Category Archives: writing humor

K.I.S.S.

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When learning to write, you have to learn the rules.  And then you start writing, and you learn that you have to break all the rules to do it well.  But what do I know?  You have to be pretty desperate to get your writing advice from a Mickey.  After all, it’s not like Mickey was a writing teacher for over thirty years… oh, wait a minute… yes, he was.

Okay, so I decided to write today about the K.I.S.S. rule of writing.  That’s right, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  Other writing teachers tell me it should be, Keep It Simple, Sweetie, because you can’t say “stupid” to a kid.  Okay, that’s mostly true.  But I use “stupid” when I use the rule myself.  I’m talking to Mickey after all.

So, I better stop “bird-walking” in the middle of this essay, because “bird-walking”, drifting off topic for no purpose, is the opposite of keeping it simple.

I try to write posts of no more than 500 words.  I write an introduction that says something stupid or inane that speaks to the theme I want to talk about.  Then I pile in a few sentences that talk more about the theme and do a good job of irritating the reader to the point that they can’t wait to get to the conclusion.  Finally I finish up with a really pithy and wonderful bit of wisdom to tie a knot in the bow of my essay.  I save that bit for the end as a sort of revenge for all the readers who don’t read all the way to the end, even on a short post like this one.  Of course, I could be wrong about how wonderful and pithy it is.  What does “pithy” even mean?  It can be like the soup in the bottom of the chili pot, thicker and spicier than what came before… or possibly overcooked with burned beans.

That was another bit of “bird-walking”, wasn’t it?  See, you have to break the rules to make it work better.

So, in order to keep it simple, I guess I need to end here for today.  Simple can be the same thing as short, but more often you are trying to achieve “simple and elegant” and pack a lot of meaning and resonance into a few lines.  And I, of course, am totally incapable of doing that with my purple paisley prose.  And there’s the knot in that bow.

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“Unfortunately, you are a Writer,” He Said.

I have made up my mind to risk investing more money in getting another book published.  Being an author, especially an unknown Indie author, is really just an expensive hobby.  Even investing in professional editorial services and print-on-demand publishers can’t help you make any money at it, even if you are talented and good at story-telling.  The best I can really hope for is to get my books in print and pray that people will discover them and like them after I die, beaten to death for a crust of bread in debtor’s prison.

So, why would anyone in their right mind want to be a writer?

It is entirely possible that I was simply born that way.  I have been drawing cartoons and telling stories since I was about five years old.  Maybe even before that.  I don’t have many clear memories of my pre-school years.  It is possible that I was lost in a library once… or dropped on my head… or in a library and having a book dropped on my head… something set it off if it wasn’t simply in my genes.

I am planning to publish Magical Miss Morgan with Page Publishing.  They are a pay-to-print publisher who are slightly more affordable than I-Universe that I used to get Catch a Falling Star into print.  I feel like I have to get it published before I die because it is the distillation of my entire life as a classroom teacher.  Books like this are important to me.  In the Bible, there are prophets and holy men who are filled with the Word of God, men like Jeremiah, that claim the Word is burning within them, and will burn its way out of them if they don’t speak it.  My stories that I am working at turning into books are like that.  They are consuming me from the inside out.  I have to get them written and printed if I possibly can.

I have recently tried and failed to get novels like Snow Babies, Magical Miss Morgan, and Superchicken published with publishers that don’t charge for their services.   I got several rejections and one contract that came to nothing because of the economic failings of the publisher.  I have tried being infinitely patient.  It doesn’t work.

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I will try to bargain for the most affordable deal I can to get Magical Miss Morgan into print.  They will apparently let me input artwork into the final cover.  I understand that successful writers tend to starve for at least fifteen years before they see any success and profit.  At best, I have six more years of that to go.  But this, after all, is my life now.  I need to write books and I need to get them published.  I am, unfortunately, a Writer.

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Stardusters… Canto Three

Installment 3 in my ongoing unfinished Sci-Fi saga is here for your perusal.  Hopefully it is not too awful.  It is a little bit racy in a junior-high sort of way… and it might turn your eyes black to read it, but it is also a little bit funny.

