I published another danged novel on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
Category Archives: writing humor
The Writing Imperative
I am a writer because I write.
I write because I have to.
I have to because somebody has to control the words.
People are made of words. Their identity, their inner self, their reason for existence… all made of words. The very thoughts in their heads are… words.
If I want to control the words I am made of, then I must be the writer who writes his own story.
I don’t want anyone else to write the words that essentially become me. Do you?
Of course, authors create characters. Even autobiographers create characters. Carl Sandburg could no more make his words into Lincoln than a bird can make its tweets into a cat. Sandburg can, however, help us to understand Lincoln as Carl Sandburg understands the words that are Lincoln.
Lincoln probably did not have the words for “bikini girls” in his head when he wrote those words in the second quote. But somebody thought that the picture would help us understand the words. By all accounts, Lincoln was not a particularly happy man leading a particularly happy life. But he showed us the meaning of his words when he stood firm against the strong winds of harsh words and bad ideas in a terrible time. And he was as happy about it as he made up his mind to be.
I, too, have not lived a particularly happy life. But I was always the “teacher with a sense of humor” in the classroom, and students loved me for it. Funny people are often not happy people. But they make themselves out of funny words because laughter heals pain, and jokes are effective medicine. And so I choose to write comedy novels. Novels that are funny even though they are about hard things like freezing to death, losing loved ones, being humiliated, being molested, and fear of death. Magical purple words can bring light to any darkness. I am the words I choose to write in my own story. The words not only reveal me, they make me who I am. And it is up to me to write those words. Other people might wish to do it for me. But they really can’t. The words are for me alone to write.
And so it is imperative that I write my words in the form of my novels, my essays, and this goofy blog post. I am writing myself to life, even if no one ever reads my writing.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, wordplay, writing, writing humor
Things I Know For Certain
I think a lot of thoroughly thoughtful thuggish thoughts that build and build and build up an idea, and then turn around and knock it all down. Let me demonstrate by knocking down that title right off the bat. Rene DesCartes in the early 1600’s said, “Cogito Ergo Sum”, and he thereby totally disrupted the world as we knew it. Didn’t get that? Let me translate. He said, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Still didn’t help? Okay, here’s the English, “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, the one thing that I know for sure is that I am thinking this particular thought at this particular time. If I am thinking, and I know I am, I must be here and I must be real. So there is one thing I know for certain. But do I know anything else for certain? Uh-oh. How do I know anything? I have to rely on my senses. And my senses lie to me all the time. I am partially color blind, so I don’t see the world the same way you do. I don’t see things in black and white, like Great Grandma Hinckley did in her 90’s, but the colors look different to my eyes than they do to yours and I will never know what things look like to you. Forget politicians and all other people who tell lies, my own eyes lie to me constantly. So can I know anything for sure? Of course not. All I have are firm beliefs based on imperfect senses and best guesses at what is true. So what I am actually talking about is a list of potential essay ideas that I am merely asserting as true based on my imperfect goofy thinking of thoughtful thuggish thoughts.
Idea #1 that I think is certainly possibly maybe true; My brain was taught and I was raised to adulthood by the movies I saw when I was young. I want to talk about this at length in another post. The video is by a guy who was a kid in the 80’s, and he has some really awesome movies to offer as a way to delineate his rise to adulthood.
My list includes the movies of my boyhood seen in the Belmond Theater and on our old black and white Motorola TV. My list of movies that raised me includes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, and The Wizard of Oz.
Idea #2; Animals are people too.
I mean, as a writer for young adults, I know for a fact that animals are relevant as characters. They have a point of view, feelings, reactions, and complex lives that people rarely pay attention to. I have to write about this some time in the future too.
Idea #3; The worst things that happen to us in our lives, are also the best things that happen. Wow! What a difficult essay topic. But I not only think it, I can prove it… at least to myself. But can I write about it? Time will tell.
