and fourteen-year-olds, actually. So, almost adults.
Todd Niland, an eighth-grade farm boy, and fan of black-and-white horror movies like The Wolfman, is the main character and first first-person narrator of the book. He is in love with a freckle-faced girl and too shy to ever tell her how he feels. He has a keen sense of adventure and longs for the day when he can do something heroic.
Sherry Cobble is his girlfriend’s best friend, and ends up being the first girl Todd sees naked. But that’s because she and her twin sister Shelly are both nudists and like to walk around with nothing covering them but skin and wind and sunshine. She is the one who decides she is going to help Todd discover romance and the secret fact that the girl he loves actually feels the same way about him. Sherry becomes the third of the trio of narrators who tell this story.
Torrie Brownfield is the second narrator of the story. And even though he is, in some ways, the werewolf of the title, he is not really a werewolf. He is a boy with a condition called hypertrichosis, a hair-growth genetic disorder like the one that created P.T. Barnum’s sideshow sensation, Jo Jo the Dog-faced Boy. And he has a tremendously difficult time finding his place in a world that sees him as a freak and even fears him.
I find my computer acting up as I try to write this, so time for different measures. More about this matter soon.
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Here’s an old post about an old humorist who isn’t me, but who I wish was me… or I wish I was him… or him is good and me is good but him as me would be good-er… or something like that.
dave barry
I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea. They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins. Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight. I can barely see what I am typing. You don’t believe me? Here’s what it looks like at the moment;
They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features. Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French. They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry. And why do you suppose that is?
Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension. He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early…
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Here’s a good old post to make you groan about the depths of Mickian humor.
If you have the bad habit of reading this particular blog more than once, then you are probably aware that I used to be a public school teacher. Even worse, I used to be a middle school English teacher. Aagh! Seventh graders! It explains a lot about how life has warped my intelligence, personality, and world view. It also explains somewhat where I found such a fountain-like source for some of the worst jokes you ever heard.
Now, as to the question of why I have chosen in my retirement early-onset senility to become a humor-blogger… well, that is simply not something I can answer in one post… or even a thousand. But kids are the source of my goofball clown-brain joking around.
Kid-humor, you see, is stunted and warped in weird ways by the time period you are talking about. The eighties, nineties, two thousands, and the tens are…
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These are my seven good novels published with three different publishers;
Soon I will be adding number eight. The Baby Werewolf should be ready to self-publish by next week.
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Catch a Falling Star 