September 12, 2025 · 12:25 am

Slade House (a book by David Mitchell)

As a writer of novels, like all passable to good writers of novels, I read novels. Not just any novels. Novels that are the kind of novels I aspire to write myself.

David Mitchell is one of those novelists who can write the way I want to write. His stories are detailed and yet, compelling enough to follow wherever the story leads you. Characters are vivid and seem to have an actual life beyond the pages of the novel. And there is a chance that you will meet them again in another David Mitchell novel, even if they died in the previous David Mitchell novel you read. He writes across swaths of time and gives the story a sense of history.

Slade House is basically a haunted house story, a horror story about a house that is itself a sort of ghost. It can only be entered by a single small iron door that only appears in an alleyway every nine years. And every time it does appear, in October of 1979, 1988, 1997, 2006… , at least one somebody will go in and never come out again.

The story is side-linked to the masterpiece Mitchell novel, The Bone Clocks. It is also a plot less convoluted and multifaceted than Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas, so much easier to follow

David Mitchell is an author I study to learn about writing and storytelling. I don’t copy him. I do take note of his bag of tricks, his writer’s toolbox, so to speak, and I pick up and play with those same tools and magician’s secrets. I would like to suggest that if you truly wish to be a writer of fiction, you must put David Mitchell’s books on your must-read-before-I-die list. If you can’t put Mitchell on that list, then here are a few others on my list; Michael Crichton, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Louis L’Amour, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, H.P. Lovecraft, Steven King, Mark Twain, and J. K. Rowling. It should be obvious that these names are all on my list for different reasons. And if you don’t read David Mitchell, there are artisan’s techniques there you can get nowhere else. But you are the reader. And if you have chosen to read this far through this essay, then you are at least fool enough to want to know the things I am telling you in this book review.

As a storyteller, David Mitchell is Rumpelstiltskin. He weaves straw into gold. And if you are canny and careful enough of a reader, you can gain some of that value from his work without giving up your firstborn.

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September 11, 2025 · 12:44 am

A Character Reference

Humble Admission

Millis

Millis

He was once an ordinary pet rabbit, transformed through an accident involving a time-traveler’s alien-created mechanical carrot.

He is a character in;

The Bicycle-Wheel Genius

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       Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates (his girlfriend)  (She forced me to write that last thing, Mike.)

Mike is a member of the Murphy clan who resides in Murphy Mansion with many other Murphys.  Blueberry is the girl who chased him until she caught him and turned him into her boyfriend.

Seen in the novels;

The Bicycle Wheel Genius

Magical Miss Morgan

Catch a Falling Star  (only Mike is in that one)  (He forced me to write that, Blue)

The Necromancer’s Apprentice  (Mainly Blueberry in this one.  Mike is only comic relief.)Val in the Yard

Valerie Clarke

Valerie is a young Iowan farmgirl who lost her father far too soon.  She loves skateboards, 80’s music, and boys, especially boys who can sing.

She is a main character in;

Snow Babies

Sing Sad Songs

She is also an important character in;

The Bicycle-Wheel Genius

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Sherry Cobble

Sherry and her twin sister, Shelly, look almost exactly alike.  They are, with both of their parents, practicing nudists.  They love being nude at home on the farm, at the Sunshine Club in Clear Lake, and at school when they can get away with it (which is mostly a matter of girls’ locker rooms.)

Sherry and her twin are  important characters in;

     Superchicken

     Recipes for Gingerbread Children

     The Baby Werewolf

The Boy… Forever

A Field Guide for Fauns

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     Orben Wallace, bicycle engineer

Orben came to Norwall after a tragic fire in his home and laboratory killed his family.  He switched from physics to bicycle engineering and opened a new lab where it is rumored that he also created sentient robots, time travel machines, supercomputers, and had relationships with aliens and time travelers.  Of course the only physical proof of anything are the bicycles he made.

He is a main character in; The Bicycle-Wheel Genius

He is also an important character in; Catch a Falling Star

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Anneliese Stein

Anneliese is a gingerbread cookie brought back to life through the magical baking skills of her human mother, Grandma Gretel Stein.  She was also a human girl in the 1930s and early 1940s who also had, unfortunately, a Jewish father.  Okay, I know… I will explain better later.