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Canto Three – In the Tadpole Chambers Aboard the Base Ship

Alden Morrell was astounded by the changes alien technology had made in him.  His wife, Gracie, inhabited a child’s body which had been artificially created by the Tellerons.  Her mind had been lifted out of her dying brain and placed into a container which had automatically adopted her DNA.    So the aliens had offered him a chance to be the same age and size as his now child-like wife.  They had put him in a device that resembled a tanning bed and processed him like a naked frog in a microwave oven.  When he had come to… no more body hair, penis reduced to a tiny pink mushroom, bald head re-forested with hair, and a renewed youthful energy he could barely contain.

Alden sat now in the moist sauna-bath that was known as the Tadpole Chamber wearing only his fruit-of-the-looms.  Gracie sat next to him, naked, and feeling apparently far less embarrassed than Alden himself felt.  Five naked Telleron tadpoles were with them, Davalon, Tanith, Brekka, Menolly, and George Jetson.  The tadpoles were the reason they were there.  Nutrient baths were absolutely necessary to the continued health of the amphibianoid children.

“We should dance,” suggested Brekka.  She was a lovely female Telleron tadpole with skin of forest green and having a delicate reddish blush on cheeks and neck, as well as her shapely buttocks.  Alden shuddered when he realized what he had been looking at.  He looked away and blushed deeply maroon himself.

“Why do you always want to dance?” asked Tanith, another pretty young female of emerald green.  “You suggest that forty times a day.”

“Since we learned to do that on Mars,” said Brekka, “I haven’t wanted to do anything else.  I want to dance like the Mickey Mouse Club kids we saw on the Earther broadcasts.”

“It doesn’t hurt to exercise,” said Davalon.  “I learned that by playing baseball.  It makes the muscles hurt at first, but then you come back stronger and more filled with power.”

Alden beamed at that.  He had been the one to teach Davalon about baseball during that brief time on Earth when he had tried to adopt the abandoned fin-headed alien boy.

“The computer system has Mickey Mouse Club music recorded from Earther TV,” reminded Menolly.    “We just have to ask for it.”

“Yeah!  Great idea!” said George Jetson.  Like many of Captain Xiar’s children, George was named for something on Earther TV that Xiar particularly liked.  “Computer, play all the Mickey Mouse Club songs.”

Alden didn’t know the song that started to play, but it had a good dance beat and the green children began to sway and move and dip and boogie.  It was a wild collection of dance moves from Earth filtered through alien perceptions.

“Let’s dance too,” said Alden’s beloved wife Gracie.   She stood and held out a hand to him.  “We can show them how it’s done.”

Alden was forty years old and Gracie was two years younger.  But now they inhabited children’s bodies, having been reduced in age to twelve and ten.  Their health was so much better, and many years had been added to both of their lives.  Still, it felt unnatural and somehow wrong.  She was younger now than when they’d first met in Belle City High School in Iowa when he was seventeen and she had been fifteen.

“Do you really have to be naked in front of the children?” he asked her in a whisper.

“Why, yes, you old coot.  I think I do.  You should take those soggy shorts off too.  This is like a sauna bath after all.”

“You know Mrs. Castille wouldn’t approve.”

“That old fuddy-duddy doesn’t have a say in this.  Prudes would tell us we have to wear swimsuits in the bath tub because they have issues, not because we do.”

Alden nodded.  He didn’t agree, but he nodded because that was what he thought Gracie wanted.   She was a mere child again, but his love for her made his twelve-year-old body want her mightily.  He had to dance bent forward because he didn’t want mushrooms blooming and embarrassing him while he danced with naked girls in an alien nutrient bath.

*****

My Art

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Butts and Nolts

“Don’t you actually mean nuts and bolts?” someone is surely going to say.  Oh, yes, I misspelled that little item on purpose.  This is another inane post about the writing process and trying to improve my “brand” with my blog.  It is something I have no earthly idea how it works or how to go about it.  So I often have to go back and think about the nuts and bolts of how you put this stuff together and try like heck to figure out what I am doing wrong.

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Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.

So, the problem is, while the blog as a whole has been gaining momentum, my blog traffic is down for this month.  People are not viewing and reading my actual stuff and nonsense as much as they were in the other months besides February.  So I have to look again at what works and why it works.

