Be careful of this tiger kitty
He rules with an iron paw
And every rat and egg and bird
Can end up in his maw
He pees where he likes
And buries poo in your garden
And sings to the moon off-key every night
And never begs of you pardon
Learning from Bad Writing
So, I just finished reading this book from my leftover pile of classroom reading books that represent my time as a public school reading teacher.
This is book six in the best-selling Charlie Bone series. I didn’t read the previous five books. I have a copy of book one somewhere, but this one is one I picked up for my reading fix last week.
Let me begin by saying, as an obvious Harry Potter imitation, it is a very inventive and enjoyable story.
I read the whole book even though I had difficulty with several things that I have come to recognize as glaring, reader-tripping problems.
Now, to be completely honest about my assessments, Jenny Nimmo, the author of the Charley Bone books, has an impressive resume. She has not only been an English teacher, but she worked for the BBC as well as an editor, director, and other creative endeavors. And her books, unlike mine, are best-seller enough to be picked up by Scholastic Books, a major publisher. She has undoubtedly made a lot more money with her books than I have with mine. And, I confess, I find the story entertaining.
But the story is guilty of writing sins that I am familiar with by having overcome them in my own writing.
Most noticeable is the lack of a sense of a focus character. It is done as a third-person omniscient narrative that goes in and out of different characters’ heads telling what they think and feel. It will go from Charlie Bone’s main-character-thoughts to his nemesis Dagbert Endless’s feelings to the thoughts of the dog that lives in the school and then veers into the bird that is actually Emma, one of Charlie’s female friends with special “gifts of magic” handed down from their common ancestor, the Red King. You end up, as a reader, trying to keep things separate in your awareness about too many characters with too many mental reveals to keep straight. And who all knows what about whom? In one scene a character seems to know already what another character said and did in a previous scene that the knowing character wasn’t present for and hasn’t been told about.
This focus problem is compounded by having too many characters with too little development in the current story. I get it that we are supposed to have met the characters in previous books in the series. But it has to have a more stand-alone quality about it to even work as a separate book. The writer has to keep in mind that readers won’t know everything about every character in previous books because they have either forgotten, or the author has only assumed they would know without being told.
And the scenes and chapters in this book are way too ranging and free-form. A scene that begins in the end of chapter two rambles across to the beginning of chapter three without really concluding and then morphs into another scene entirely when the narrative follows a single character from the conversation in one room into an encounter in the next room. There is a lack of chapter structure to rationalize why those words belong in that chapter rather than the next.
And numerous plot lines are just left hanging at the end of the book, seemingly forgotten rather than set up for the probable sequel. The book does not end with a sense that it is the final end of the saga.
So it is a book that both Hemingway and Dickens would’ve cringed to have written. Never-the-less, I did like this book. The old uncritical critic, you know. I would’ve neither finished reading it, nor written this essay about it if I didn’t find merit in the story. I learned things by reading it. Things to avoid, things to correct when I find them in my own stories, and things that make me go, “Hmmm… I’d like to try that myself.”
Filed under book reports, book review, humor, writing, writing teacher
They Are Real
I have always believed as Carl Sagan taught me in the 1970s, “Extraordinary claims like the existence of aliens requires extraordinary proof.”
Well, we are seeing extraordinary proofs from eye witnesses, military videos, and accounts from whistleblowers.
The main reason I can say I am now 95% certain that we are being visited by intelligent entities from other worlds or other realities is because the American government has finally admitted on the record that there are things buzzing our aircraft-carrier fleets that we have video recordings of that we don’t know how they fly and do the other impossible things that we have them on record as doing. The gentleman pictured above, Luis Elizondo, was formerly the leader of an intelligence project for studying these Unidentified Arial Phenomena (UAPs for short.) The government has identified him as the person he says he is, a person who left his job in order to make all of this public and to get the government, especially congress, to take it all seriously. He has evidence that the visitors are a definite national security threat and safety concern for our airborne military and civilian air travel.
Extraordinary proof. Of course, I believed before based on the work of Stanton Freedman, Richard Dolan, George Knapp, and numerous other competent and believable investigators (but NOT the Ancient Aliens guys.)
