Since I finished the essay collection project, Mickey’s Rememberries, I have been squandering my writing time. I have been working on the next AeroQuest novel, trying to finish book four. I have also been preparing other thingies and doing some artwork, all while being weather-crippled and basically non-Covid ill.
Yesterday’s post was merely the cover I worked on all day for the 5th novel in the AeroQuest saga.
I spent enough of all day yesterday working on that cover that I really didn’t get much other writing done.
And I am working on editing projects too. Here is the new cover for a reworking of the already-published novel Stardusters and Space Lizards. It is the very first novel I published on Amazon, which makes it a novel desperately in need of reformatting, revision, editing, and a new cover.
So, there is my list of excuses for why I didn’t write much yesterday and today. Make of it what you will. I hope to make these three books happen in the next few weeks.
This is a humor blog. It is not an insult blog, although I do enjoy a good insult done well, especially by master insulters like Jon Stewart and John Oliver who do it to make a valid point.
I do not appreciate when others equate my sense of humor with the poop-flingers who promote hate and violence. If I thought a joke I made would inspire someone to assassinate the Bozo President, I would stop making jokes entirely. Seriously… President Pence would have me boxed and euthanized within days. (See what I mean? HUMOR! Not a call to violence.)
I am NOT like Mark Levin .
Who is Mark Levin, you say? Good for you. You must have relatively good luck avoiding human Pepe the Frog memes.
Yes, Mark Levin is a radio insult-flinger who hates President Obama and basically all things reasonable. He argues in favor of the…
This is not the first Christmas I kept in my secret heart and all by myself.
It probably won’t be the last.
But it is the only one like this due to Covid 19 and the fear that I may die before the month is over.
I must accept whatever comes. And I have no regrets about how I’ve lived my life. Even the bad parts, the sad parts, the pain… are all a part of the song as a whole, and no one ever was able to take back a single note once it has been sung.
I continue to get fallout from that one blistering review. Amazon reduced that particular review from two stars to one. They also reduced the stars on a review for Magical Miss Morgan because the reader, although she says she really likes the book , found some things questionable. It went from four stars to three because of that one word, which, from reading the whole review, was more about Miss Morgan’s teaching practices which included having students go barefoot in class while reading The Hobbit. So, I’m feeling persecuted.
I will survive. But in a pandemic Christmas where I am confined to my house, unable to visit family in Iowa, and still trying to recover from my father’s death a thousand miles away from here, I am a bit depressed and in need of something happening that is good for a change. I know this current problem is the fault of a bad editing decision, which made me contemplate changing the critical detail before publishing, but then deciding the tale was more intimate and subtly beautiful if it was not changed. I forget that one man’s beauty is often another man’s thought crimes.
No more dwelling on this. I have fixed the novel already. My next novel probably needs to be the one about overcoming chronic depression. The title has changed from Valerie in Darkness to The Boy Who Rose on a Golden Wing. Somebody will probably evaluate it as totally inappropriate too.
When you make the mistake of admitting to others that you are a writer, they immediately assume you know things that are kept secret from “normal” people. For instance, they will simply assume that you can tell them where you get your ideas for writing. Well, I am fairly sure that I got the idea for this post from watching a YouTube video in which the Master, Neil Gaiman, says that every author has a joke answer for that one with enough sarcastic wit in it to punish the asker with public humiliation.
I asked the dog if she knew any jokes like that which I could use to prepare for someone asking me that question in public. She said, “You could tell them that your family dog tells you what to write every day.”
I am a liar. I can’t be any more honest than that. Of course, you probably already know that I tell my truths in stories that are fiction, but always reveal the deeper things that I am really talking about.
This last weekend I was bitterly disappointed by a Pubby review. It was disappointing because, although the reader read the whole book, he or she obviously didn’t understand the themes of it. The reader recognized that the story was well written, but instead of judging the overall message of the book, the reader seized on a detail of the plot and accused me of writing a book that depicted twelve-year-olds having sex.
The book, Sing Sad Songs, is not about that at all. In the story the girl and boy are talking about a dream they shared. They are talking about it in private. But it is not a sex dream. At that point there is no mention of sex at all. But during the discussion, they share their first kiss. The boy kisses the girl first. She then kisses him back, even more passionately, and he puts his tongue in her mouth. Shocked, she pulls away. She asks what they are doing.