A lot of my work generates interest from the real world outside of my stupid little head because of the artwork.  I am really probably better at drawing colored pencil Paffooneys than I am at the constant yadda-yadda-yadda of trying to write humor.  Pictures like Mr. Fuddbugg here draw people in better than anything else I can post.  Of course, the artwork I post from my favorite cartoonists and comic artists of the past, like Wally Wood and Rumiko Takahashi draw far more views than my own artwork does.  This is due to the undeniable fact that they are better known and better at it than I am.

And both of those artists are well known for the “butts” that are in their works.  Yes, nudes and naked pictures increase your blog traffic.  Two of my top ten posts of the past two years are Be Naked More (https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2015/12/20/be-naked-more/) and Naked and Nude (https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2015/03/04/naked-and-nude/).  (Sorry for the poor link quality, but my computer is still having brain farts and keeps shrinking stuff and blowing stuff up at random, so I cannot, for the moment, make proper links.)  So, I can probably boost my blog traffic by posting another nude I have never posted before, even though it may make it impossible to share this on Facebook.

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This picture is actually a very complicated thing to post.  I have issues with things like sexuality and nudity because I was assaulted as a child.  And some of my nude drawings involve real-life models whose privacy I don’t want to invade.  (Yes, I had a real Gryphon pose nude for this picture.)  But this picture is old, having been created during my wild days as a grad-school college nerd.  Adding the “nude” tag to this post will undoubtedly draw in viewers.  (There really do seem to be a lot of people out there who want to look at naked Gryphons.)  And I am not ashamed at having drawn this pencil-piece.  It brings back lots of grand and glorious memories, though probably not the ones you think I mean.

Finally, I may need to get more aggressively insulting.  It seems to be the thing to do to create political humor with the impending Presidential Election coming up between the Wicked Witch of Wall Street and the Racist Orange King.

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The Orange King is very, very HYUGE! but his hands are small.

But there are difficulties in pulling that one off.  I mean, I spent a lifetime learning how to love the unlovable in the classroom because all students are able to learn and we owe them all, as teachers, the best education we can give them.  (Believe me, you will have a better life because I spent my teaching career trying to iron out the stupid from the laundry basket of Texas education.)  So I will have to settle for a more serene and gentle sort of political wit (if I may be allowed one last oxymoron).  Because I agree with Neal Gaiman on the subject of Political Correctness.

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There’s my two cents, such as it is.  Four cents after inflation.  I have had my say about the Butts and Nolts of this essay.  And if that’s not enough to explain it, then feel free to call me names in the comments and look at some of my other recent posts that nobody is reading so you can see how terrible those are too.  And thank you for actually reading the whole post.

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Filed under artwork, blog posting, feeling sorry for myself, finding love, humor, nudes, Paffooney, politics, writing humor

Mapping the Road Ahead

I have been doing this insane post-every-day thing for a solid year and a half since the start of this month.  That isn’t a sane thing to do if you are committed, like I am, to not posting pictures of the food you eat and blathering on about nothing.

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Braum’s chili… mmm… food of the gods!

Hmm?  Oh, no… that picture is an accident.  I didn’t put that there.  It’s not even a good picture.  Look at all that garbage in the background.  How did this picture get here?

But planning a daily blog can be difficult.  You keep having to make a map of the road you are planning to travel before you get there to see the lay of the land.  It gets tricky.  Almost as tricky as following the oxymoronic joke I tried to use as a title for this post.

Things happen all the time that make for good posts.  Yesterday was the result of my trip to the DMV.  If government offices don’t want to be the butt of satire, they shouldn’t make writers sit and stew in the heat for three hours and then not give them what they were waiting for.  But they apparently do want to be the butt of satire… or there wouldn’t be so much butt-ness to be found there.

