Hidden Kingdom… (Chapter 2 through page 19)

If you would like to see the complete Chapter One, you can find it at this link; https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2018/11/24/hidden-kingdom-chapter-1-complete/

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Filed under comic strips, fairies, Hidden Kingdom, humor, Paffooney

Fridays Should Be Funny?

This is a hard video to watch if you have experience with this topic, either your own personal struggles or the struggles of someone you care deeply about. But it speaks to me with electric power that both burns and galvanizes my personal resolve. It is, perhaps, the most beautifully and carefully done thing I have ever found on this particular subject matter.

I have myself battled suicidal thoughts in my lifetime. And even though I have won the battle in the past, I realize that the war is never over, and you fight it every day no matter how long you live.

But coping with suicidal ideation, and knowing how to find the help you need, and eventually being that help for others, is something worth knowing about. And it is critical to get it right when communicating that to others. Because some very good books and movies have touched this landmine of a topic and caused readers, especially teen readers, to actually go through with the act.

So, if I finish writing my book about depression and suicide, and then it causes the very thing I have been fighting, then I have lost the war. That must not happen.

Suicidal thoughts are one of the worst after-effects of surviving a traumatic event. And if you read the actual words in my posts instead of just looking at the pictures, you may remember that I was once a victim of a traumatic event. He not only sexually tortured me, he convinced me that I was going to die if I screamed for help. It led to a long period of traumatic amnesia, hating my naked, helpless self, and self-harm every time I had sexual urges. I was lucky. The Methodist Minister, father of my best friend at the time, taught me the real facts of life and saved me from myself. I was saved again when I reached out in a secret phone call to a friend and got him to admit to me that I was not worthless and beyond redemption… even though I never revealed to him what happened to me, or why he needed to tell me not to kill myself. And it probably even helped that the high school guidance counselor spent an awkward afternoon with me trying to understand how I could be so terrified of something I didn’t even remember and couldn’t tell him about.

My experiences from that traumatic event and tragic time in my life led me to become a school teacher before I tried to become a writer. It led me to want to help others, especially those like me who have been forced to spend time in the existential darkness.

And along the way I did help some kids overcome things that were similar to my own dark woes. But, then too, there were ones I tried to help that didn’t make it.

Ruben joined a gang in San Antonio and died in the crash of a stolen pickup truck.

J.J. got drunk and drove his truck in front of a train at a local railroad crossing.

And I wouldn’t have survived either of those things without help. Sometimes life is more fragile than we realize… or know how to cope with.

But I have also spent hours upon hours sitting with kids in emergency rooms for suicidal ideation on three different occasions. And I have visited kids in two different behavioral hospitals more times than I can keep track of. And the number of times I have actually helped someone dear to me survive a suicidal episode is a number I have no way of accurately counting up. They don’t always tell you what you have done for them after the fact. But, then again, sometimes they do.

And now my work in progress is a book about having the blues so bad… Well, the scene I wrote last night made me weep for twenty minutes. About the same amount of time I cried over this essay. If you read the whole thing, congratulations. You are very brave and a decent human being, and I am sorry for whatever bad feelings I may have caused with my words.

In case you need it, no matter for who…

  • Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-8255

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Filed under autobiography, battling depression, Depression, novel writing

Me, Myself, and Eye…

I am aware that nobody who looks at my blog ever clicks on my videos. This one, however, would be very useful if you are really going to read and engage with this essay. This self-reflection came into being as a response to watching this video. The video talks about how most people can’t stand to actually sit alone in a room with only themselves. And it has an impact. I have claimed in the past to being a devotee of the Theodore Roethke maxim, “Being, not doing, is my first love.”  But how does one go about becoming truly self-aware? How does one enumerate the concept of “being”? I believe I can do it, but it requires a bit of self-examination. How do I do it?  

Let me count the ways…

I put myself down on paper, through drawing or writing in English and look at the way it portrays me.

I find myself in both the written characters I create and the cartoon characters I draw. In Hidden Kingdom, my graphic novel, the Mouse and young Prinz Flute are both me. I can see myself both as the reluctant romantic hero and the snarky child-thing with a dangerous little bit of wisdom.

I learn to know more about my secret heart and what I truly think about the world I live in and react to by writing about what I think and the things that happen to me, both for good and ill. This blog is all about learning about myself, just as your blog is a mirror of who you really are. Consequently, I have no secrets left.

