“Lady Godiva”
“Young Mickey in the Forest”
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Digitize Me, Digital Maniac
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A Character Reference
Millis
He was once an ordinary pet rabbit, transformed through an accident involving a time-traveler’s alien-created mechanical carrot.
He is a character in;
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius
Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates (his girlfriend) (She forced me to write that last thing, Mike.)
Mike is a member of the Murphy clan who resides in Murphy Mansion with many other Murphys. Blueberry is the girl who chased him until she caught him and turned him into her boyfriend.
Seen in the novels;
The Bicycle Wheel Genius
Magical Miss Morgan
Catch a Falling Star (only Mike is in that one) (He forced me to write that, Blue)
The Necromancer’s Apprentice (Mainly Blueberry in this one. Mike is only comic relief.)
Valerie Clarke
Valerie is a young Iowan farmgirl who lost her father far too soon. She loves skateboards, 80’s music, and boys, especially boys who can sing.
She is a main character in;
Snow Babies
Sing Sad Songs
She is also an important character in;
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius
Sherry Cobble
Sherry and her twin sister, Shelly, look almost exactly alike. They are, with both of their parents, practicing nudists. They love being nude at home on the farm, at the Sunshine Club in Clear Lake, and at school when they can get away with it (which is mostly a matter of girls’ locker rooms.)
Sherry and her twin are important characters in;
Superchicken
Recipes for Gingerbread Children
The Baby Werewolf
The Boy… Forever
A Field Guide for Fauns
Orben Wallace, bicycle engineer
Orben came to Norwall after a tragic fire in his home and laboratory killed his family. He switched from physics to bicycle engineering and opened a new lab where it is rumored that he also created sentient robots, time travel machines, supercomputers, and had relationships with aliens and time travelers. Of course the only physical proof of anything are the bicycles he made.
He is a main character in; The Bicycle-Wheel Genius
He is also an important character in; Catch a Falling Star
Anneliese Stein
Anneliese is a gingerbread cookie brought back to life through the magical baking skills of her human mother, Grandma Gretel Stein. She was also a human girl in the 1930s and early 1940s who also had, unfortunately, a Jewish father. Okay, I know… I will explain better later.
She is an important character in;
Recipes for Gingerbread Children
The Necromancer’s Apprentice
This will have to be finished another day. I have too many more characters to show you, and my Internet is giving out.
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Art is Life… err… Life is Art
More pictures of my Filipina relatives. (From left to right;) Sesspartoolie Malloopy, her sister, Doonaloolie Malloopy, my daughter in the back, Maninalootie Beyronoopie, Christmas Cookie Danoolie (in front with a dog I don’t know,) Grandma Eiloloopu Malloopy. and Nickolooni Danoolie (and I don’t know that dog either.)
Mickey copies a classic Cupid by William Adolphe Bouguereau.
Ariel, my largest and most important doll, holding her favorite doll.
Zorah the SeaWitch takes her pirate fleet out to do some pillaging and pirate stuff.
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Things That Make Me Mad
Who knows how much longer in my life I have to draw pictures? Arthritis is having too much input. I am mostly taking old drawings and making them into new digital art on my cell phone with a computer stylus. What was super easy when I had the Chromebook touchscreen to work with, has become super hard when I try to do the same thing on my phone’s tiny touchscreen.
She’s supposed to be the Ponies’ pitcher in the softball game. But I could not get the letters to look right with my finger pain twitching the drawing of the letter “n” and then multiplying the problems as I went on. To publish on Instagram I went back to the previous stage when I was trying to use the drawing program’s cursive letters.
You can see multiple errors in the execution here. I think I put an extra letter by accident between the “o” and the “n.” And put the “e” before the “i.” Talk about spelling demons! And I got upset and restarted the lettering after I screwed up the “P” on the hat. Still, it ended up looking better than the unassisted letters I tried to draw after that.
So, after that, I decided to use this photo of my wife and daughter with all my many female Filipino in-laws and nieces. I started by tracing the photo. And, the Minnie Mouse on Sessparrtoolie’s shirt is a copyrighted logo, so I decided to change that to flowers.
But this anime art style applied to Filipina faces makes them all look like children, even Grandma in the middle. My wife looks like my daughter’s younger sister. And Nickolooni’s Mickey Mouse Club Ears look like they are stuck into the side of her mother’s head. (I am not using real names, by the way.) I really hate making mistakes in drawing. But I like how easily they can be fixed in digital art if you are not mad, tired, and have hurting arthritic fingers.
