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Having finished a novel…

I am now in that awkward spot where I need something more to write before the regular flow of ideas stops gushing out of the well. And unlike the last finished novel, this time I haven’t chosen a follow-up project to work on already.

It’s not that ideas don’t already exist, some of which have existed for many years. The problem is that I need something i can keep going on that won’t be derailed by further health crises or the possibility that Donald Trump may get reelected dictator for life. It needs to be a durable, fireproof idea.

Here’s the ideas I already have…

Kingdoms Under the Earth is a character study about a core group the Norwall Pirates falling victim to a mysterious and possibly fatal virus. This idea existed long before the pandemic of Covid 19. But it seems timely to take something like this up now. Especially if it is the last novel I write because this pandemic eventually kills me.

The story starts with Blueberry Bates, a transgender girl, falling victim to the mysterious illness. She fails to make it to school one day, and the other Pirates soon learn she is in the hospital in a coma. Mike Murphy, the love of Blueberry’s life, is distraught and worried that Blue is going to die. Tim Kellogg, the leader of the Pirates, gets a message from the fairy kingdom that the only way to cure Blueberry is to get sick too and go searching for her kidnapped soul-seed in the Kingdoms under the Earth. Of course, we as intelligent readers would realize that Tim is excessively imaginative and this is, in reality, a very bad idea. But Mike will try anything to be with Blue again. Mike kisses Blueberry on the lips and gets sick too. And Mike’s older sister, Dilsey Murphy, vows to rescue both of them and kisses Blueberry too.

Tim, of course, feels responsible for the three sick kids in comas, and he has a secret crush on Dilsey. So, he kisses Dils on the lips. And of course, four kids searching blindly in the realms of Purgatory isn’t quite enough. Just because he has nothing better to do, young Leo Toy also kisses Dilsey on the lips after she becomes ill, and joins the group in the realm of pestilence. Nobody seems to like him anyway, so he figures if they all five die, then at least he will have been a part of the group about something.

I know that is a pretty squirrely-sounding idea, but if Francis of Assissi can preach to the birds, then I should be allowed to write novels for squirrels.

I could also choose to tell the even older story I call There’s Music in the Forest.

This is the story of Dabney Calhoon, the autistic son of the late Joe and Sassy Calhoon who had the child late in life. Too late, as it seems they waited until only four years before they both succumb to stroke and old age.

The story is told by a school counsellor who worked with the boy after the authorities have returned him to foster parents following the year he spent living as a total wild child in the Sumpter Park woods.

Dabney was believed to be autistic, unable to talk, read, or write. But the school counsellor discovers he can do all three. He has apparently taken the books My Side of the Mountain and The First Jungle Book as his guidebooks for living off the land. How he lived in the wild for a year comes out slowly because he will only tell the story in the form of poetry. And somehow the guidance counsellor has to interpret all of it to help the boy learn to live with his foster family once again.

The choice is basically between those two novel ideas. I am, however, also working on another book of essays I am calling Mickey’s Rememberries. And I am about half way through the next AeroQuest book, Book Four. It goes without saying, I will definitely be working on those two projects also.

If you would like to have input on this decision, by all means, tell me in the comments how dumb you think these ideas are, and I promise to ignore everything but what I myself want to do.

The situation: I finished the last novel I was working on, The Wizard in His Keep. I like it. It is not the best book I have ever written, but it might be the fifth best. I am now in the between-projects doldrums. There is no wind in my sales. And I have a cough that is making me miserable, especially if it turns out to be COVID 19. If that’s actually what it is, then the only place I’ve been where I could’ve caught it is the voting precinct. That means voting against Donald Trump may have cost me my life.

I have no real reason to go in and get tested, though. When I was in the most misery yesterday, I took some of the antihistamine the doctor gave me for the last illness I thought might be COVID, and my head cleared up during the night. I have no fever today. And the virus plaguing me now might actually be a cold brought on by allergic reactions to California smoke in the Texas air and the gawd-awful astronomical pollen counts created by global warming.

If it is the start of my final illness, I definitely blame Trump and the Republican Party of Texas. My mother in Iowa got to vote by mail-in ballot. My sisters got to vote by mail. But Texas requires you to get approval of your excuse to get a mail-in ballot. This I could not obtain by the deadline over two months ago in early August because we were in quarantine as it expired. And I had to go into a polling place that has mostly Republican voters coming in to vote early. I didn’t see any maskless wonders there, but the potential for virus in the poorly-ventilated air was pretty good.