I not only reveal myself in this blog, but I also attempt to sing about myself in much the same way that Walt Whitman did in his poetry.

I live most of my life in my own imagination. It is a silly Willy Wonka world of images, songs, music, and dreams. It can all blow away in a moment when the sun comes out. It can also keep me in a light-obscuring cloud wrapped and safe, well away from the things I fear and the things that worry me. I came to realize I was repressing the memory of being sexually assaulted when I was ten through a dream when I was nineteen, re-living the event in a dream from which I awoke with a blinding flash of realization. I came to grips with the horror that mangled my childhood and young adulthood first by facing the fact that the nightmare had been real, and then by finding ways to overcome it. I became a teacher of young people in large part as a way to protect them and prevent such a thing from ever happening again to someone else.

I use my fictional stories about the girl Valerie Clarke to examine my relationships with my own daughter and a couple of old girlfriends from my youth.

I often worry that I don’t see real people as being real people. I tend to think of them from the first meeting onward as potential book characters, walking collections of details and quirks, conflicts and motivations. But I recognize too that that way of seeing with the author’s eye is not incorrect. People really are those things. There are rules and generalizations that everyone falls under at some point. It is not so much that I see real people as book characters as it is that I realize that book characters are as real as any other purportedly “real” people.

I am myself both the subject of my cartooning and fictionarooning, and the cartoon character of myself as well.

Mickey is not a real person. He is a cartoonist persona, a mask, a fake identity, and the lie I tell myself about who I actually am.

In this essay, I have attempted to explain to you who I think I am spending time with when I am alone in a room with myself. He is not such a terrible person to spend time with, this Mickey. Or else he really is truly awful, and I am lying about me and who I think I am when I am alone with me and have no other options. But probably not. I have been getting to know me for about 562 years, only exaggerating by 500, and I am not finished yet.

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Filed under autobiography, being alone, irony, Mickey, Paffooney

Frozen in Place

Everything in the Dallas-Fort-Worth area is shut down today by ice and the threat of ice. Texans don’t like to drive on ice. You can’t drive friendly… and fast… on ice. And Texans don’t like to be cold. 100 straight days of 100-plus heat is okay for Texans. Three days of freezing weather is the end of the world.

A year ago the world was frozen like this in DFW. The electric grid failed and people froze to death. Emperor Greg Abbott blamed the windmills because they froze and stopped turning. But in Iowa they go through the same thing every year and the windmills are properly winterized. Only the really stupid people and the spectacularly unlucky people freeze to death in Iowa. Mostly when they are stuck on the highway. Some froze to death in their bedrooms in Texas. But in Texas the real problem was the natural gas lines freezing and breaking down. Those can be properly winterized too. But Emperor Abbott doesn’t know that… or doesn’t want to know that. He still hasn’t winterized anything… or forced corporations to spend money to do so.

My wife’s religion actually makes her hope that Armageddon will come soon. They think the end of the world is the only way to get to paradise. Now that Russia is invading the Ukraine, Armageddon may be about to happen. All that Gog and Magog crap has been going on throughout the twentieth century. So far we’ve managed to avoid it actually happening, by war, by nuclear war, by nuclear winter. We have been feeling that the world is in danger of ending since long before I was born in the middle of the 20th century. The Bible says the 1st Century Christians would still be alive when the Day of Judgement would come.

They were wrong about that. Maybe they are still wrong now.

If the world is not going to end in fire and ice in the next week or two, we have to realize that things need to change. We can’t be frozen in place. In politics it is basically a matter of choosing to be progressive and not be stuck in the ice of being conservative. We need to change, not stay the same. We need to determine that world maps change by diplomacy and compromise, not by combat and killing civilians. And we need to convince Russia of that. We also need to change the way we treat the environment and the economy. We need to invest in technology and changes to the consumption of practically every product. Production needs to occur without polluting. We need to spend more, a lot more, on clean energy like solar power, wind power, thermal energy from the under-earth, and we need to stop spending so much of our capital on tax breaks for billionaires and corporations. And we need to convince millionaires, billionaires, and corporate executives of that.

We could even change schools to give Louisa her wish and create naturist classrooms in school, letting kids learn in natural environments, and having the school uniform be nakedness. And we would have to convince parents and teachers of that… Of course, that last one is a joke, and even Louisa might not really want that. Especially since it is really, really cold today.

