I am a fool. I am a fool who tells stories. The stories are made up of lies about things that never happened to people who don’t really exist. But I am good at it. I have had a few successes with a few readers. I have even won awards that don’t translate into earning any money. Ah, well. A fool gets what he deserves. And though they are lies… my stories are always about things that should be true. You can tell the real truth with real lies.
Grandma Gretel in this book is based on a real woman and holocaust survivor I knew as a boy. It is one of my best books because I tell lies about the twin girls who told me they were nudists, a brave old grandma who survived Nazis in World War II, and fairies I believed in as a child and once were real to me.
Another book that I consider one of my best is full of lies about fairies and a teacher I once knew whose classes were more like her own children than mere students, even though she never had a child of her own. And she faced troubles in keeping her job that teachers actually face in the modern classroom.
I consider this one to be the finest story I have ever composed. It is full of lies about a killer blizzard that I experienced two different times in my childhood. Once in grade school and once in high school. And the children who survive this blizzard are all based on kids I actually taught during my teaching career. Definitely filled with lies, but lies that bare the scars of real experiences.
These are all book links to Amazon, just in case you are fool enough to want to buy any of these lies. You can’t go wrong reading wisdom from a fool who doesn’t know anything. Knowing you know nothing is the beginning of wisdom.
Use the comments to tell me what this story is about. Who is she? Why the golden horse? What happens. I promise I won’t steal your idea. I will probably write my own in the future.
There are many goofy people on social media. Here are a few of my own interpretations of a few of them. Starting with these twins. Did you know they are naked under their clothes? They assured me that if they took off their clothes, they would be naked. I didn;t let them prove it. You can’t do that on Facebook and Instagram.
This is Mel. Short for Melanie, I think. She is goofy enough to wear sunglasses indoors. She insists, however, that they are “shades,” not sunglasses.
Mel has intensely blue eyes. She can look right through you and see what’s inside you. At least she thinks she can. She can’t read my mind. Too many cobwebs and bats in there.
This is one of my best works of fiction. You can use this link to check it out.
Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect picture. I struggled with the fingers on this one. I made it from a photograph. And the photo only showed three visible fingers on each hand. The pointer finger on each hand is tucked behind the rest of the hands with the thumbs. They make Susu look like a cartoon character. So I tried extra hard to suggest what you can’t see. I had to make the right-hand pointer finger extra long to show the tip in shadow underneath. And then the stupid AI editor made the left hand flip the bird… but with the ring finger… So I had to redraw that even though it was the wrong finger for that. It looked stupid. AI can be very stupid.
But Susu likes it. I should say, however, that Susu is imaginary. She exists in my mind to take the place of the grandchild I lost to an ectopic pregnancy resolved before the Supreme Court made fixing the problem illegal and threatened the life of the poor mother. But Susu makes it easier to live with the loss, and everything that makes her happy is a pure healing miracle for my troubled mind.
“Take my hand, Grandpa. Let’s go take a walk in the park.”
I have lately been feeling like the Grim Reaper is lurking somewhere near again. Can I whip him in a game of chess again? Debatable.
Derfentwinkle, the Necromancer’s Apprentice, turned out to be a good student.
As a teacher, I have always been one of those who sincerely believes,
You must never give up on any student. They all can learn. They are all worth teaching.
And reflecting on that philosophy, in spite of the fact that I have been having a hard time getting things done and writing very little, I should not give up on myself.
I am not yet done telling my story. There is more to do, and more life to live.
Here’s the book about a teacher who doesn’t give up on a student and is proven right the hard way.
Up until now I have been doing little but writing stories and working on getting a lot of them into a published form. Admittedly a self-published form. For the most part, I am the only reader who knows how good my writing is. Well, there’s an editor from I-Universe who thinks I am as good as many authors on the best-seller lists. Not better than… as good as. And the editorial and marketing staff at PDMI Publishing (a publisher now out of business for over eight years) know how good my novel Snow Babies is. And a lot of nudists here, in England, in France, and in Germany know how good Recipes for Gingerbread Children is. But my reputation is tiny and the splash I have made is limited to puddles.
If the literary agent I have been talking to actually gets my book Catch a Falling Star republished by a major publishing house, things will change for the better. However, the current marketplace still puts most of the burden on the authors to promote and make their books succeed. The only difference would be having an agent on my side instead of me doing it all with no one on my side.
Most of the best writing I have done includes strongly realized female characters. Particularly Valerie Clarke, the female protagonist of Snow Babies. Good writing builds on previous writing. I may have already written the best things I am capable of writing. But as I continue to write, I can deepen characters that already have been established. And I can add new ones. For example, the character depicted in the Paffooneys of this post is Charlotte Robbins. She is a complex young lady with an anger management problem. She is also Valerie Clarke’s hated rival, one who beats her out for head cheerleader, but only because Valerie quits cheerleading in her senior year. She is destined to become Valerie’s best friend somehow in the course of my manuscript He Rose on a Golden Wing.
Of course, none of that happens if one of my health problems croaks me before my 70th birthday. I don’t mean to end on a downward note when everything has been looking up. But there it is, in spite of myself.
After a year-long post-Covid publishing drought, I am back in the page-making storyteller business once again. This post is about recent publication accomplishments, evidencing some pride in a comeback.
The poetry book is finished and will be published within a month (knock on wood, barring sudden unexpected death, prison time, or Armaggedon battles.) I have never thought of myself as a poet. But now I seriously think of myself as one of the worst poets in the history of the world.
This book was my only appearance on a best-seller list anywhere at any time as it made the number one spot on Amazon’s hottest-selling newly published books on two separate days in its first week of publication. It is about nudism and naturism, so it is the nudist community on X, formerly Twitter, that I have to thank for its achievement.
This book, the 4th in the AeroQuest series was published just this month, and it has already sold two copies and a whole bunch of KENP pages read. It has been a couple of years since book 3 of this series, so some readers have been waiting for it for a while.
This book, published during the pandemic has also been getting attention from readers, making it the most popular title on my author’s page.
And this book, a fairytale, is the most ignored book I have recently published. I think it is an excellent comedy adventure that even has some illustrations with nude fairies in them. But nothing is ever truly sure-fire.
I am now hoping that the interest in my books will begin to really pick up. I am talking to an agent for the first time about my book, Catch a Falling Star. I could actually be going places this time.
I am not ashamed to claim I enjoy reading and writing in the sunshine without anything but a hat. I wish I could’ve done that today, but there was no sunshine, the privacy fence had a huge hole in it, and the weather was too cold. Ah, the problems with being a nudist in the city.
She made that barrette with the paper flower on it. So, she’s talented. Her mother hates that top and how much bare midriff it shows off, but she went to the mall with her sweater on, and then made the sweater disappear. So, she’s also sneaky.
They are not sisters. But they do look alike, dress alike, and style their hair alike. But they are not even sorority sisters. They are in a high school prep school with a strict uniform dress code which they all break alike. That’s sorta like sisters, isn’t it?
The girl who drives that old, classic yellow cat also shops for yellow dresses and yellow shoes. But if you ask her, her favorite color is blue.
She wears only white in the food court and looks like an angel, and will not even drink much of that milkshake so it doesn’t mess up her dress or upper lip with even a hint of chocolate as she waits for that gangster thug who is her boyfriend. But if you think she’s too good for him, like she does, you don’t know what evil plans she has to manipulate and exploit him and eventually make him cry like a baby. She’s much more dangerous than he is.