And these sour grapes really do make for very poor whine. Even though they ferment pretty easily and stink to high heaven, they are not very funny or delivered with the least bit of dramatic irony. It will only be more sour if I manage to live to election day to see Trump, Cornyn, and their evil minions manage to win by cheating. The eternal pessimist in me is expecting that result. It has a 95% chance on Rotten Tomatoes.

So, I will leave the idea there for now, a moldering stew of sour grapes and rotten tomatoes. It stinks. And I feel too ill to do anything more with it.

Teachers like me often say, “There are no bad kids.”

And, boy! Are we ever wrong when we say something as dumb as that.

To be fair, when teachers like me say something like that, a clueless liberal-minded comment that reveals fatal levels of idealism, morality, and even faith in God, we are really saying that there is way to reach every kid and make the difference for them… if only we are given the tools, the time, and a decent amount of incentive. To go in front of a hostile audience five, six, or seven times a day, up to thirty of them in a classroom made for twenty, and teach them something worth learning requires an unquestioning belief in miracles, and a foolish notion that somehow goodness and light always win out. And often they do. But exceptions prove the rule… And the need for rules. Because there are some very bad kids in this world.

The first hour of the first day of my very first year as a gringo teacher in a mostly Spanish-speaking junior high school in deep South Texas contained two eighth grade boys who would die violently from gunshots.

Osvaldo “Ocho” Sotello put a gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger after finally getting released from prison after serving five years of a sentence for armed robbery. He was guilty of that crime and many others he was never caught doing. But he was put in prison at eighteen, and repeatedly raped by other members of the Mexican Mafia because he had given himself teardrop tattoos by his right eye and had never killed anyone to earn that gang sign.

And Lorenzo “El Loco Talan” Marquez would die in a hail of bullets from the guns of rival drug dealers on the streets of Encinal, Texas. His family watched in horror as it happened. Neither of the names I gave those boys in this essay are their real names. But the gang names are real. And their life outcomes are real. And I even had to teach the son of El Talan when he reached eighth grade.

Both of those boys are proof of the idea that there really are bad kids out there. Evil kids even. But those two boys were both sixteen in the eighth grade because they failed seventh grade twice and had been “placed” in the eighth grade especially to welcome me into the jolly world of classroom management and discipline. Those were tough kids. They refused to do anything I asked of them.

They were disrespectful to me in both Spanish and English. And I am grateful for their tutoring of me in a wide range of profanity and swear words in Spanish. At one point, walking them back to class from another campus after lunch, El Talan picked up a metal fence post and was going to use it on me like a club because I tried to hurry them up and interfered with their plans to ditch afternoon classes.

Some kids are bad kids because they have been mishandled, mistreated, and misunderstood by all of their parents, relative, teachers, coaches, and classmates before you even meet them for the first time. Their paths are already set in stone. Fossilized footprints made rock-hard-certain a million years before they should’ve been set in stone. I had no chance to make any improvements on them.

Another bad kid I had my very first year of teaching was not really named Alonzo Angel Diablo (but certainly should’ve been named that.)

Alonzo was the older cousin of a kid in that class, Fernando, that I really liked and tried hard to help through two years in the eighth grade. But Alonzo was definitely too old and set in his criminal ways to be reached. Alonzo’s problem was that he was a gay young man living in a Catholic/Hispanic culture that actively persecuted gays. His own family had disowned him and treated him like a criminal. So, he was one. I had to get him expelled from school by reporting him for threatening the life of another student. Prior to that incident the boy had harassed me at the Halloween Carnival (a fund-raising event that the Baptist Church later made us rename the Harvest Festival.) He forced Fernando to sexually proposition me, and when I rebuffed that nonsense, he offered to do it himself. It would lead to a later discussion in which he revealed to me his sexual orientation and asked me for forgiveness. He was relentlessly bad. But he later contacted me as an adult and thanked me for being his teacher. I never taught him anything, but it was important to him to show me that he had a job and had achieved adulthood without further violence or jail time. If he’s still making his way in this world more honestly than he did before, I am happy for him. But It was all his own doing. I could do nothing for him as a teacher.

There very definitely are bad kids. But they are not all irredeemable. And I know conservatives and Old School types would prefer that we just threw all of them in jail to rot forever. I, however, like to think there is still room in this world for stupid liberal notions of making kids less bad through education, patience, and the Grace of God.

the Real Post for Today

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Today I needed to write something short and sweet to be done with it, and yet, actually do it. This was because my head was hurting with a blood-sugar headache, my computer keyboard is still acting up and interfering with writing, and my ability to actually concentrate is seriously impaired.