And I am not the only one who has had his long-held beliefs vindicated. This gentleman, Bob Lazar, has been a much-maligned and persecuted whistleblower since the 1980s. He had his identity erased by the government. His former bosses at the Los Alamos Research Facility disavowed that he ever worked there. His college records were expunged. They even deleted his birth certificate. All of this because he worked at a secret base in Area 51 called S4. He was tasked with reverse engineering the craft pictured above. And, during the time that he was working on that, he took friends and credible witnesses out to a secure area to witness test flights of the aircraft he was supposed to be working on. And, of course, he got caught. He turned to TV journalist George Knapp to broadcast the information he was blowing the whistle on, not to make money, but to spread the truth and make himself too visible for the government to simply kill him and make him disappear.
More people believe Bob Lazar now than ever did before. He is somewhat vindicated as a real whistleblower. It has been proven that the rare element, 115, is real, though it was an unknown element when he broke the story forty years ago. There is now also undeniable video of similar crafts provided by the US government.
It will probably never be 100 % certain. The people profiting off the technology gained from the 1947 Roswell Incident will not compromise their cash cows… or their money-making anti-gravity drives either. And our government has been lying and covering up things since before Washington’s Presidency. But I believe we now know… we are not alone in the universe.
Filed under Uncategorized
Human Beans
People are not really vegetables… even though I have seen IQ scores as a teacher that might say otherwise. But I often use the pun of calling them Human Beans.
Of course, being a Texan means having a healthy appreciation for beans as a staple food. Cowboys used to live off of beans and beef jerky, and if Louis L’Amour is to be believed, they even made tea from mesquite beans. That makes your average cowboy made up of over 50 per cent beans. Of course the rest of him is mostly gas caused by the beans in his diet, whether it comes out as a fart or as a Texas tall tale… And yes, I admit it, I get a lot of my writing ideas from eating beans.
We must also be aware that Texas has no corner on the beans market. We all know Boston baked beans by reputation. They, like the ever-hapless Cubs, had a habit of never winning the World Series. And now, in the last two decades, it has actually been difficult for the other teams to keep them from winning it all. But we shouldn’t mix up beans with baseball metaphors. Baseball is like life. Full of long and boring parts punctuated by intense moments of hitting, scoring, committing errors, and player versus player individual drama. And concession stand food! Beans, however, can taste good in chili draped over the ballpark hot dogs which cost more than a restaurant meal at most reasonable restaurants. And I promise you, you will never hit a home run over the fence by hitting it with a bean.
And I wish to point out that this last human bean is not a racist cartoon. Beans are not part of the human race. They only have legs in cartoons and would come in last even when racing a snail. And all beans are created equal in the sight of God. Kidney beans, butter beans, navy beans, string beans… all beans are just beans, no matter what the color of their skin is, and no matter how they add flavor to a casserole. All beans are just in it to live life the best they can, and if that’s not enough… they can be planted as seeds to raise the next generation of human beans.
Filed under cartoons, foolishness, humor, metaphor, Paffooney
12 Days in a Row
I am increasingly frustrated with an inability to get any writing done on my primary, secondary, and emergency writing projects. My writing time, it seems, is constantly interfered with by problems seeing the computer screen, or achy fingers from arthritis to type with, or just a lack of willpower to get off Instagram where I listen to kids play instruments or sing like an angel the way little Aiko Bett does or post their artwork.
I fear I may be at the end of my creative endeavors. I have more novels in my head, but getting them down on word documents is becoming impossible. If I only had a brain…
I am not willing to lose my ability to write. I am not ready to spend the rest of my days mindlessly watching Netflix or scrolling through Instagram and Twitter. So, I lose the battle again today, but I will fight to make it happen again tomorrow.
Filed under Uncategorized
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.”
Equipment Makes the Adventurer
You cannot cleave a ghost in twain with a cast-iron fireplace poker. Throwing snowballs at vampires will not keep your blood from being drained. And bugbears don’t really have an aversion to little girls in pink dresses (except for little Tessie Trueheart of the Green Dale; that little booger has a temper as large as her love for the color pink).