She is an important character in;

Recipes for Gingerbread Children

The Necromancer’s Apprentice

This will have to be finished another day.  I have too many more characters to show you, and my Internet is giving out.

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September 10, 2025 · 12:07 am

David Mitchell is Genius!

Yes, David Mitchell is a very smart man… a very smart English man.  (That isn’t to say that his genius is any less genius than an American Genius.  Just that he is a genius who also happens to be English)

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And I, of course, don’t mean this David Mitchell either, though this David Mitchell is also a genius and also from England.  I have to tell you, though I have always loved British humor, this particular tongue of silver fascinates me enough to make me binge on hoards of old episodes of “Would I Lie to You?” from the BBC on YouTube.  He’s a quick-wit, Brit-wit, smooth-talking  bit-wit who can make you laugh even when he’s playing a thick-wit… which he is certainly not. Continue reading →

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September 9, 2025 · 12:28 am

The Sorcerer’s Tower

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In the mysterious continent of Xendrick, the adventuring party came across a very old abandoned tower.  The only way into the tower was a long sloping tunnel that turned out to be trapped and filled with a deadly poison and the numerous corpses of the previous adventuring parties.  Of course, if you are a D & D adventurer, such a tunnel is not going to scare you off.  It is going to irresistibly pull you in.

After nearly dying on three different attempts to get through the tunnel, Gandy Rumspot, the halfling rogue and thief, realized that it was a poison gas in the tunnel.  So he sent Big Cogwheel, the warforged artificial man who didn’t need to actually breathe air, to use his natural immunity to poison to go down and open the tricky invisible door and gain access to the tower.

Voila!  On to further tricks and traps.  At one point, exploding skeleton warriors animated by necromantic trap spells nearly killed Cog the warforged (by rolling a twenty on an attack roll) and required a miraculous magical repair by Gandy to save him.  That left the big metal man with a permanent irrational fear of skeletons.

Along the way, they encountered and had to overcome a bound female demon who had been imprisoned in the tower to keep watch over the property.  She was the slave of the Wizard Crane, builder of the tower long ago, who had then gone abroad and died in his semi-noble quest to slay a devil.  She told the adventurers a great deal about her former master and her imprisonment, monologuing  as villains will before killing and eating the adventurers.  She overdid it, though, accidentally revealing the presence in the room of the devil jar that enslaved her, and even more stupidly, revealing how to activate the jar to physically seal her inside like a genii in a lamp.

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Finally, they found the teleport room in the top of the tower which zapped them to the dungeon under the earth where Crane’s ultimate treasure was kept.  It turned out to be a crystal ball which contained all the knowledge, memories, and experiences of Crane himself.  In fact, Crane’s entire life up to the point where he left on his fatal adventure took the form of Crane’s imprisoned self, longing to have someone to talk to again after hundreds of years of loneliness.  This proved to be a great boon to the magic users in the party, especially the half-elven wizardess Drualia.  So that adventure left the adventuring team with more than a mere heap of experience points.  It also gained them a crystal ball with an imprisoned sorcerer in it to talk too much and complain too much and teach them exotic and dangerous magic spells.

Like any three-session D & D adventure, this one was probably a lot more entertaining to play than it was to retell, but there it is, complete with the secrets that kept my players thinking about them for more than three weeks.

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September 8, 2025 · 12:11 am

Really Odd Things are in the “Wrong File”

On my computer I keep a lot of picture files for inspiration both as an artist and a writer.  One of those files is labeled simply the “Wrong File”.  Everything in that picture file is in there for the wrong reason.  Or does a wrong file need to be filled with the wrong stuff for the right reason?  I don’t know.  There is a lot wrong with this world.  The fact that I am going to post stuff from the “Wrong File” is merely proof of that.

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Liking Grumpy Cat posts on Facebook is an oxymoron of the lowest order.  It is an example of what is wrong in the “Wrong File”.

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Certain puns are just so wrong in a fundamental way.  That’s right.  They are both fun and mental.  So that’s wrong.

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As an educator I am aware that this thing we thought was true is now an untrue fact.  That’s wrong also.  My left brain tells me so.  But my right brain tells me it feels right.