I am a former teacher, having taught for 31 years.  I could’ve done this point about the recent education news in Texas.  Larissa Martinez , the Valedictorian of McKinney Boyd High School, used her graduation speech to come out of the closet as an undocumented immigrant.  It is an important issue.  This is a girl who will be nothing but an asset to this country.  She fled Mexico to escape an abusive father.  Her mother brought her to this country where she enrolled in school and quickly adapted to a new language and a new culture to achieve a 4.95 GPA in a well-funded Texas high school.  Her family immediately applied for citizenship in 2010.  As she gave her speech, her application had still not been processed.  I could write a number of posts about the immigration laws in this country being the real criminals.  Well, except laws aren’t actually people.  Okay, maybe I am not the best person to take up this vital issue.  But other people are reporting about this.  You can read more at this link;  Click Here!

So, maybe, I should just write more posts about Donald Trump becoming the next president of the U.S.  There is great opportunity  for humor there.  I am looking forward to Lonesome George W. Bush levels of comedy gold.

What then will I write about for today?  I am torn between a post for the fantasy book I just read and the movie Zootopia we saw last weekend.  But, somehow I have already reached my word-length goal for today.

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The milkshakes we had at Steak n” Shake after watching the movie Zootopia.

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I Love to Laugh

It began in childhood with the Red Skelton Show.    Every Wednesday night it a was a refuge for me.  And refuge was a critical idea for me.  I was a child hiding a terrible secret from the entire world.  At times I hated myself.  Twice as a teen I came very close to choosing suicide over life.  The person I most needed to hide from was myself.  And humor helped.  Red Skelton’s gentle humor helped me to not only escape from myself for a while, it taught me to laugh at my own foibles and not take things quite so seriously.

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In my college years I discovered humor in written form.  Mark Twain swiftly earned my utter devotion as I read not only Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Mysterious Stranger, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain.  You know, there are a large number of things in Mark Twain’s humorous books that make you cry, that make you angry, and make you think deep thoughts.  I basically discovered that humor is a way that smart people choose to think of things which helps to keep you sane and basically un-suicided.

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A beautiful portrait by artist Emily Stepp

It is obvious that some people become very skilled at humor because they have used it all their lives to fight the darkness .  Robin Williams is only few years older than I am.  In many ways his life has paralleled my own (obviously minus the wealth and fame in my case… but what would’ve happened if Robin had become a school teacher?)  I have depended on Robin Williams’ movies to keep me going, giving me insights in how to talk to kids, how to be a parent, and how to empathize with others.  Of course, I haven’t yet taken some of his movie advice.  I never put on a mask and a dress to deceive my own children.  But only time will tell.

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I obsess about humor and how you create it.  I gorge on things like the works of Dave Barry.  Do you know who he is?  Florida newspaper columnist who writes books about everyday life and the fools who live it?  I have to do a post on Dave Barry, because he makes me laugh so hard that milk shoots out of my nose, sometimes when I am not even drinking milk… believe me, I don’t know how that works either.

 

 

I love to laugh.  It makes the world right again.  I have laughed an awful lot for almost an entire lifetime now.  I treasure all the funny people I have known.  And I need to continue to try to make people laugh up until the very end.  Because the world is too often not a funny place.  It can be full of badness and sadness and suffering.  And as Mark Twain  so aptly pointed out, “Against the assault of laughter… nothing can stand.”

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Like Pulling Teeth from a Chicken

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Life is hard here in the Kingdom of Paffoon where you labor hard at a labor of love and try to give birth to something eternal that ends up going nowhere… stacks of old writing litter my closets, and the prospects of being published grow dimmer and dimmer.  My book Snow Babies has a contract with a publisher, but, apparently they are not going to be able to publish it after all.  I am at the very least going to have to find another publisher for the rest of my books, both finished manuscripts and works in progress.

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I do intend to follow through and get published, though.  I can no longer teach, but I feel a powerful force pushing me towards the sheer precipice of authordom.  One way or another I am going to make it over the edge and plummet to the bottom of that cliff.  I am compelled by the need to tell stories, and I have a captive audience every school day no longer.

I used to tell my classes that doing impossible things was like trying to pull chicken teeth with pliers.  You know, impossible things like getting a book published or teaching a mostly Spanish-speaking student how to read in English…  every-day-sort-of impossible things.

“But, Mr. B, chickens don’t have teeth,” some bright-eyed student would say after realizing that “chicken” was the English word for “pollo”.

