Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

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.

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.

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.

The PTSD I have experienced since the age of ten has in many ways altered my perceptions.  I also was gifted with an abnormal body chemistry due to dioxin-based farm chemicals of the 1970s that have since all been banned.  Being on edge and paranoid all the time because of what might happen if you wander into the shadows or go into a public bathroom alone where other, bigger people might be lurking…  You know there are real monsters out there.  And a hyperactive imagination can make you start seeing things that aren’t really there.  You may also be plagued by night terrors and nightmares.

No child should ever have some of the dreams I have had. 

Being stalked by a huge duck with human dentures in his monstrous mouth…  Toys that play with their owner… 

Walking skeletons that you saw for the first time in Ray Harryhausen’s movie Jason and the Argonauts, but chase you around the winter streets of Rowan, Iowa in early February, seeking to separate you from body parts… And you are naked in the snow…

Sentient pumpkins taking control of your relatives and attempting to make them judge you and send you to Hell…

But I learned from monster dreams early in childhood that all you need to do is realize that you are dreaming.  If you know it is a dream, you can take control of everything in the dream.  I learned to explode vampires and walking skeletons with finger guns that shot lasers, explosive bullets, or disintegration rays.

I not only saved myself by blowing up dream monsters, I learned to deal with those embarrassing school dreams.  If I had to stand naked in front of Mr. Lyon’s seventh-grade Math Class, I could make everybody else in the room naked too.  Starting with big old Kevin, the class bully.  Dang!  The girls too.  Some of them screamed and tried to cover themselves.  A lot of them, though, sat there like that and giggled at each other.

Examining yourself naked in the mirror of your dreams makes it possible to realize every advantage and vulnerability that you possess.  I learned the depths and power of my imagination.  I could weave dreams into stories where I was the creator of the plot.  It was better than real life… even if it started out as a nightmare.