Idea #4; Silly thoughts and serious thoughts are two sides of the same coin. And this will be particularly difficult to think about if thoughts are literally coins. That would mean that my head is full of metal, and I know several people who would read that sentence and shout, “I knew it all along!” Fortunately they are all too sensible to read this far in one of my blog posts.
So, at 600 words I still have lots more to say. But people with metal in their heads often talk way too much, so my concluding sentence will be simply; “I promise to shut up for now.”
Writing Myself To Life
I have been working on my novel The Baby Werewolf, and I am now in the final phase, working on the climax and crisis point. And I surprised myself. The killer monologues to the main characters who have now become his intended next victims. I have played this out over and over in the twenty-two years I have been writing this book. Last night, for the first time ever, the hero character laughs in this scene instead of the cringing fear that had always been there before.
How is such a thing possible? What changed? I have been writing and rewriting this story since 1996. But it goes much deeper and darker than that. This story went on my have-to-write list in 1966 when an older, stronger boy who lived near my home trapped me in a place out-of-sight of others and stripped me, gaining some horrible kind of pleasure by inflicting pain on my private parts. Recovery from that has taken half a century. The recovery itself probably explains why I struggled so long to pull this story together in a finished form.
There are things about my writing life that are undeniable. First of all, I have to write. There is really no other choice for me. My mind will never know rest or peace without being able to spin out the paragraphs and essays and stories that make it possible to know those things. Nothing is real if I can’t write it out. Secondly, I am a humorist. If I can never be funny at all, can never write a joke, then I will descend into madness. My sense of humor not only shields me and serves as my suit of armor, it heals me when I suffer psychic wounds. This book is a horror story, but like many of the best horror stories, it relies on humor to drive every scene and knit the plot together. And it was a breakthrough for me to have the hero character laugh instead of cringe in the critical scene. It allows me to live again. And love again. And the real monster that caused this book to be, is now forgiven. The world continues to turn. The picture is now complete. And soon, the novel will be too.
If I Thunk It, Then Wrote It, I Will Leave It In There
One good thing about being a humorist is, if somebody calls you out for an error you made in your writing, you can always say, “Well, it’s a joke, isn’t it?” Errors are for serious gobbos and anal-retentive editors. I live with happy accidents. It is a way of life dictated in the Bob Ross Bible.
Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be “oops” not “OPPS”, but after all, this isn’t even a list I made up myself. I stole the whole thing from another writer on Twitter.
You have no idea what a cornucopia of ravings from knit-wit twit-tweets Twitter really is.
Oh, you waste time time on Twitter too?
Then you know already.
Twitter makes you want to shout at your computer, and has so many Trump-tweets and conservative blather-bombs on it, that it can seriously impair your editing skills.
So I look elsewhere and elsewhen to sharpen my critical English-teacher eye.
Yes, the illustrator of that meme doesn’t get the blame for the content. I wrote that violation of the sacredness of classic literature myself. I think we should thank God for the fact that neither Charles Darwin nor Dr. Seuss decided to act on evil impulses. The world is a better place for their decision on how to use their genius, and how to edit themselves.
So, this is me writing today’s post about editing as a writer, and failing miserably to edit my own self. I got the pictures from Twitter and edited them myself. Or failed to edit them properly, as the case is more likely to prove. But however I may have twisted stuff and changed stuff and made up new words, editing is essential. It makes the whole world better. Now let’s consider editing the White House for a bit, shall we?
Mickey Viewed From the Inside
Yes, this post is a self-examination. Not the kind you see Donald Trump enacting every weekend, where he says any crappy thing that occurs to his craptastical very good brain to cover what he doesn’t want us to believe about the truth on Twitter, basically for the purpose of continuing to say he is great and we are poop. I do not like myself the way Trump likes himself. I am an old bag of gas that is in pain most of the time, in poor health, and the subject of endless persecution from Bank of America and other money-grubbing machines that are convinced any money I might accidentally have really belongs to them. But this is not a complain-about-crap fest either.