But if you were serious about changing education to provide nude classrooms or even nude schools, you would have to change it slowly. You would start small. Kindergarten and first grade would go first, and only with kids who would actually choose to be nude in school (probably a lot more of them than parents think would choose that.) Then you would move them up a grade every year until you reached high school. Of course, you would have to be flexible. Some students would not thrive and have to be moved to textile classrooms. And nude classrooms would have to be expandable as textile students begin to see the changes in their nude friends and want to be transferred into the experiment.

Of course, I know that joke idea is still just a joke and always will be. But the point is, the Diplomacy/War question and the Save the Planet/Profits over People question would have to be answered the same way. The younger ones make the actual changes and the gas-and-oil, pro-war dinosaurs would be responsible for going extinct themselves or taking everybody else with them.

So, I am basically confined to my bedroom today with considerable arthritis pain and trapped in the middle of a frozen world. And as I have nothing better to do than solve all the world’s problems today, even Louisa’s… I am still faced with the fact that solving these problems involves changing people’s minds. Especially conservative minds who will likely have a gun and want to kill me if I try to change their minds. So, there it is, a simply-stated theme… and now I need to look at bullet-proof vests on Amazon.

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Filed under angry rant, feeling sorry for myself, humor, photo paffoonies

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

It is, of course, one of the most powerful, masterful, and best-known pieces of music ever written.

Mozart completed the “little serenade” in Vienna in 1787, but it wasn’t published until 1827, long after Mozart’s untimely death.

The Serenade is incorrectly translated into English as “A Little Night Music”. But this is and always has been the way I prefer to think of it. A creation of Mozart written shortly before he hopped aboard the ferryman’s boat and rode off into the eternal night. It is the artifact that proves the art of the master who even has the word “art” as a part of his name. A little music to play on after the master is gone to prove his universal connection to the great silent symphony that is everything in the universe singing silently together.

It is basically what I myself am laboring now to do. I have been dancing along the edge of the abyss of poverty, suffering, and death since I left my teaching job in 2014. I will soon be taking my own trip into night aboard the ferryman’s dreaded boat. And I feel the need to put my own art out there in novel and cartoon form before that happens.

I am not saying that I am a master on the level of a Mozart. My name is not Mickart. But I do have a “key’ in the name Mickey. And it will hopefully unlock something worthwhile for my family and all those I loved and leave behind me. And hopefully, it will provide a little night music to help soothe the next in line behind me at the ferryman’s dock.

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Filed under artwork, cartoons, classical music, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, Hidden Kingdom, magic, metaphor, music, Paffooney

The Day After Two’sday

Can Bugs Bunny sue me over this picture? Does it represent a copyright violation?

First of all, the Bugs-Bunny look-alike above is clearly labeled “Rugs Rabbity.” You can make satirical references to copyrighted characters if it is clearly satirical. The Rabbity’s speech balloon is clearly not saying, “What’s up, Doc?” Instead he’s using a beer-commercial reference addressed to a wooden structure intended for tying up your boat at the shore. Sure, it’s clearly meaningless without the context of the Warner Brothers’ favorite attack rabbit. (He is well-known for getting black ducks blasted by Elmers during Wabbit Season.) But it is referential using clearly altered forms of the copyrighted character. And clearly, no cartoon rabbit has ever won a lawsuit in human court.

Yes, I know Superman won his lawsuit against Captain Marvel (err… make that Shazzam because of Marvel’s Captain Marvel.) But that was actually DC Comics ruthlessly taking down the competition, and the result was that DC ended up owning the character they proved was a rip-off copy.

But what’s the actual topic of this post anyway?

In other words, “What’s up, Doc?”

Um, as a kid I used to think updock was a weed like burdock. And I assumed that Rugs Rabbity said that all the time because he liked to smoke it. Or brew it so he could drink it and dip his carrots in it.

See, I got you to grimace at that joke without being sued yet again.

But, really, this post is about yesterday. 22/02/2022!

Yes, yesterday was a screwy -number day. You can write the number out forwards or backwards, depending on how you initially write it down, and have it be exactly the same. In other words, not numbers, a palindrome. In other numbers, 2/22/22. The last time a number like that happened was in the 17th Century. (I haven’t double-checked that fact myself, but Stephen Colbert said it was so.)