He tells her they are probably making love. Then he says he knows a way to do it that can’t make you pregnant. Using their mouths. They discuss whether they want to go further. They are about to choose not to when the girl closes and locks the door. There the scene ends. There the Reader stopped enjoying the book and instead started planning a review that listed all of my crimes in the novel.
The Reader decided to be offended again when the act is discussed again between characters. There is a scene when the three narrators of the book decide whether or not they should include such personal and private stuff in the story. And the girl later turns to her older female friend, a high-school girl who already has a boyfriend she is intending to marry. They talk about sex one more time, and the older girl tells her the important thing is to be honest with the boy in question and especially with herself. This last discussion is, I think, the most important part of the whole theme. It is a theme about being honest about how you feel. The girl is getting advice from someone who is older and wiser, telling her to be more careful and to be honest with the boy about it.
The Reader feels that my truth in this book is a crime and somehow unacceptable. The Reader wrote a toxic review that not only shames my book, but questions the reading ability of a former teacher who left the previous review and dared to suggest that my book was good enough for school libraries.
I love this book. It is one of the best things I have ever written. I wrote it very carefully. I knew when I left this plot detail in the book that I was taking a risk from blue-nosed old ladies. (I don’t actually know the gender of the Reader, who reviews everything under the name Reader.) Now the risk has snapped on me. I already went back and updated the novel. All I had to do was take out the oral sex suggestion and make the particular conflict in those three chapters be about the “French Kiss” using his tongue. A few sentences rewritten and a handful of different words chosen make a big difference. But even at its worst, the book was not explicitly describing underaged sex. It was not without a moral lesson attached, and it was really not intentional pornography. I got unlucky and triggered the censorship instincts of this Reader. And Amazon did not allow me to comment on this review, not even to say I had changed the part that offended the Reader.
And what’s worse, the toxic review will not only turn away potential readers, it will affect further Pubby reviews. Pubby expects the reader to buy the book (for a verified review) and then turn it into a book review in only four days. Not all readers on Pubby are as determined to read the whole book carefully as I am… and the Reader who zapped me is. They will, for the most part, look at the existing reviews and skim through the book or not even read it. I got one review on Recipes for Gingerbread Children for an excellent cook book, even though it is listed as a YA fiction novel. (Amazon already removed that review, as apparently the reviewer didn’t actually buy the book either. I didn’t get value for value on that one.) My only hope is that actual readers will take care of business through Pubby, reading this now-sanitized book before the average of reviews totally bottom out.
Looking on the bright side, Pubby has gotten me a good rating on Amazon as a book reviewer. I have 43 citations for helpful reviews. I always include information from the book to prove I read it, specifically talk about the things I liked or didn’t like about the book without spoiling anything for future readers, and clearly either recommend or not recommend the book. I have reviewed some terrible books. But not once did I ever leave a book-killing review like this one that now makes me sad. And I can’t argue that the reviewer did not do his or her job. Just that he or she was rather unkind.
I have been very prolific as a writer in the last couple of years. 2020, though a really dark and bitter year, saw me complete a bunch of writing projects.
Starting with the most recent finished writing project, Mickey’s Rememberries is a compilation of Catch a Falling Star blog-post essays chosen to represent all my teacher/school stories, my numerous conspiracy theory opinions, my personal history, the death of my father from Parkinson’s Disease, and pithy observations connecting the past world to the present world. I published it on Amazon as a self-published work of autobiographical non-fiction essays, with some original cartoons thrown in for good measure.
Before that, this summer, I finished and published The Wizard in his Keep. This novel is the endpoint of character arcs that began in the novel Superchicken, set in 1974. Two of the original kids’ liars’ club known as the Norwall Pirates, one who has become an FBI agent trying to find his sister’s kids who have been missing since their parents’ fatal car crash, the other a video-game designer who has those kids hidden away in a virtual-reality game-world that has all gone wrong with government interference. It is a rollicking science-fiction adventure that reunites two boys who were once best friends and possibly turns them into enemies as their objectives begin to clash.
Before that came Laughing Blue, the first book of essays inspired by Robert Fulgham’s Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.
Like the Rememberries book, it is made up of essays that appeared first here on my blog, Catch a Falling Star.