This is a self-examination that attempts to honestly examine where I am in my quest for wisdom and my affliction with being a writer.
If I am being honest about the type of writer I really am, I guess I am most like the Weird Recluse in the bottom corner. I can’t claim to be as good as Kafka or Dickinson, but I am definitely better than some of the crap that gets published and marketed as young adult literature. The business of publishing is more interested in how many books they can sell, rather than literary merit or good writing. Some of the crap that is out there and being made into bad movies (which I have not seen because I don’t go to movies that don’t pass the fiction-source smell test) is actually a form of brain poison that will mold young people into sexual predators and professional poop makers. And people will take poison happily if it has been deviously marketed well. So far, in the money test, I have made only $16.43 dollars as an author (plus whatever I have made from I-Universe that doesn’t cut a check until it reaches at least $25 dollars). Nobody is buying my books because nobody has read them. I have sold a few copies to friends and relatives. Some of those books are just sitting on a shelf somewhere unread. I have a couple of 5-star reviews on Amazon, and that is it. I will die in the near future not having known any measurable success from my books at all.
I have entered novels in writing contests and done well enough to make it into the final round of judging twice. I have not, however, made a big enough splash that anyone really noticed. I have paid reviewers to review my books online. One of those charged me money, and then reviewed a book with the same title by a different author, a book which was nothing like my book, and then, when forced to correct their error, only read the blurb on the back of the book to write the oopsie-I-goofed-last-time review. They were not worth the money I paid them, money that Bank of America could’ve sued me for instead.
The only thing I have done successfully as a writer is, I think, this goofy blog. By writing every day, I have managed to give myself considerable practice at connecting with readers. I have practiced writing humor and written some laughable stuff. I have plumbed my soul for new writing ideas, and found a creative artesian well bubbling up with new ideas daily. I can regularly manufacture inspiration. I am never truly without an idea to write about. Even when I write a post about not having an idea to write about, I am lying. Of course, I am a fiction writer, so telling lies is what I do best. I am also a humorist, so that means I can also tell the truth when I have to, because the best humor is the kind where you surprise the reader with a thing that is weirdly true. Like just now.
So, somewhere ages and ages hence, I hope there will be a trove of old books in a cellar somewhere that will include one of mine. And some future kid will pick it up, read it, and laugh. The golden quality of that laughter is the only treasure I have really been searching for. It is the reason I write. It is the reason I continue to be Mickey.
Since I wrote this blog post originally, I have added a few books published on Amazon. You can find information about this random noveliciousness here at this page in my blog. Click on this linkie thingie here.
Writer’s Block on a Thursday
The 1957 Pink and White Mercury of Imagination
I don’t have writer’s block. I can write as long as I can think and move my fingers on the keyboard to crystallize that thinking into words. The Pink and White Mercury of Imagination is always moving, either driving forward in the present and towards the future, or in reverse, rewriting the past. It is never parked.
But somewhere along the way today, the route got sidetracked onto a looping detour.
Hence, this car-themed drive through the idea-capturing process.
A picture of me reading painted long ago and not with me in the picture..
I started reading a new novel. It is a 500-plus-pager by Kate Morton called Distant Hours. It is a Gothic novel, but in a very different way from the one I am writing in The Baby Werewolf. That book starts as a first person narrative, and then flashes back to the past as a series of third person narratives focused on single characters per section. My novel is a first person narrative throughout, though told by three different narrators. It would make an interesting writing analysis post, but I haven’t read enough of that novel nor completed mine to a point where I can compare and contrast them. And those of you who get bored easily have already tuned out and just looked at the pictures by this point.
I also thought about writing a post about Uber-driving conversations and how that impacts the quality of my driver-service. But the best stuff there can’t be revealed without breaking confidences. Doctors, lawyers, bartenders, and Uber drivers are tasked with providing a touch of confidentiality.
I wanted to complain more about Trump and evil Republicans. But that gets far too tiring. And if the collection of my posts on WordPress is like a flower garden, the political rants I do are definitely the garden-choking weeds.