And Minnie Mouse can’t sue me either, since we paid for our Disneyland tickets and she posed for the photo with my daughter as part of what we paid for. Scraggles the Cat surely won’t sue me because I created him with my own colored pencils, and cartoon cats can’t sue in human courts either.

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Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney

Little Metal Men I Have Made

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Today’s post is basically a picture post.  Every metal (or Plasticine) figure displayed in this post was painted by me with Testor’s enamel.  Most of the figures were painted back in the 1980’s.  Most of them were sculpted by Citadel Miniatures Co.  The Indian boy I repainted as a young storm giant was made of an inferior quality Plasticine that melted a bit with the paint’s more caustic ingredients.  That’s why looking at him closely makes him appear like a burn victim.

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Not all of the figures are from Dungeons and Dragons games.  These are figures I used in the Traveller RPG.    I also owned the Indiana Jones role-playing game, but the figure was used as a Traveller hero.

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These figures were used to play Call of Cthulu as well as Traveller.  Cerebus the Aardvark made appearances in both the Dungeons and Dragons game and Traveller, which was fairly true to the character as he appeared in Dave Sim’s underground comic.

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I am proud that my arthritic hands once allowed me to paint the tiny details on these miniature sculptures.  But the red dragon I wanted to display in this post, that I have pictured before in this blog, is missing for the moment.  I spent most of the morning trying to find him.  Oh, well…  I still got to show off my mini-painting skills.

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Filed under artwork, Dungeons and Dragons, heroes, humor, photo paffoonies

He Rose on a Golden Wing… Canto 4

Chopin – Etude Op. 10 No. 3 (Tristesse)

Since shortly after her twelfth birthday Valerie had lived with her mother in the house on the northeastern corner of Main Street and Whitten Avenue.  It was a house they moved into after Daddy Kyle lost the family farm to the bank and he…  well… he stopped sitting at the dinner table in the evenings.  In fact, he never sat at that particular dinner table in that particular house.  Ever.

“Valerie, help me set the table,” her mother said to her.

“Maybe you could ask Tim to do it.  He’s growing up too, you know.”

“He’s a guest in our house this evening.”

“I’d be happy to help,” said Aunt Jen.

“We welcome the company, but you’re a guest too this evening.  Valerie used to love doing this.  Remember when she was ten and would sing Disney songs as she placed the spoons, knives, and forks?”

“I’ll set the table, Mom, but I don’t sing anymore.”

“That’s a real shame.  You have a beautiful singing voice, girl,” said Aunt Jen.

“Valerie doesn’t do a lot of the things she used to do, Jen.  Did you know she is giving up cheerleading in her senior year?”

“What?  Why, Val?  You have always been the best one out there.  I thought you were the head cheerleader this year.”

“No.  Charlotte Robbins is head cheerleader.  But I didn’t want the job anymore anyway.  I don’t have the pep in my step anymore to do that whole bouncy, smiley thing.”

Valerie rounded the table plopping down five forks next to the five plates.  Then she picked up five spoons and rounded the table again, listlessly plopping down one for Uncle Rance, one for Terrible Tim, one for Aunt Jen, one for Mom, and then one for herself.  Aunt Jen was Daddy Kyle’s sister, and her family came to visit every Tuesday like clockwork, because Aunt Jen was relentlessly trying to help her niece and sister-in-law every single week since… since Daddy Kyle stopped sitting at the dinner table.  Five butter knives finished the ritual, and Valerie plopped down in her place.

Aunt Jen raised an eyebrow as she surveyed Valerie up and down.  “I really thought you loved cheerleading.  Is there something more wrong than usual that you need to tell us about?”

“No, I promise, there is not.  I’m sorry if I’m a bit out of sorts.”

“Valerie says the cheerleading squad has gotten too shallow and petty for her.  She seems to have some sort of grudge against about three of the girls.”

“Oh?  Did they do something mean to you, hon?”

“No, Aunt Jen.  It’s just that Dottie, Charlotte, and Lupe have all been making fun of the fact that I’ve gone most of the way through high school without a boyfriend.  They’ve all got one.”

“All three of those girls?”

“All seven of them besides me.  Even Patty the mascot has a boyfriend now.”

“But that is no reason to give up on something you love to do.”

“That’s just it… I don’t love to do it.  Not since the end of eighth grade.”

At that moment Uncle Rance and Tim the Termite both walked into the dining room.