To go adventuring in Mickey the Dungeonmaster’s dungeons, you need the right equipment. Of course, whole books full of weapons and armor and adventuring doodads have been published. Some of the stuff we use in the family games comes from the game books, as exemplified by the items pictured above. The Blue Wood Armor of the Forest Guardian is a collection of items put together from the books published for D&D by Wizards of the Coast Publishing.
My daughter’s favorite weapon is a sentient throwing knife that always flies back to its current master after being thrown. It also never misses, adjusting its own flight to always strike the target for the greatest possible damage. It has a mind and intelligence of its own. It became sentient and alive in the middle of an epic combat with a magical giant golem who hit it with a spell that went disastrously wrong for the caster. This item was created on the spur of the moment in the midst of a published adventure, based on a disasterously low roll of the dice for the monster side of the combat.
Some items in the game are actually treasures from the published adventure scenarios I like to use. Instead of simply selling off items when they are discovered in the cold, dead hands of defeated evil druids whose dreams of conquest and tyrannical rule you have thwarted, you can take them for your own personal use. I have a tendency to embellish what is described in the pages of the adventure with both really good powers and effects, and really insidious concealed curses. The Legendary Black Blades are both demon-laced and deadly. And both, though fatal to your enemies, will eventually darken your own heart and possibly shorten your adventuring life the hard way.
Not all equipment is made of swords and armor. The Evil Heads of Dr. Zorgo are a collection of living zombie heads that can impart wisdom and information (allowing characters to add skills) and can also direct you to places of adventure and great treasure. Of course, they are evil. There is always that little factor to consider. But come on, how can you not be tempted by treasures talked about by the Ghost Elf’s head when you tried to ask her for the time of day in her native land?
So the point of this post is that I am really proud of my drawings of D&D equipment and wanted to show them off. This post is merely an excuse for doing that. I have one more to show you, though I must confess, while I drew this one, it was designed by number one son to be used for his character, though as soon as he got it made, he sold it for lots of gold to use on the next project.
Filed under artwork, Dungeons and Dragons, heroes, Paffooney, playing with toys
The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 17
Canto 17 – The Balcony Scene
Rogelio found himself looking up at the second-floor balcony of the Zuniga Inn.
“So, you wanna climb up there?” he asked Steven.
“I have now done it countless times in more than a century of practicing this moment over and over again.”
“So, I won’t die if we fall headfirst on our stupid head?”
“You can’t actually die in this reality unless another living human kills you here.”
“And that’s what we’re gonna do to Yesenia when we get up there?” Rogelio felt a bit panicky over having no control over his own body.
“Not here. Not now. I told you I would give you the reasons for why we have to kill her. But those reasons don’t apply to this moment.”
Steven took control of Rogelio’s arms and legs. He began to shinny up one of the columns that supported the balcony on the second floor. Then like a monkey he swung his legs up over the edge of the balcony railing. It was all solid wood, but Rogelio still felt as if it could fall apart at any moment and they would plummet headfirst to the ground. But he found himself standing on both legs outside the first room on the second floor.
“What if the balcony door is locked?” Rogelio asked.
“It’s not. These balcony doors don’t even have locks.”
He reached over and slowly, silently pulled open the balcony door. Quietly, he entered the room. It was a simple, sparsely furnished room in a Spanish inn. The bed was occupied by two skeletons, a large, blue male one and a smaller pink one that looked like it could be Imelda’s mother.
“Don’t say anything with your mouth. You’ll wake them,” said Steven.
“Are they both asleep?” Rogelio asked nervously in his head only.
Then the male snored loudly enough to remove all doubt. The female moaned at the noise, but merely poked her husband and rolled over.
Steven quietly moved them out of the room and closed the door after them.
“So, I was supposed to expect you to sneak into Momma and Poppa’s room?” said Yesenia/Imelda on the next balcony.
Steven grinned sheepishly. Rogelio noticed that the moonlight made the ghost nightgown she was wearing more visible, but you could still see through it to Yesenia’s beautiful naked body underneath.
“Why don’t you try this room instead?”
