2023 has been a year of recovery. I don’t believe I published a single book in 2022. I experienced in that year the very first complete year with both of my parents gone. Neither of them died of Covid, but I lost both of them during the pandemic. My father died of Parkinson’s Disease in 2020. My mother died of heart and kidney failure the year after in 2021. Then in 2022, I came down with Covid Omicron Variants twice even though I took every vaccine and booster I could up to the time I first came down with it. Depression, fatigue, and serious degradation of both my ability to see color due to increasing color blindness and my loss of some of my drawing skills due to arthritis.
My sons have both left me behind, the former Marine now going to college on a military scholarship in Oklahoma, and my number-two son joining the Air Force. My daughter is still at home, but she is an independent adult in most of the ways that matter, and I am now more or less unemployed in the job of parenting, really for the first time since 1981 because when I became a teacher I was suddenly swamped with fatherless boys and girls who attached themselves to me as the significant adult father-figure in their lives. I didn’t become a parent of my own children until 1995. And now that I am no longer really accepted in my wife’s religion for reasons of atheism and agnosticism, as well as retired from teaching, there are no more captive audiences in my life. (My wife only talks at me rather than to me… for reasons of atheism and agnosticism.)
My books do not really take the place of having a captive audience to carry the big pencil in front of. When you write a manuscript, it never laughs at your jokes… or at you when a joke fails spectacularly. You don’t really get feedback from a book the way you do from a captive audience… even an audience of sixth-grade non-readers. It is a one-way conversation with nobody but whatever fools make the mistake of picking up one of my books and actually reading it. To be fair, though, there are some who read and review my books to tell me how well I connected with them across the void. Mostly being an author means speaking into the void to the greater universe and the future, where whatever answers or echoes you get come only after you are dead. It is frustrating to put on a show with all your best tricks now refined… to a visibly empty theater.
But I have rediscovered my writing mojo (hiding under my bed with stacks of old notebooks and drawings and Paffooney-making materials.) And I bought an electronic stylus and a Chromebook computer with a touch screen to start doing digital art. (The Chromebook, however, died a mysterious virus-related death before I had it a year, making me regret not buying the Best-Buy warranty that usually is only a waste of money.) I started doing art digitally, a process much easier to make corrections and changes on. And I even found an AI program called AI Mirror that can edit my art and remove entire ranges of mistakes I could never alter before. (This last thing proved crucial because the only touch screen I had access to was the tiny one on my phone where my fat, arthritic fingers make whole ranges of mistakes.)
Catch a Falling Star 