“What don’t you love anymore?” Uncle Rance asked.

“Boys,” Tim the Twit had to answer for her.  He was the closest thing in the world she had to an actual brother, and he fulfilled that role tremendously terribly.

“Tim, dear, remember our discussion about respecting members of your own family,” Aunt Jen warned.

“But it’s not a secret,” Tim explained.  “You remember that French boy that came to live with the Martins, don’t you?”

“Francois?  The one who wore the clown paint and sang so beautifully in the Martins’ family bar and grille?”

“Yes,” Valerie answered with an almost-shaky voice.  “I was in love with him.  And suddenly he was dead and gone.”  She looked down at the tablecloth and couldn’t look up again.

The adults were silent, looking… well, stunned.

“Oh, I do remember.  That was so sad,” Aunt Jen said.

“But in school you are always hanging around with Ricky Porter and Billy Martin.  And you and Danny Murphy were inseparable before he graduated and found that Carla Bates.”  Uncle Rance was an English teacher at the high school, and he had seen practically everything she had ever done at Belle City High.

“Yeah, well, that’s because they were all Norwall Pirates and my good friends.  Not my boyfriends.”

“We’re sorry for your loss, Val,” Tim said, in a voice that was at the very least an excellent imitation of sincerity.  “I know how much you loved him and how long you were hurting after he was gone.”

Valerie almost said something mean to him.  But she looked at his innocent little devil-face and knew he wasn’t about to say something to hurt her in this moment.  She did love him… in a way… like the way you love a brother whom you want to bop on the head with your closed fist… and maybe even bop him really, really hard.  But he was undergoing changes in his life too, wasn’t he?”

“Did Tim tell you about his big date this weekend?” Val blurted out.  Even she wasn’t expecting the secret to spill like that.

“Oh?  He hasn’t told us anything about it yet,” Aunt Jen said, looking at Tim.

“But I’ll bet it’s Miss Murphy,” said his father.

Tim blushed deeply.  “Yes, it’s Dilsey.”

“What are you planning to do?” Aunt Jen asked.

“The Robin Williams movie is playing in Belle City at the theater.”

“Oh, that should be good.” Uncle Rance gave Tim a knowing wink.

Tim looked at Val and gave her a pained smile.  “How did you find out before I told anybody?”

“Dilsey asked me to babysit for her on Saturday, and I made her explain why.  Of course, you and her used to have some pretty epic arguments about who was more accurately described as a pig and who was a baboon.  So, she asked me how terrible I thought you would be to her.”

“Valerie!” Her Mom interjected reproachfully.

“So, did you say nice things about me?  Or did you tell her the truth?” Tim said with a wicked grin.

“Tim!”  Aunt Jen said with even more vehemence than Mom had used on her.

“I told her that even though you are kinda stinky on the outside, deep inside you’re basically a pretty good guy… well, really deep inside.”

Tim laughed.  Everybody else at least smirked, even disapproving parents.

“You know, Tim, we approve of Dilsey Murphy even more than we do of her brother Mike, your best friend,” said Uncle Rance.

“She’s very sweet and well-mannered young lady,” added Aunt Jen.  “Not that we don’t find Mike to be charming too… at least sometimes.” Aunt Jen was laughing by that time.

“And, Timothy Allen Kellogg, you better not do anything to upset her in any way,” Valerie warned.  “If you do, I will make sure you are wearing your underwear as a hat with your butt still inside it.”

“When you finish med-school, Cuz, you will learn that you can’t actually do that in the real world.”  Tim was entirely his usual self again.

“Don’t you try to tell me what I can’t do if I really put my mind to it!  One day, no single part of your anatomy will be safe from my surgical skills.  I’ll give up my dreams of studying architecture and study medicine just to prove it to you.” After that, the adults fell into their usual conversations.  Normally Valerie and Tim would use the time to talk about TV shows and comic books, and what monsters the Norwall Pirates were currently chasing.  But it had been a while since Val had last felt like actually talking about stuff.  So, instead, the two of them just looked at each other in uncomfortably awkward silence.

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Filed under humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Star Wars Aliens, Mickified

I spent a good deal of my time as a game master for the Star Wars role-playing game in creating alien characters that fit the movies, the books I read in the Star Wars series, and the game materials.  In this post, I will give you a mini-gallery of the aliens I drew for the game.