On Pubby I have started getting reviews on my book of essays, Laughing Blue. They have shown evidence that people who actually read my book, like it a lot. Today has not been all bad news.

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The real news for today is that I am almost finished with my work in progress. The Wizard in His Keep is now past the climax of the plot and winding down. I am at the moment around 42,000 words. I am thinking only two Cantos (Chapters) more.

But I didn’t plan on having to learn a whole new WordPress editing system on a day when my head is aching. So, it ends here for today.

WordPress gave me a new toy to play with. Dang! I couldn’t resist. But this is just a playful practice post. I hope it doesn’t become metaphorically fattening.

This was not the picture I was looking to post. This is not the article I intended to write. But sometimes writers and their glitchy computers have different ideas about what to do.

I am having keyboard issues. The enter and the control key both stick and things pop up on the screen while I am composing an essay that I never intended, and some things I ask the computer for never happen.

But for now, Poppa is home. I am tired of writing stuff over three times. It recently made me recreate an entire 300 word passage in my current work in progress.

So, I’m tired of fighting to type coherently. This will be enough for today.

Today I almost skipped writing a blog post. And why? The air outside in Texas is gray with smoke from fires in California. It makes it hard for people like me to draw breath. I know it is important to practice going without actual air to breath in order to be prepared for the future. But I guess I am too much of an addict to fresh air to go too much longer in a de-regulated future where you have to be born wealthy to afford air.

And COVID still has me down. My son has returned to the job of guarding the prisoners in the jail of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office where he got infected once already, and may be risking re-infection. And my wife is back in the classroom now with students who have no other options than to go back to the brick and mortar school. She has diabetes. They may be infected but have no symptoms. Nothing to worry about, right?

But writing is like breathing. Once you’ve developed a metaphor-making gland in the primitive part of your brain, you have to be able to let it out. If you only breathe in by reading and watching old movies, and never breathe out, your lungs will at some point explode. Or you will drown in your own similes which only writing something can be a ventilator for.

Don’t get me wrong. I live for reading good books and watching good movies. But I don’t feel really alive on days when I don’t write anything.

So, the result is a post like the one for today. It is writing something… but it seems slightly off, slightly askew.

I have been watching a mega-binge of Don Knotts movies, and other old movies that I haven’t seen in some time… some since childhood. I have been pretty much isolated and alone in my bedroom since March. No more Uber driving… ever. No more substitute teaching. Not even taking someone to school in the mornings on school days.

And my father is dying. He is in hospice care, suffering from dementia when he’s awake, the result of Parkinson’s Disease. He is sleeping most of the time now. They don’t know when… but they think it will happen soon. And I will be stuck here in Texas while he’s in Iowa. My sisters in Iowa and Missouri are planning to take care of Mom and most of the arrangements are already done. But it is still going to be very hard.

For right now, things are a little off. My full-color, technicolor life is in black and white for the time being. My computer is crashing once a week. I am having to re-type the letter “o” so often it becomes a habit to type “oooo” and then delete any extra “o”s that may appear. But taking a day off from writing does not seem to be an option.

I face times in my life when the words just don’t come easily. And yet, I never suffer from writer’s block. The ideas float in a semi-coherent soup in the soup-bowl of my mind. It’s just that I have trouble making the spoon work properly.

I have a severe headache this morning. My blood-sugar is out of whack. I could always go to the store and buy more whack… but, oh yeah, quarantined. But that is almost done. My son is so much better. And the other three in the house, my wife, my daughter, and I have not gotten the disease. The disinfectant in the bathroom, the hand-washing, the wearing of masks in the house, has been mind-numbingly hard, but it has kept us safe. We are going to come through this.

But the school district I was subbing for last school-year is going to re-open and they are desperate to get subs back to the battle, especially subs who had no reported problems and even some good comments in their folders. They want me back. But my health has drifted down the ladder rungs of life from acceptable to moderately poor, and then slipped to daily suffering. I can’t go back at this time. In fact, I fear I haven’t the super-power left in me to ever go back to it. The Kryptonite has permanently taken me down.

And I am heartbroken. No students to yell at ever again? No captive audience to laugh and groan at my jokes… ever again? No more angry glares? And no more smiles? You can’t know how hard it is to say goodbye to those… unless you’ve been a teacher too.

But the time has come to make that decision. Risking my life in the pandemic to do one of the world’s hardest jobs for $100 a day is no longer something I can do.

My head hurts. There was something I wanted to say. But hopefully, I’ve already said it.