A much better thing for my garden is to chase the flitting butterflies of near-perfect ideas with a butterfly net made of idea lists like this particular post.
So, it is true that I never actually have writer’s block. I do get writer’s detours, writer’s delays, and writer’s just-not-satisfieds- with-those-ideas sorts of things. But not today. I made the problems the topic and the topic wrote itself.
Filed under artists I admire, artwork, imagination, irony, Uncategorized, writing, writing humor
Writing Every Day
Teachers of serious writing will often tell you… or more correctly, give you the Word of God, “You want to be a good writer? You have to write every single day.” And having been a teacher of writing at the high school and middle school level, I am committed to passing that on to you also as the inviolable Word of God. You see, I have long been, well, not a serious writer exactly, more of a dedicated writer with warped notions of reality and a tendency towards goofiness. You can see by the view of my WordPress insights page that I have steadily, in five years’ time, been noticed and looked at by increasing amounts of thoroughly duped WordPress viewers.
10,373 visitors have viewed something on my blog 17,383 times in 2017. And I know that most are looking at the pictures and moving on. That’s how I get away with writing some of the stupid stuff I post on my blog. But there’s a secret to that too. I drew or painted a lot of the pictures I use on this blog myself. You would think that sooner or later some expert psychologist would trace violence in the streets back to my pictures as the ultimate cause, but that hasn’t happened yet. I am sure that is mostly because not even the psychologists can muck their way through my paragraphs of purple paisley prose. You see, I most often use my writing on this blog to commit atrocities of humor and wit. I only rarely dabble in things intended to be uplifting, spiritual, politically challenging, or sentimental. I complain on my blog a lot. It is also a place for expressing my inherent grumpiness and old-man dyspeptic irritations with life. But viewers tend to take my humor seriously and only laugh at the stuff I am most embarrassed about.
I was supposed to be doing this blog as way to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star, for I-Universe Publishing. They set it up for me. But, as they don’t pay me anything for the work I put into it, and it doesn’t really impact sales anyway, I use it now as writing practice. I have as a personal goal to write 500 words a day. The blog counts. So it means that some days, the 500 words I write in my blog are the only words I get written that day. Though, now that I am retired, 500 words of blog writing plus 500 words of novel writing can get me well past writing 1000 words in a day. It doesn’t take long at that rate to build up an awful lot of words. I shudder to think what would happen if the word dam were to suddenly give way, releasing a word-flood of monumental proportions. Half of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex would drown in Mickian words if that were to happen.
So, do I think that you should write every day? Do I think it makes you a better writer? Do I actually follow my own advice? Yes! To all three. And as I have passed the 500 word mark yet again, I can stop now.
Why Mickey Writes
If you are wondering, “How in the Heck can Mickey write nonsense like that essay he wrote yesterday?”, then please be aware that Mickey is pondering that same question.
Seriously, why would a writer publish personal thoughts and allude to personal tragedies? Especially when they are about things that once upon a time nearly killed him? (Please note that when Mickey starts a sentence with “Seriously” it is probably about to lead to a joke, the same way as when Trump says, “Believe me” we should assume he is telling a lie and knows it.)
The answer is simply, writers write stuff. They have to. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be writers.
It is really not something to do to earn fame and fortune. Fame and fortune happen to rare individuals like J. K. Rowling and Steven King… and even Stephanie Meyer, to prove that it is totally random and not based on actual writing talent… except for sometimes.
You write to get your head right about bad things that happen in life. You find that factor in Mark Twain whose infant son died, as well as most of the rest of his family, before him, forcing him to face survivor’s guilt and the notion that life is random and death does not come for you based on any kind of merit system. Charles Dickens wrote about the foibles of his father, on whom he based the David Copperfield character Wilkins Micawber, a man who was overly optimistic and constantly landing in debtor’s prison because of it. He also wrote in his stories about the women he truly loved (who were not, it seems, his wife) one of whom died in his arms while yet a teenager. Dickens’ amused take on the innate foolishness of mankind gave him a chance to powerfully depict great tragedies both large (as in a Tale of Two Cities) and small (as in Oliver Twist). I wrote yesterday’s post based on the connection between the nudity I write about in novels and my own traumatic assault when I was only ten.