It is about becoming a teacher, becoming a Christian Existentialist, becoming a nudist, and being able to make the best out of everything, including the time I was sexually assaulted as a ten-year-old child. And all of it is basically done with humor rather than anger… even for those people on my list of who I am going to seriously haunt when I die and become a ghost writer. Oh, and cartoons for good measure here as well.
In June, before the essay book, I published the third in my AeroQuest series of humorous science fiction, AeroQuest 3 : Juggling Planets. This is a product of my Tuesday novel-writing posts that shares with you how the novel is progressing Canto by Canto, whether it is rewriting, or possibly entirely new writing. It is a story with lots of characters, lots of planets, lots of alien beings, lots of space ninjas, space cowboys, space pirates, Space Smurfs, space samurai, space nudists, and a White Spider of Prophecy who will weave together a web of interstellar civilization.
A Field Guide to Fauns was finished and then published in April. It is a story about a boy coming to live in the San Antonio area with his father, his step-mother, and twin step-sisters after the death of his mother.
The problem for Devon is, his new family lives in a residential nudist park, and they expect him to be a nudist too.
This book is beginning to become popular among the nudists I know from Twitter. It is probably not a book for everyone, but you never know. If you read it, it may surprise you too.
The first book I published in 2020 was…
actually the re-publishing of my book Magical Miss Morgan. It had been previously published by Page Publishing Company. But, since they don’t actually do anything for an author but print the book and think of new things to charge the author for, I reclaimed my manuscript and the rights to it, giving myself more control and less expense over everything.
You can see that I am not really bragging about six books written in 2020. I came into the year with the first half of A Field Guide to Fauns already written. AeroQuest 3 was two thirds done while I plodded along at a chapter every Tuesday. The Wizard in His Keep was the only book written entirely in 2020. But six books in one year all published is a special case. I still have more stories stored away in my writer’s closet that only need to be rewritten or revised, and a ton more in the mental closet in the mandatory mental-scape in my stupid old head. But I doubt I will ever publish six in one year again.
Nerrak, the Christmas Viking,,, He is blue in color because he lives in upper Norway and it gets very, very cold.
I guess I need to explain the festive Christmas Viking that I included as the initial Paffooney of this post. You see, during the Princess’ Christmas concert where she played the tooty leather pole, one of the pieces was called Sleigh Ride. But as we talked about it at the dinner table, Henry, the Princess, and I, it was quite naturally understood to be Slay Ride. It probably stems from too much Dungeons and Dragons adventuring. You tend to get into an entirely too slaying-sort-of mind set. And, naturally enough, we figured a “Slaying Song” had to be the kind of Christmas music that would appeal to Vikings and barbarians everywhere.
Finishing the second book of essays at the same time my father finally passed away from his long battle with Parkinson’s Disease has felt like crossing a finish line. Not winning anything, mind you, but definitely the end of something that was a big part of my life. I am exhausted. I feel a bit ill. I have several Parkinson’s symptoms myself. I definitely need to slow down a little.
Of everything I have written up until now…
…these two books are the most important part of the puzzle that is me.
These two books of essays represent everything in the clearest, most truthful way what my writing, and my life is really all about. The themes, the personal truths and tragedies, and the created reality I have generated in my fiction books is deeply rooted and mostly explained in these essays.
That is difficult work that basically saps the marrow from my bones. It is no wonder I need a bit of a breather.
But a big part of the break I have been on was not voluntary. I went for a week and a half with no cell phone.
The charging port on my cell phone, a Samsung Galaxy, broke. And that is easily fixed… when not in a pandemic. And my phone is an old, beat-up S-5. In a world of S-10s and maybe S-11s, those are not easy to find a working repairman for. The last repairman I had repair it moved all the way to Mesquite, Texas. But he was kind enough to put me in touch with a new guy from India in our area. I can at least call people again. But, of course, the internet still can’t be connected to.
So, now that I have struggled to write this essay, explaining how writing has made me naked and poor with no creative energy left, I should stop writing for today. Except that I can’t. More AeroQuest 4 to finish.
Nerrak, the Christmas Viking,,, He is blue in color because he lives in upper Norway and it gets very, very cold. 
Groo the Wanderer, created by Sergio Aragones 
Catch a Falling Star 