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I have reached a time in life when I wonder if I truly want to keep on, or just softly mark time until the end comes and I lose that chess game with the Grim Reaper. I don’t have anything left to prove. Most of what I have left to give to society is in my twenty-some books somewhere. And it is not my fault that nobody has, with a few important exceptions, chosen to read my work. Reading is less of a thing in the internet age of Marvel movies and podcasts. So, I am already fading away to nothing while still technically being alive.

I find myself drawing more than writing as digital art tools and AI picture editors let me combine drawings and photos and designs that my hands can no longer make without help and colors blended now that my increasingly colorblind eyes cannot see correctly without help. I have spent a decade fighting to draw what I wanted in the way that I wanted, and now it is all simple with digital help.

And I do have more stories to tell, if I have time. But all the most important ones like Sing Sad Songs, The Baby Werewolf, Snow Babies, Catch a Falling Star, and The Bicycle-Wheel Genius that I have labored over since the 1970s are now complete and published. I have added some other really good ones like Recipes for Gingerbread Children and Magical Miss Morgan along the way. So, my most important work is done.

Am I ready to die, then? Oh, Hell NO!

This is made from a picture of the flowers blooming early in our yard and a drawing of a fairy that I did on top of the original photo before knitting it all together with the AI Mirror program that digitally turns everything into a uniform painting.

This is done from an old yearbook photo of a former student and the alley cat that often prowls our backyard looking over her shoulder. Viviana will never recognize herself here, either because it wasn’t her picture I chose to draw, or because I am pretty bad at doing portraits that look like the person. I won’t tell you which, if any, is true.

Years ago the green-eyed girl on the cover of National Geographic Magazine became a well-known and well-loved iconic image. Here I have turned her into a blue-eyed girl who looks nothing like the original. Well, I got the clothing to look very similar.

This is an anime-style picture of a girl who was singing on Instagram. When you use the AI program to edit it, you have to often go back and re-edit it to correct things like where the AI fails to interpret the hands the way you originally drew them. I actually went back and fixed the fingers on her left hand, but then I made the mistake of downloading the previous version, retaining the AI finger flubs. She still has her cat claws. The shadow on the thumb still looks wrong even in my corrected version.

Believe me when I say that the teaching-life’s okay.

I survived it many days because I brought bananas to the fray.

I taught within the monkey house and now’s my time to grouse.

Sixth graders are the little monkeys

Small and fast and full of funkies

Seventh-grade are chimpanzees

Who grab and eat whatever they sees

And the eighth, well, they are the gorillas

Who throw their poop and make school thrillers.

And though it makes you crazy and mean

And you feel like life is full of beans

You learn to love the monkey house

Even the bully and the louse

Entertaining them with stories and tasks

Which makes them smile and drop their masks

You trick them into a little learning

And maybe keep the school from burning

And long years end with coos from doves…

They have become your little loves.

There is no doubt about it

As a writer, as a poet, as an author

I am absolutely nobody

I will never be famous

I will never be wealthy

Only a tiny, precious few

Will ever read me, ever know me

But that is entirely okay

That was never what my life was for

In fact, I am satisfied

Because you read this

And now you understand.

I finished the final draft of this bug-boiler during the pandemic, before the end of 2022. It should have been published about three books ago. I have never run into a more complex writing experience than this one.

The first issue was arthritic. I wanted to continue using illustrations to short-cut character depictions. I like to illustrate these novels with comic-book-style pen-and-ink illustrations. But my fingers have lost so much dexterity that I can no longer match the old cartoons and things begin to look a little off. I tried to use pre-existing illustrations from my old notebooks full of such pictures. But my scanner became a problem because the controls of the thing were tied to my son’s computer… the one he gave to his older brother when he went into the Air Force. And my only computer linked to the scanner, which I can no longer link new computers to, is old and wearing out. It takes a week to scan things at times when I need to go faster than that. And the drawings don’t look that good anyway… though much better than any new work I do with pens on paper. And it is the part of the old book that I am rewriting as a series of five books where I have the most new plot and world-building to do… and then cross-check for consistency with everything I wrote back in 2007.

And then the ability to do digital art came along, something I would’ve loved to apply to this book. But the learning curve on that took more than a year. And yet, I am still trying to master the skills necessary to create science fiction art in a digital format.

And this entire last week was consumed with frustration over trying to create the new format Amazon requires with an interactive table of contents. I still have to skip the parts of that which Amazon will still let me skip because it is new.

Anyway, the thing was fun to write, fun to reread, and worth all the effort. You can see for yourself at the link above.

So, Mickey has discovered how to use poetry for evil.

He can make dead people and poets return to life through poetry.

He can manipulate your feelings, make you laugh, make you cry…

He can even make you have ideas that began in someone else’s stupid head.

But does that mean we should punish him, maybe even execute him?

Well… Probably.

But does that also mean that you shouldn’t write poetry yourself?

In today’s modern internet age, many stupid people and AI machines

Are writing many stupid poems.

Good poems are lost in swamps of bad poetry.

Though, you should never let that stop you!

Life is poetry. And we must all write our own into being.