Category Archives: Uncategorized
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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This Friday the 13th
I am not particularly superstitious. But as a person who perceives the world synesthetically, I still find certain numbers to be eerily omenous. I am not a descendant of the Knights Templar, but I do know why Friday the Thirteenth makes them nervous. At dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307, the Templar Order was betrayed and arrested by King Philip of France because he sought to seize their vast treasury, which he did not fully gain control of. But he did use a lot of Templar Knights as firewood, burning them at the stake for supposedly worshipping Baphomet, a horned devil of Islamic origin.
The number thirteen appears black to me with an aura of evil around it. As a child, and after I was sexually assaulted, my terrible secret, I believed I would die on Friday the 13th. I worried intensely as each new Friday the 13th approached. But when it passed and left me still alive, I tended to think that any such date that did not end me was, in the long run, a lucky day. Some years, I had three whole lucky days.
This day, however, brings with it worries about blood pressure spikes and dives, possible heart attacks, or heart failures, and possible strokes. I may actually die this time. I spent a week in the hospital in May and had a pacemaker surgically attached to my heart. I still await the stress test that will reveal if there are any blockages in heart valves or clogged arteries. There is also a concerning spot on my liver that has yet to be tested, discovered anew by an X-ray taken during one of my three ER visits.
Do you think I can hold my breath for an entire day? Or will that only make matters worse?
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Talking to the Night
Alone in the darkness, I was talking to the night.
And with no one near to hear me…
My shirking, shrinking wisdom was not missing or bedight.
I said, “My head is filled with fear in times when wounds are deep and dear.
“And nothing stands on bedrock base, and it’s to just appear.
“But once it’s said, in dark absorbed, it’s only not to hear.”
A poem is pointless when…
No one Good is listening.
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The Adventure Continues
Doctors’ visits this week proved that I am still alive and probably will still be alive for a while yet.
The pacemaker is regulating my heart and working correctly.
I now have nine incurable diseases and conditions. And there is a spot on my left lung, and another one on my liver that will have to be checked once my heart is fully healed.
There are still worries and concerns.
I have been experiencing cracks in reality, though. I am told by spirit voices that when one is drawing close to the Reaper’s doorway, one can get glimpses of the last world and the next world through an increasing number of encroaching cracks. I should be concerned about seeing things that aren’t there yet, and hearing things said that no one here has spoken. But I am not. My life is nearly complete anyway, and I am not going back to the Emergency Room unless I have to.
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Counting My Dragon Treasures
If I am going to move to Iowa to live in the farmhouse until I die, then I have to take stock of the things I want to take with me. I have limits to what I can keep. Treasures to go through acquired since 1981. So, I will be posting a number of things as I sort through them. Above you find some of my horseback treasures. Left to right, Cowgirl Barbie, Roy Rogers, Lady Godiva Barbie, The Queen of Themyscira, Hippolyta, and her daughter, Diana, Wonder Woman. This is the first of many I will be evaluating, keeping, or discarding. What I have to leave, my wife and daughter will have to dispose of. Some of what I take may be denied me by my Spartan and frugal That will be disposed of in the Northlands.
This plan, of course, is easily thwarted if I die of heart failure before it can be done.
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Picture Play
Today was spent in the ER pursuing what might have been a bad turn in my heart struggle. Fortunately, an x-ray, six or seven blood tests, a CT-scan, an EKG, and three hours of heart monitoring proved that it was nothing to worry about. It wasn’t wasted worry either. I went to the ER because of signs and symptoms that my cardiologist had warned me to be alert about. I happily turned out not to have any post-surgery blood clots, nor any further undetected blockages or bleeding following my new pacemaker being installed.
,So, being too tired to write more, here are two digital artworks I created with digital art tools, a Digital Drawing Pad app, AI Mirror app, and Picsart AI Photo Editor app, as well as the funky otter picture being created from a color-by-number cutsie picture from the Tapcolor Pro app.
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Catch a Falling Star 