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Mangled Metaphors and Purple Paisley Prose
I have rather regularly been revising and editing old writing. One thing I have discovered is that I am capable of the most gawd-awful convoluted sentences filled with mangled metaphors and ideas that can only be followed while doing mental back-flips or managing miracles of interpretation. That last sentence is a perfect example of purple paisley prose. Paisley, in case you didn’t know this, is a printed pattern on clothing or other cloth that makes an intricate design out of the basic twisted teardrop shape borrowed from Persian art. The basic motif, the teardrop shape, is a leaf or vegetable design often referred to as the Persian pickle. I write like that. You can pick out the Persian pickles in this very paragraph. Alliterations, mangled metaphors, rhyming words, sound patterns, the occasional literary allusion, personification, bungles, jungles, and junk. “How can you actually write like that?” you ask. Easy. I think like that.
To make a point about mangled metaphors, let me visit a couple of recent scenes in novels I have been working on;
From The Bicycle Wheel Genius; page 189
Mike Murphy and Frosty Anderson sat at the kitchen table eating a batch of Orben’s pancakes, the twentieth try at pancakes, and nearly edible. Mike could eat anything with maple syrup on it… well, maybe not dog poop, but these were slightly better than dog poop.
From The Magical Miss Morgan; page 7
Blue looked at Mike and grinned. It was an impish and fully disarming grin. It made Mike do whatever Blue said, even being willing to eat a lump of dog poop if she asked him to, though she would never ask him to.
So, here’s the thing. Why is there a repetition of the dog-poop-eating metaphor? In one case it is Mike Murphy expressing in metaphorical terms his love of maple syrup. In the other, it is Mike Murphy expressing his love of Blueberry Bates’ dimpled grin. He is a somewhat unique character, but why would anybody associate love with eating dog poop? I don’t know. I just wrote the dang things.
I like to take a convoluted plot and complicate it with complex sentences and numerous running gags, with a seasoned-sauce of mangled metaphors poured on top like gravy. I will use sentences like this either to make you laugh, or give you a headache. I’m almost sure it is one of those. So if you have gotten this far in this post without a headache, then I guess it must be funny.
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Further Digital Art Practice
Drawn from a random model on Instagram.
I redrew this old drawing in pen and ink and colored pencil as a digital art piece.
Drawn from an old scrapbook picture of a catalog swimsuit model.
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Tess of the D’Urbervilles (by Thomas Hardy)
I decided I wanted to be a novelist because of Charles Dickens. I loved the way he told a story with vivid characters, rising and falling crises, and story arcs that arrive at a happily-ever-after, or a how-sad-but-sweet-the-world-is ultimate goal. Sometimes he reached both destinations with the same story, like in David Copperfield or The Old Curiosity Shop. I have wanted to write like that since I read The Old Curiosity Shop in 9th Grade.
Thomas Hardy has a lot in common with Chuck. I mean, more than just being old Victorian coots. Hardy knows the Wessex countryside, Blackmoor and Casterbridge with the depth and understanding that Dickens bestows on London. Hardy can delineate a character as clearly and as keenly as Dickens, as shown by Diggory Venn, the Reddleman in Return of the Native, or Tess Durbyfield in the novel I am reading at the moment. These characters present us with an archetypal image and weave a story around it that speaks to themes with soul-shaking depth. Whereas Dickens will amuse and make us laugh at the antics of the Artful Dodger or Mr. Dick or Jerry Cruncher from a Tale of Two Cities, Hardy makes us feel the ache and the sadness of love wrecked by conflict with the corrupt and selfish modern world. Today I read a gem of a scene with the three milkmaids, Izz, Retty, and Marian looking longingly out the window at the young gentleman Angel Clare. Each wants the young man to notice her and fall in love with her. Sad-faced Izz is a dark-haired and brooding personality. Round-faced Marian is more jolly and happy-go-lucky. Young Retty is entirely bound up by shyness and the uncertainty of youth. Yet each admits to her crush and secret hopes. Tess, meanwhile, overhears all of it, all the time knowing that Angel is falling in love with her. And worse yet, she has sworn to herself never to let another man fall in love with her because of the shameful way Alec D’Urberville took advantage of her, a quaint old phrase that in our time would mean date rape. There is such bittersweet nectar to be had in the characterizations and plots of these old Victorian novels. They are more than a hundred years old, and thus, not easy to read, but worth every grain of effort you sprinkle upon it. I am determined now to finish rereading Tess of the Durbervilles, and further determined to learn from it, even if it kills me.
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