“Exactly!” I would say.  “That’s what makes it so challenging!”

And now I must put on my chicken-catching socks, find my tooth-pulling pliers, and get ready to make more novels happen.  After a brief bout of consternation and depression, I actually feel a bit better about the whole fiasco.  There are other publishers, and publishers seem to like my writing, even if they can’t publish it.  And I have waited two years to get Snow Babies published, all apparently for nothing.  It is time to stop wasting time.  And maybe to stop repeating repetitions too.

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Blog Happy

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I can’t seem to help blogging daily on this goofy little blog spot.  I am a writer and I write every day whether I publish anything or not.  I am not connecting with readers through my published novels.  In fact, I seem to be nose against a brick wall with publishing anything further in novel form despite doing well in writing competitions.  Publishers exist mainly to make money for corporations, and creators of content of any kind are only paid serious money when the publishers are forced to by the healthy flow of cash into certain authors’ established platforms.  But feeling sorry for myself is a full time job and doesn’t pay very well… actually, if you can’t afford a lawyer, it doesn’t pay anything at all.  Instead I have been looking at the arc of this blog and rereading old posts.  To my amazement, I actually communicate ideas much more interestingly than the goofy-drunk word-flinger I thought I was.  Let me recount some of it so I can get the benefit of clip-show laziness the way television shows do.

Yesterday’s post was about the Lennon Sisters, a nostalgia post where I slathered on some goopy nostalgia about being a farm boy spending Saturday nights at my grand parents’ house and salted it with YouTube videos of the sisters singing some of my favorite songs from the Lawrence Welk Show.

The day before saw two posts about collecting Star Wars Action Figures, the twelve-inch size, not the three-inch.   They are a part of my over-all G.I. Joe/ Barbie obsession and have to be the same size.  One post was about the collection, and the other was a correction because I goofed on font size with speech balloons.

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The post before that was me mooning about this year’s apple blossoms and how I use them to counteract the moaning about how ill allergies make me while doing yard work.

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Before that was an extra-silly post about where creativity comes from, which recognizes the fact that I do, indeed, fall into the general category of “too creative to be outside of a mental institution”, but actually have no earthly idea why.

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That post was preceded by a post about my antique library books that I treat as treasure, though I found them at Goodwill prices or got them free as library discards.  The Sherlock Holmes books were even rescued from the middle school trash bin.

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Prior to that was a post moaning about having to deal with my daughter’s cold.  It gave me an excuse to re-post an old picture I drew that looks remarkably like my daughter the Princess, even though I drew it in colored pencil fifteen years before she was born and eight years before I even got married.

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The post before that was about marketing my published book, and how the review I paid for ended up being about the wrong book (same title, different author).  The mistake made by the book-review company has not been corrected yet even as of this writing.  They haven’t refunded my money either, I have noticed.

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Before that was a collage post of collected artwork and photographs from my Monster Movie file.  It focused mainly on the Universal movie monsters, and it provided a worthy use for my habit of filling my computer’s memory with all kinds of pictures copied from the internet.  I am a hoarder and collector in so many disgusting ways.

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And on the first day of April I posted an April Fool’s Day post full of pictures I have drawn of fools and photos of foolish things.

The conclusions I have drawn by looking at the last ten days of posting include these;  I definitely do not think in straight lines.  I think in quirky squiggles that double back on themselves and allow freaky ideas to meet themselves mid-sentence.  I also crave loopy levels of variety and my selections of topics and illustrations are completely unpredictable.   I like bright colors.  I dwell mostly in the past, though sometimes in the future.  My mind is a lot like a boomerang, travelling woop-woop-woop willy-nilly through the air, but always coming back to essentially the same things over and over.  I call all of this humor, though not all of this is funny because humor is basically pointed and takes you by surprise more often than not.  But if it is good humor, you can’t help telling yourself, “You know, when you stop to think about it, it is funny, but it’s also true.”

I came back to this post today thinking, “Wouldn’t it be a great idea to take some old blog posts, essays like this one, and put them all together into e-book form.  But then I began tinkering with the mechanics of the format, and then I realized, I use too darn much incompatible media to put into book form under the current Amazon publishing set-up.  And how do I shift my full-color imagination into strictly black-and-white?  So, there’s another blogging notion that requires a re-visit on another day.

