I finished the final draft of this bug-boiler during the pandemic, before the end of 2022. It should have been published about three books ago. I have never run into a more complex writing experience than this one.
The first issue was arthritic. I wanted to continue using illustrations to short-cut character depictions. I like to illustrate these novels with comic-book-style pen-and-ink illustrations. But my fingers have lost so much dexterity that I can no longer match the old cartoons and things begin to look a little off. I tried to use pre-existing illustrations from my old notebooks full of such pictures. But my scanner became a problem because the controls of the thing were tied to my son’s computer… the one he gave to his older brother when he went into the Air Force. And my only computer linked to the scanner, which I can no longer link new computers to, is old and wearing out. It takes a week to scan things at times when I need to go faster than that. And the drawings don’t look that good anyway… though much better than any new work I do with pens on paper. And it is the part of the old book that I am rewriting as a series of five books where I have the most new plot and world-building to do… and then cross-check for consistency with everything I wrote back in 2007.
And then the ability to do digital art came along, something I would’ve loved to apply to this book. But the learning curve on that took more than a year. And yet, I am still trying to master the skills necessary to create science fiction art in a digital format.
And this entire last week was consumed with frustration over trying to create the new format Amazon requires with an interactive table of contents. I still have to skip the parts of that which Amazon will still let me skip because it is new.
Anyway, the thing was fun to write, fun to reread, and worth all the effort. You can see for yourself at the link above.
I am diabetic. I am not supposed to have donuts for breakfast any more. Hence the obsession with donuts. I am only guessing here, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that the very name of donuts tells you what to do.
“What?!” you say. “What goofiness are you talking about now, Mickey?”
Well, I’ll tell you. I had a donut for breakfast this morning… with nuts.
The name “donuts” is literally a command. It tells you to “Do nuts”. So I had nuts with my donut this morning. Peanuts to be precise. Of course that’s what is wrong with the whole scenario. It doesn’t mean “peanuts”. It is commanding you to do something nutty. Maybe more like eating a donut when you have diabetes. No matter how good that particular donut tastes when you eat it, an hour later you are going to suffer.
So here’s the result of my being nuts this morning. I have come to the conclusion that the root of all evils in the modern world is “donuts”. Especially when it is pronounced “doo nutz”. Yes, eating a donut subjects you to the command, “Do nuts!”
And we all know how bad Trump’s diet is. Could he be imbibing donuts? Horrors! That explains Twitter, cabinet firings, tariffs for the fun of it, random protestations of “No collusion!”, and even “Covfefe”. Although Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is an evil beyond even the power of donuts.
And how did Trump even get elected? Do people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan glory in eating donuts before voting? How about disgruntled Bernie Bros? And one also suspects that middle-aged white women can’t resist a good donut… or an evil one either.
Could it be that I am down on donuts because I ate one and now I am writing this with a pounding high-blood-sugar headache? Well, yes. Eating one inspired this post. It was a chocolate donut with green, mint-flavored frosting. And it was evil. It is taking out its evil revenge on the blood vessels in my brain.
So, I implore you if you are reading this… no, I’m not going to tell you not to “Do nuts”… I am going to tell you, “Please, for the love of God, keep donuts away from me! Eat them yourself if you have to. But be warned! They have a secret meaning.”
Looking for stuff to organize into a post today led me to realize that I currently exist swimming in a tidal wave of goofy images that I myself have created.
So, lazy and goofy old me will now show you some of these things.
I don’t even remember why I drew some of these things.
Some of it, is obviously because I was a teacher.
But some of it is merely wacky.
Though some might be considered inspirational.
While some of it is just meant to be appealing.
But all of it provides me with an easy post that you can read fast, but still get plenty to think about from. It is even good for a re-post if I add something newer.
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were all down today at various times. Not that I am such a loser that I spend all day on Facebook and can’t live without it. I like to use Instagram for posting artwork as I continue to noodle with digital art tools. The little girl I use as a model for pictures of my imaginary granddaughter posts on Instagram her little videos more than twice a day. I managed to get this drawing done today even though Instagram disappeared shortly after Facebook was completely gone. I didn’t need either social media site to create this picture as I already had a rough draft done, and from there it can all be done offline.
I didn’t need the Facebook group of sites for this practice picture at all. I made it from the most viewed photo on my WordPress blog, Catch a Falling Star, where you should be reading this post if you are not merely looking at the pictures.
Here’s the original photo with the little naked girl, her six fish in jars, and the black cat pretending not to be thinking obsessively about how to get fish out of jars. You can see how well… or how poorly I redrew the picture. I regret drawing the cat looking fatter and less hungry than the one in the photo.