Yes, these things are wrong.  Just wrong.

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Why did I put this in here?  This is not wrong.  This is right.  So I must’ve put it in the wrong file.  So that’s all right, then.

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Putting this in a file my wife could find on my laptop… Yes, that was wrong.

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Saddle shoes have been wrong for many years now.  I still draw them on the feet of kids, especially girls, especially school-age girls, and that is especially especially wrong because it means I am just too old and out of fashion.’

Boy!  Is that wrong!

These things are all older than me, but I remember two of them.  Is that wrong?

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I’m not sure I believe this is wrong.  So is that wrong?  To believe that it is right, I mean?  I’m probably wrong.

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My wife constantly tells me I am wrong… about everything.  And I probably am.  So that is not right.  And if you think that’s my wife in the picture, you would be wrong.  She’s much larger than that in real life.

And many people find surrealism is wrong.  Surreal is when you put wrong things together on purpose to make something that almost seems right.

So that’s what is odd about the “Wrong File”,  It is so wrong that it is right.

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September 7, 2025 · 12:45 am

There Are No Stranger Things Than Kids

I am planning to re-watch all eight hours of Netflix’s Stranger Things.  I can’t help it.  I really seriously love that show.  And the reason is the kids in the series.  Yes, it was set in the 80’s, a decade I long to return to, but I wasn’t a kid myself in the 80’s.  That was my first decade as a teacher.  The thing is… I taught each and every one of the kids in that series.  I admit, they had different names and lived in different bodies, but they were the same faces, the same personalities.

And it is not so much the characters the kids inhabit in the show, though they were obviously cast as themselves.  It is the real-life screwiness that Jimmy Fallon brings out with the silly string that I recognize.

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Finn Wolfhard’s character, Michael, is basically me.  The dreamer determined to make the fantastic become true.  And when they played Dungeons and Dragons in the basement, he was the Dungeon Master.  That was me.  The teller of the stories, the maker of the meaning.  He’s the one who creates the Demogorgon adventure that eerily comes to life.  He is also the one who finds and befriends the mysterious Eleven.  He is the driving force that leads them all to the inevitable conclusion of the adventure.

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And while I never met anyone quite like the mysterious Eleven, Millie Bobby Brown is definitely no stranger to me.  She is bubbly, outgoing, and utterly charming.  She can channel Nikki Minaj.  I must’ve taught at least five different versions of Millie in three different schools when I was a teacher.

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She makes the weird and otherworldly character of Eleven become believable through the sheer force of a natural talent for empathy and understanding.  She is a highly intelligent girl with a knack for making things work.

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I have also taught about four different incarnations of the Dustin character’s actor, Gaten Matarazzo.  The goofy but courageous kid with a broad sense of humor and a focus on food is a very common type of junior high kid.  And while he isn’t usually a leader in the classroom, he’s the one you turn to when you need help getting the group to choose the right path.

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I swear to you, I know all these kids, even though I have never met them.  You see, when you are a teacher for long enough, everyone in the world comes in through your door.  You have to get to know them and learn to at least like them if not love them.  You do the thing for long enough, and you learn that there are a limited number of different faces and personalities that God distributes over time and circumstance to many different people.  It is possible to get to know nearly all of them.  And there are no Stranger Things than kids.

 

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September 6, 2025 · 12:02 am

“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.

This being an old post reposted, I now have this book available on Amazon.

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September 5, 2025 · 12:12 am

Translating Texican

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I came to Texas from Iowa.  I was well-versed in how to speak Iowegian.  (I was, don’t-ya-know, and spoke it fluently, you-betcha.)

Then I arrived, fresh-faced and ready to change the world as a twenty-five-year-old teacher, and began working in a mostly Hispanic middle school in deep South Texas.  Dang!  Whut language do they speak?  (Yes, I know… Spanish.  But my students straight from Mexico couldn’t understand the local lingo either. South Texas Spanish and Castilian Spanish from Mexico are not the same language.)  I couldn’t talk to the white kids either.   It is possible to communicate with Texicans, but it took me years to learn the language.  It takes more than mere usage of “ya’ll” and “howdy”.