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Where Does Creativity Come From?

Ima mickey

Okay, I hooked you in with a title that sounds like I actually know something and somehow have some expertise to share beyond the usual brain-drippings of a noodling writer-type idiot.  Unfortunately I don’t.  I am a practicing creative person.  But do I know how it works? I do not.

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I suspect that it has something to do with my actual life experiences.  I am not God.  When I get a creative idea, it is made from known things.   I don’t snap my fingers and make a snerflkuppie, the first one that ever existed, and give it actual substance and reality.  Okay, metaphorically I did just make the first snerflkuppie… It is about three feet tall, has glossy purple fur and three legs.  Four puppy-like eyes, a wide mouth, and no nose… I dare you not to try and picture it in your mind’s eye.  But there isn’t one skipping about in this universe.  I can only take known things and recombine them in unique and surprising ways.  My novels are about kids doing kid stuff… you know, like time travel, being kidnapped by aliens, uncovering werewolf plots, and making magical cookie people.  Stuff that really happened.  And I am a former teacher, so I have experience knowing real kids.

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If you think kids you see depicted on television and in the movies are realistic, you have never played a video game with a real kid.  You have never had them tell you what they are really afraid of.  You have never come to the conclusion that they actually know a whole lot more about sex than you do.  And kids are not afraid to try something new for the first time (unless, of course, the thing they are going to try is what their parents want them to try for the first time).  You take liquid one and mix it with powder two, watch it fizz, and then drink it.  You don’t know if it will taste good, turn you into a muscle-bound Mr. Hyde-type monster, or blow you up like a firecracker.  But you made it yourself and you are going to try.  We generally think of kids as being creative and undisciplined.  We expect time and experience to take the unruliness, as well as the creativity, out of them.  It is the thing we refer to as, “growing up”.  But I think being creative is, to some degree, remaining a child.  I am a child because I continue to hold play-time in high regard, and do it as often as I can.  Writing words on paper, or on my laptop, is playing to me.  Drawing pictures with pen and ink and colored pencils is also playing to me.  Fortunately mixing chemicals from the cupboard like a mad scientist and testing them on my sister is no longer playing to me.  (And that, Nancy, is just a joke… I never actually did that… I think… I hope…)

The Car Chase of Life

The metaphorical car chase of life… with an old dog behind the wheel.

So, there you have it.  The ultimate answer.  Where does creativity come from?  I do not know.

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Novel Problems

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It was a simple plan, really.  I paid a review company to review my book and post the result on their website.  It was affordable, and research showed that their services were not a mere waste of money.  How could anything go wrong?

Well, it’s me, of course.  The fact is, my book is not the only book with that same title.  I sent them the link to my book on Amazon.  They had all the right info to pick the right book.  They, of course, picked the wrong book to read and review.

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Naturally, they can’t tell the difference between my YA science fiction novel about an abandoned alien boy being adopted by a childless Earth couple and a Hollywood romance between sun-soaked beautiful people.

Oh, well, it would be funny if I weren’t running out of time for making waves with my novel and getting some notice.  I can’t seem to get another novel published and everyone is ignoring my little bookie thingy.  Serves me right for thinking I have a good reason to write stuff and nonsense.

And of course, it is not my only unique and novel problem.  I am currently trying to get essential yard work done before the leaves kill the grass on our yard.

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I raked for half an hour with a bad back stinging me constantly, and all I got accomplished was one bag of leaves!

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I really need trees that are more housebroken than this.  If I drop dead doing yard work, I will die an unknown novelist that nobody ever reads.  I am sure several people who have read my work would think that’s actually a good thing, but I’m inclined to disagree with them.

And leaf and novel problems have exacerbated my doll-collecting mania.  The third day of April and I have already bought two more dolls after vowing to quit the habit cold turkey.  But these are Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck dolls.  How can any doll collector with hoarding disorder resist?  At least, two dolls (and their horse) completes the collection…. until they get around to making more of these sweet little things.

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So, I have different problems than most people do.  But they are still problems.  I need to get busy and come up with some novel solutions.

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