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Chee Mobok was a space trader who had a problem with his own ego.  He believed that he was a genius at language and could speak any language he had heard a handful of words from.

The Galactic Common speakers were always laughing at the things he said.

Huttese speakers like Jabba the Hutt were always trying to kill him for saying precisely the wrong thing.

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Hethiss was the Jedi Master when my son’s Jedi character was still a padawan learner.

He was wise, but unable to keep his student from doing things in violent ways when a diplomatic solution was called for.

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Merv was a potential terrorist and a suspect in a series of murders on a water planet.  He was, however, the good badguy character.  You know, the villain who has a heart of gold and whose actions redeem him in the end…  As opposed to a bad goodguy who seems to be a hero and ends up betraying everyone.

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Fisonna was a street kid from the same planet and same race as Hethiss the Jedi master.  He had the potential to become a padawan learner.  But he also used his Force skills to pull pranks on serious adults.

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Odo-Ki was a Gotal with the ultra-sensitive cones on his head.  He had a limited ability to see behind walls and predict the near future.

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Nadin Paal was an actual pirate and terrorist with no redeeming qualities at all.  The best thing about him was, that when the time came, he blew up really nicely.  A colorful fireball.

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Kehlor was a Herglic, one of the whale people who required specially built extra-large space ships and accommodations.   He was also a gifted pilot.  You can see that he wears the uniform of the Trade Authority.

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And finally, Klis Joo was a Duro and a Jedi, a gray alien with considerable Force powers.

There were many more drawings like this as well.  But these are some of the best ones.

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Filed under aliens, Dungeons and Dragons, humor, Paffooney

Pursuing Readers

My current free-book promotion is doing better than any I have done before. And not only have I given away more free copies than ever before, it has already yielded one five-star review.

But you have to pour a little cold water on your head whenever you get too happy about being an author who has readers. It ain’t all bluebirds and sunshiny days.

The Pubby review exchange thingy is continuing to operate worse and worse. I am not subjecting the new book to any of that pain and squirrel poop. You break your head to read a book in only four days and write a review to earn the points you need to get your own books reviewed. And a lot of books on Pubby seeking review are written by… um, not really genius-level writers. They don’t know how to craft a scene with a beginning, middle, and end that fulfills an actual story-crafting purpose. You know, advancing the plot, building a character with depth and complexity, establishing a setting, or advancing a theme. Instead, they flood the page with adjectives and adverbs, excessive but irrelevant details, going around the scene telling you what eye color each character has, repeated cliches, and other dumb stuff. But it makes you feel mean and petty to point out in your review what specific dumb stuff made you give their work of not-really-genius only a three-star review.

And when you submit your own precious book potentially full of irritating dumb stuff, they don’t bother to actually read it before reviewing it. They write their review based on what other reviewers have said about it. And sometimes they give you a bad review because somebody else gave you a bad review with a dire dyspeptic rant about all your irritating dumb stuff. And they have no right to somebody else’s dire dyspeptic opinion if they didn’t read those things in your book for themselves to be certain the other viewer’s opinion is not based on something their dire and dyspeptic imagination saw in your story that wasn’t really there. And how do I know they didn’t read the book? Well, Pubby allows you with extra points charged to request a verified-purchase review. So, if their review isn’t labeled a verified purchase, they did not even have a copy of the book to write a review from. Pubby simply refunds the extra points you spent when the verified purchase label is not present.

Honestly, the only thing you know about the people who read your books are what comes through feedback. And you get remarkably little of that. The most important part of that is when somebody you know in real life reads your book, liked it, and tells you so. Sometimes readers will connect with your book in a way that makes them want to write a detailed review and implore others to read and like your book too. I have had a handful of those along the way, whether from aspiring fellow authors who know what the things are that you have actually done well, Twitter nudists who are literate and hungry for stories that use the word “naked” a lot without being an erotic or a pornographic writer, or fellow teachers who appreciate the many ironic, humorous, and empathetic details you have applied from your own teaching career.

I will continue to write and write and write some more. That means life to me. And I will continue to do some of the things authors do to pursue readers, because feedback grows that life. But I am old and in poor health and will not be doing this forever. If writers ever become immortal, it is not because they ever found the philosopher’s stone. At some point even Shakespeare, Dickens, and Poe had to stop writing.

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Filed under humor, novel writing, Paffooney, writing, writing humor, writing teacher