And for good measure, here’s a picture of me and my plastic doll Ariel whom I constantly talk to while my wife is away at work and my daughter is occupied with college classes. She stands in for the grandchild I don’t have too. I even drew glasses on her to make her feel more like one of my myopic family.
And to finish up, I did a bikini picture. I like girls in bikinis. But, incredibly old coot that I am, I have more or less forgotten why I like bikini pictures so much. The model for this one was plucked from Instagram after the site came back to life. So, basically, I did more drawing, not less, on a day without Facebook.
Yes, in some ways, I have Peter Pan syndrome. I have never truly grown up. But not in the ways that really matter in life.
As a writer of fiction, I put all my effort into writing young adult novels. My main characters are mostly children from roughly around eight years old to teens who are almost adults.
But it is not as G-rated as Nancy Drew. I have issues that creep in to become the monster under the bed. My childhood was not all naked innocence and sunshine.
Don’t get me wrong. I had wonderful parents. And wonderful grandparents. And the little town of Rowan, Iowa becomes the town of Norwall in all my Earthbound fiction. It was a very magical, if boring, place to grow up. I lived in town, but my uncles and grandparents lived on working farms. I knew farm life. I knew how you fed animals, trained animals, and helped them reproduce. I knew that farm animals die. And, sometimes, people die too. Even people who are important to you and you depend on.
And at the ripe old age of ten, I was sexually assaulted by an older boy. It is hard to talk about that even now, 52 years later. It wasn’t so much a sex act that I was forced to commit. It was more of a sexual-torture thing. He took his pleasure from twisting my private parts, making me hurt intensely, telling me all the while not to scream or call out for help. I think I even passed out at one point. There was no pleasure in it for me in any way. In fact, once he let me go with more threats, I promptly turned it into a repressed memory for twelve years. It turned me from an outgoing, leader-of-the-gang type kid into a miserable wallflower. It made me contemplate suicide as a teen. It led to some self harm that my parents never actually figured out, burning my lower back against the heater grate and making small burn scars on my arms and legs. It kept me from falling in love with a girl until my thirties. And it made me turn myself inside out through drawings, cartoons, and story-telling.
The Baby Werewolf
Some of the key stories I have turned into novels were created because of what happened to me, the horror at the center of my childhood. The monster in my novel, The Baby Werewolf, and the serial killer in Fools and Their Toys were both inspired by him, were both a reaction to what he did to me.
And do you know what he means to me now? I have forgiven him. He passed away a few years ago of a heart condition. I avoided him and his family from when it happened until now. I never told anyone what he did to me. I never sought any kind of revenge or justice for his act. To this day I still haven’t revealed his name to anyone, though I have been able to talk about it in this blog since he died. He has paid his price. The scales are balanced. I am healed. That is enough.
What he gave me, though, was a gift of purpose and an ability to fight the darkness with a strategy of sharing every tactic I have learned about defending myself from predators, depression, and crippling self-loathing in novel form. I shared those tactics as well during my years as a teacher and mentor to kids who had problems like mine for which my solutions sometimes also served as answers. I was able to put into thematic form the positive answers to the question every kid asks themselves somewhere along the road to adulthood, “Am I a monster because of what I have done and what has happened to me?”
The answer, of course, is, “No, I am not a monster.” But kids like me desperately need someone to tell them that and give them reasons why it is true. Fiction can do that. At least, I believe that it can.
And so, I write YA novels, novels for kids trying to become adults. And what good does that do if nobody ever reads my books? Or even this blog post which some of you who actually read my blog posts have probably given up on as too hard to read several paragraphs ago? It keeps me young. At 62 I still think like a twelve-year-old. Admittedly a wise-beyond-his-years twelve-year-old. I have never grown up in my mind where it counts. And maybe it even makes me able to fly like Peter Pan. But no jumping off roofs to find out for sure.
Lawanda and Geoff, time travelers, visited me from the future today. They come from the 56th Century CE, precisely two hundred years before the beginning of the Xandar Empire, the Milky Way’s first galaxy-wide Star Empire.
Here’s the birth of the characters in the third draft of the picture, before I designed their uniforms and converted Lawanda into a female.
Here’s a fellow space traveler. Still no name for her.
Here’s a second draft of the space traveler portrait, before I learned she was from the future and outer space.
Here’s further proof that once you make a digital picture, it is so easy to edit details that you can make many versions of the same picture.