You write because you have wisdom, an inner personal truth, that you are convinced needs to be crystallized in words and written down on paper. It isn’t necessarily real truth. Lots of idiots write things and post them in newspapers, blogs, and even books. And it is often true that their inner personal truth is complete hogwash. (But, hey, at least the hogs are cleaner that way.) Still, your wisdom is your own, and it is true for you even if some idiot like Mickey reads it and thinks it is only fit for cleaning hogs.
And you truly do have to write. If I did not write my stupid, worthless novels, all the hundreds of characters in my head would get mad and start kicking the pillars that hold up the structures in my head. I do have structures in my head. My mind is organized in boxes that contain specifically sorted ideas and stories and notions. It is not a festering stew pot where everything is mixed together and either bubbling or boiling with hot places or coagulating in the cold corners. (That is how I picture Donald Trump’s mind. It is certainly not an empty desert like many people think, because deserts don’t explode all over Twitter early in the morning like the stew pot metaphor obviously would.)
And so, I have done it again. I have set down my 500+ words for today and made a complete fool of myself. And why do I do it? Because Mickey is a writer, and so, Mickey writes stuff.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, humor, insight, irony, Mark Twain, Mickey, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wisdom, writing humor
Catch a Falling Star 
Finding My Voice
As Big MacIntosh welcomes more little ponies into my insanely large doll collection, I have been reading my published novel Snow Babies. The novel is written in third person viewpoint with a single focus character for each scene. But because the story is about a whole community surviving a blizzard with multiple story lines criss-crossing and converging only to diverge and dance away from each other again, the focus character varies from scene to scene.
Big MacIntosh finds himself to be the leader of a new group of My Little Ponies.
In Canto Two, Valerie Clarke, the central main character of the story, is the focus character. Any and all thoughts suggested by the narrative occur only in Valerie’s pretty little head. Canto Three is focused through the mind of Trailways bus driver Ed Grosland. Canto Four focuses on Sheriff’s Deputy Cliff Baily. And so, on it goes through a multitude of different heads, some heroic, some wise, some idiotic, and some mildly insane. Because it is a comedy about orphans freezing to death, some of the focus characters are even thinking at the reader through frozen brains.
The ponies decide to visit Minnie Mouse’s recycled Barbie Dreamhouse where Olaf the Snowman is the acting butler.
That kind of fractured character focus threatens to turn me schizophrenic. I enjoy thinking like varied characters and changing it up, but the more I write, the more the characters become like me, and the more I become them. How exactly do you manage a humorous narrative voice when you are constantly becoming someone else and morphing the way you talk to fit different people? Especially when some of your characters are stupid people with limited vocabularies and limited understanding?
The ponies are invited to live upstairs with the evil rabbit, Pokemon, and Minions.
I did an entire novel, Superchicken, in third person viewpoint with one focus character, Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken himself. That is considerably less schizophrenic than the other book. But it is still telling a story in my voice with my penchant for big words, metaphors, and exaggerations.
The novel I am working on in rough draft manuscript form right now, The Baby Werewolf, is done entirely in first person point of view. That is even more of an exercise of losing yourself inside the head of a character who is not you. One of the first person narrators is a girl, and one is a werewolf. So, I have really had to stretch my writing ability to make myself into someone else multiple times.
I assure you, I am working hard to find a proper voice with which to share my personal wit and wisdom with the world. But if the men in white coats come to lock me away in a loony bin somewhere, it won’t be because I am playing a lot with My Little Ponies.
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Filed under commentary, goofiness, humor, insight, NOVEL WRITING, photo paffoonies, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor
Tagged as My Little Pony, Snow Babies