The two balcony railings were separated by only about three feet of empty space. Getting up on the railing, it was easy for Steven/Rogelio to step across the gap.
“Gringo, I am surprised that you actually did this. I thought it was just talking.”
“I was talking… to a pretty girl whom I may have fallen in love with at first sight.” Steven was laying it on thick, but Rogelio also knew he was deeply in love with Imelda.
Imelda blushed using Yesenia’s face.
“Come into my room where Momma won’t hear you. If she finds out, she will make Poppa kill you.”
Steven let Imelda take him by the hand and pull him into the bedroom.
“Is what I think is about to happen really going to happen?” Rogelio asked Steven.
“It depends on what you mean by really happen?” he answered by thought alone.
“Have you ever made love to a woman?”
“Only one time in my whole life, but I have relived it more times than I can count on all the fingers in Dallas.”
“And you are going to relive it again now?”
“Yeah… so?”
“In my body? And Imelda in Yesenia’s body?”
“And you are a virgin… huh?”
Then Rogelio saw Imelda pulling them toward the bed. And he began to remember how beautiful Yesenia was in real life. He was about to become a man in the world of the ghosts and skeletons.
*****
“You will come to my quinceañera, Steven?”
“I will. And we will run away together?”
“I will go anywhere with you. I love you, Steven.”
At that moment, a loud banging at the door frightened them both.
“Imelda! LET ME IN! I will kill him!”
“It is my padre! He will kill us both! Get out now!”
Steven scrambled out of the bed and grabbed at his clothing. The ghost materials all slipped through his fingers except for his floppy cowboy hat. He was out over the balcony rail in mere moments. Completely naked… with a hat on his head.
Several splinters pierced his hands, forearms, and thighs as he shinnied down the support column. “You come back here, gringo! You will marry my daughter now, or you will die a horrible death!”
The angry shadow loomed over the street, huge and terrible. It shook a black skeletal fist at Rogelio and Steven as they ran down the street naked, not wearing even ghost clothing. Rogelio’s heart hammered hard enough for two people as they barefooted their way down the dirt street.
Filed under ghost stories, horror writing, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
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
Catch a Falling Star 
Old and Grumpy
Suppose being grumpy was a super power, and we could, as a grumpy old brotherhood of geezers, coots, and conservative uncles, could change things just by complaining about them.
No woman would ever leave a toilet seat down again. The Dunkin’ Donuts on Frankford Road would magically reopen and never run out of donuts again. And liver spots and wrinkles would suddenly be attractive to beautiful young women whether they were linked to fortunes or not.
But what if, in order to make better use of this unexplainable super power, we start telling old coots like the fool in the picture that they have to prove they will use this super power only for good, or we will raise their taxes? Or we would forbid them from ever eating bacon again? Either of those things would definitely motivate them.
Of course, the biggest problem with geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles that no one wants to sit next to at Thanksgiving is that they don’t generally get smarter and nicer with age. It is probably not wise to give them a super power that can alter reality. Yes, they are generally quite literally mean-spirited and unqualifiably dumb. And it isn’t really a matter of whether they could ever actually have a super power like that. The real problem is that they already have it. They proved it in 2016 when they elected a gigantic orange-faced Pillsbury Doughboy with mental flatulence to lead our government. And it wasn’t the dumb part that did it. It was the literally mean part. Trump is a walking, talking old coot-complaint given to us by mean old men to tell us, “We are unhappy geezers, coots, and conservative uncles who would rather blow up the government than lift a single tax dollar (especially from a rich dude) to try and fix it”.
What we truly need to do is harness a bit of that grumpy-old-man complaining power, a truly misunderstood and misused super power, to tackle problems like making public schools better, cleaning the environment, and electing smarter leaders (not the stupid ones who actually represent the majority of us). But of course, we will first have to turn off the spigots in the brewery of prejudice and ignorance that is Fox News, and brand all the greedy and stupid people with a red letter “R” for Trumpian Republican. That way, knowing who to vote for to make things better will become easier to the point that even us geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles can do it right.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, goofy thoughts, humor, oldies, Paffooney, satire