Yes I will continue to coddiwomple for a while. On my birthday in November of 2014 after retiring in May, I decided I would do a blog post every single day for at least a year. Now, two years and four months later, I am still posting every single day. I think that I shall continue for a while because there are real benefits to doing so.
It keeps my seriously old and worn-out brain active, chugging along even though it is held together with mental duct tape.
It challenges my ability to come up with new ideas. I admit, sometimes I set down to write a post with nothing in my head but random snippets of music and empty space. Yet, I have managed to increasingly create bizarre and exotic thought-artifacts at an increasingly volatile pace. Perhaps soon the ideas reach critical mass and my writing goes boom like a series of fireworks.
It has increased my visibility on WordPress and the reach of my writing through social media.
It has taught me how much I hate Twitter. People tweeting in a rage at each other makes the world a birdhouse full of angry birds.
It has also taught me to edit carefully and quickly because my writing time is theoretically limited, as is my target word-count.
And I have learned that some days I need to do a simple and easy post like this to give my mind-muscles a chance to rest and grow.
So I will continue to post on WordPress, putting up pusillanimous Paffoonies to treat and entertain you. (Yes, I know that “pusillanimous” means timid. But the root words mean “small mind”, and my mind is nothing if not small. And I also needed a multi-syllabic p-word to make the alliteration sound funnier.)
Being a Child for More Than 60 Years
Yes, in some ways, I have Peter Pan syndrome. I have never truly grown up. But not in the ways that really matter in life.
As a writer of fiction, I put all my effort into writing young adult novels. My main characters are mostly children from roughly around eight years old to teens who are almost adults.
But it is not as G-rated as Nancy Drew. I have issues that creep in to become the monster under the bed. My childhood was not all naked innocence and sunshine.
Don’t get me wrong. I had wonderful parents. And wonderful grandparents. And the little town of Rowan, Iowa becomes the town of Norwall in all my Earthbound fiction. It was a very magical, if boring, place to grow up. I lived in town, but my uncles and grandparents lived on working farms. I knew farm life. I knew how you fed animals, trained animals, and helped them reproduce. I knew that farm animals die. And, sometimes, people die too. Even people who are important to you and you depend on.
And at the ripe old age of ten, I was sexually assaulted by an older boy. It is hard to talk about that even now, 52 years later. It wasn’t so much a sex act that I was forced to commit. It was more of a sexual-torture thing. He took his pleasure from twisting my private parts, making me hurt intensely, telling me all the while not to scream or call out for help. I think I even passed out at one point. There was no pleasure in it for me in any way. In fact, once he let me go with more threats, I promptly turned it into a repressed memory for twelve years. It turned me from an outgoing, leader-of-the-gang type kid into a miserable wallflower. It made me contemplate suicide as a teen. It led to some self harm that my parents never actually figured out, burning my lower back against the heater grate and making small burn scars on my arms and legs. It kept me from falling in love with a girl until my thirties. And it made me turn myself inside out through drawings, cartoons, and story-telling.
Some of the key stories I have turned into novels were created because of what happened to me, the horror at the center of my childhood. The monster in my novel, The Baby Werewolf, and the serial killer in Fools and Their Toys were both inspired by him, were both a reaction to what he did to me.
And do you know what he means to me now? I have forgiven him. He passed away a few years ago of a heart condition. I avoided him and his family from when it happened until now. I never told anyone what he did to me. I never sought any kind of revenge or justice for his act. To this day I still haven’t revealed his name to anyone, though I have been able to talk about it in this blog since he died. He has paid his price. The scales are balanced. I am healed. That is enough.
What he gave me, though, was a gift of purpose and an ability to fight the darkness with a strategy of sharing every tactic I have learned about defending myself from predators, depression, and crippling self-loathing in novel form. I shared those tactics as well during my years as a teacher and mentor to kids who had problems like mine for which my solutions sometimes also served as answers. I was able to put into thematic form the positive answers to the question every kid asks themselves somewhere along the road to adulthood, “Am I a monster because of what I have done and what has happened to me?”
The answer, of course, is, “No, I am not a monster.” But kids like me desperately need someone to tell them that and give them reasons why it is true. Fiction can do that. At least, I believe that it can.
And so, I write YA novels, novels for kids trying to become adults. And what good does that do if nobody ever reads my books? Or even this blog post which some of you who actually read my blog posts have probably given up on as too hard to read several paragraphs ago? It keeps me young. At 62 I still think like a twelve-year-old. Admittedly a wise-beyond-his-years twelve-year-old. I have never grown up in my mind where it counts. And maybe it even makes me able to fly like Peter Pan. But no jumping off roofs to find out for sure.
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