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You can probably see what I mean when you look at these fake quotes based on the things real Texicans actually once said to me.  Of course, I can be accused of being a racist by interpreting things this way.  Texicans are concerned that you understand that they are not racists.  They merely rebel against being “politically correct”.  Apparently the political-correctness police give them all sorts of unfair harassment about speaking their minds the way they always have.  I should note, however, that I had to use a quote from Bubba rather than Dave Winchuk.  Dave is so anti-political-correctness concerned that he regularly said to me things with so much racial heat in them that they would even melt the faces off white people.  Face-melting is bad.  If you don’t believe me, re-watch the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

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And to speak Texican, you must actually learn a thing or two about guns.  Yes, Texas is an open-carry State.  Apparently, Second Amendment rights are the most important rights in the Constitution.  My two sons grew up in Texas; the oldest is a Marine, and the younger is in the Air Force.  Guns are important to them.  I have those same arguments with former students, too.  I have learned to say the right things so that they will tolerate my unholy pacifist ideas about how the world might be safer if everybody didn’t have five guns in the waistbands of their underpants.  So gun-stuff ends up as a part of the Texican language I have learned to speak.

The point of it all is, language is a fascinating thing that grows and changes and warps and regresses.  I love it.  I try to master it.  And the mistakes I make usually sound purty funny.

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September 4, 2025 · 12:01 am

Planting Some Onions

I told you recently that I believe that opinions are like onions.  Consuming them is good for you.  It cleans out the system.  It turns little imperfections and poisons into gas and leads you to expel them.  Yes, I mean opinions from my stupid old head come out of my mouth in the same way that digested onions form into gas and come out the other end.  And keeping them inside (and safe from being argued or made fun of) can poison you and make you insane.  So, I need to plant some onions… err, I mean opinions… and you should feel free to sample the stuff in this onion garden and fart back in my general direction if you feel the need.

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It would be good if you don’t throw bricks.

  • Donald Trump is going to be our President until he dies.  I am not saying I want that to happen.  I didn’t want Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush to be President for life either.  But bad things happen with the inevitability of thunderstorms and flu season.  Fox News has been spreading poisonous onion gas for thirty years as a propaganda service to the corporate masters, and they will continue to provide us only with business-and-crime-friendly leaders who will wring every last penny’s worth of value out of our increasingly valueless souls.
  • Human civilization is doomed.  We have failed to deal with human-induced climate change for too long, and now the air is turning into methane and carbon dioxide (that’s right, fart gas!), and only the people wealthy enough to create totally sealed environments will survive.  We have the innate capacity to solve problems and overcome disaster, but we won’t because President Trump doesn’t want it to be that way.  And he says that climate change is a hoax anyway.  I think he has held onion gas inside long enough to pickle all his brain cells.
  • The Roswell incident was real, and there are aliens living on planet Earth.  They will not save us from ourselves, however.  President Trump won’t allow that.  After all, they are immigrants.

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  • Doctor Who is the best thing that the British ever gave us.  It combines science fiction, fantasy, a goofy sense of humor, and serious charm into a show that can make us think about things in a new way and make us see things from a different point of view.  Donald Trump won’t allow him to save us either, even though Great Britain is our very tremendous ally.   Foreigners keep us from winning economically.
  • Eating onions is better for you than eating cheese.  Onions get the gas out.  Cheese makes you constipated.  The French call cheese “fromage”, but that doesn’t make it any better.  Cheese by any other name still can stink like Limburger.
    “Once it reaches three months, the cheese produces its notorious smell because of the bacterium used to ferment Limburger cheese and many other smear-ripened cheeses. This is Brevibacterium linens, the same one found on human skin that is partially responsible for body odor, particularly foot odor.”

    Limburger – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • So I have now planted some real stinkers in the onion garden.  In a just and reasonable world, the debate would now begin.  Refute, if you will, dear reader, for that is the very reason that opinions exist, to start a debate.  You cannot clear the air of fart gas without at least waving your hand at it.

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September 3, 2025 · 12:47 am

Making Pictures

I love to make the pictures I make,

To draw, paint, and edit, I love to create.

Faces and places and photos I take…

And viewers give praises or even berate.

AI helps me now that my hands ache and shake,

But the ideas come from my head,

With thoughts robots can’t make.

I will keep making pictures until I am dead.

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