April 9, 2020 · 5:22 pm

Snarks and Snags

I am from Texas, but this is not me.

I am really not fond of people telling me how to live my life and what I should be doing differently. Especially when the thrower of verbal stones lives in houses made of metaphorical glass.

This particular angry-old-coot rant was inspired by the bitter old octogenarian in the park sitting on a park bench trying to catch coronavirus. She watched me as I walked my female dog. Then, when Jade squatted to pee and expel a couple of gallons of canine message-juice for the benefit of male dogs sniffing grass everywhere, the angry old crone points at the wet spot and hollers, “Pick it up!”

I shrugged and showed her my handful of poo-plucking plastic. “I didn’t bring a sponge!” I quipped back at her.

“Pick it up!” she screeched.

“It’s PEE!” I coot-howled without profanity.

The dippy old cat lady didn’t understand the difference between how male dogs pee (hind leg pointed skyward) and how female dogs do it (back legs carefully folded out of the way like a dainty lady and back end pressed to the ground}. Either that, or she was just so far gone in her senile viciousness that she really desired me to scrape up all the urine-soaked mud from under the grass.

I am aware that tempers are sparked to life by the flint and steel of crisis management, and these are dark times under the threat of death-viruses in Texas public parks.

And somebody is out there telling us what to do (I won’t mentioned the names of any current Presidents of the United States going to war in orange warpaint to make tons of money off of Hydroxychloroquine made by a company partially owned by an orange-faced moron criminal) in ways that may get us killed by the pandemic just so he can restart the economy early enough to get re-elected and stay out of prison.

Okay… enough angry ranting by dog-walking crazy old coots today. i managed not to get in any fist-fights with cranky old cat ladies today, a feat I should be proud of because she would’ve beaten me to death with her multi-footed cane. And I didn’t mention the moron criminal’s actual name today, so the NSA should leave me unharmed too.

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April 8, 2020 · 4:51 pm

What Makes the Story Worth Writing?

On the face of it, a lot of what I am writing stories about is nonsense. Snow Babies is about a town coming together to survive a blizzard populated by naked children made of ice who select people to freeze to death and possibly become snow babies themselves in the afterlife. Fools and their Toys is a story told by a ventriloquist’s dummy in the form of a zebra sock puppet. Clowns from the world of dreams (specifically H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands) come to a small Iowa town to teach children how to share their dreams and face death and grieving in the novel Sing Sad Songs. You get the idea. I am a surrealist story-teller who uses the melting-clocks method of presenting my ideas about love and life and laughter.

And I have this weird thing about nakedness too. I mean, some of my characters are practicing, unabashed nudists. While others, though not comfortable with social nudity, find themselves facing significant life events naked and completely vulnerable. Of course, some of this stems from myself being the victim of a sexual assault at the age of ten. Themes about overcoming fears about sex and being taken advantage of are prominent in my fiction. Much in the same way that Roald Dahl often wrote about defying the authority of those in charge who mishandle their authority. or Charles Dickens often wrote about the soul-crushing nature of child poverty and the effects it has on the development of people and their character. These writers, like me, share obsessions based on their own childhood experiences. And they do it for the same reasons I do it.

But the kind of story a piece of fiction is, isn’t itself what makes the story valuable to both reader and writer. It isn’t the weirdness or the colorful insanity of a piece of surrealist literature that is the worthwhile point of it all. It isn’t even the teachable moments bound up in every theme or literary device that gives the story its meaning. No, it is the act of creating the story that takes the very real events in life and weaves them into a vehicle of understanding, peace of mind, and epiphany about everything that makes it valuable to the life of the writer. And, depending on how it is received by the reader, it can offer the very same things to many of them.

From my mind to your mind… my words to your heart… therein lies the real value of a story.

I am saying stories have value beyond merely boring children to sleep at night.

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April 7, 2020 · 4:09 pm

AeroQuest 3… Canto 85

Canto 85 – Digging In

Outpost was abuzz with activity.  The airless world had only limited defense from attack.  The primary protection had always been the secret of its location.  As an airless world, the surface could easily be lasered or bombarded with no atmosphere to interfere with the destructive force.  Tron had ordered the mirror fields raised, hoping that some laser fire could be reflected back into the surrounding darkness.  He knew, however, that the only hope he had was in his fleet.  If they could somehow destroy enough of Admiral Tang’s fleet to make him feel the losses were no longer worthwhile, then maybe the groundside installations could survive intact.

There were still very talented corsairs able to fly fighting ships.  Elvis the Cruel and Apache Scout were both peerless star warriors.  But Tron had to believe that Admiral Tang had a few potent killers left to his name too.  There was every chance that the situation was hopeless and would end in massacre.

Still, there were a few unknowns on Tron Blastarr’s side.  The crazy alien star ship known as the Megadeath was the most agile killing machine that Tron had ever seen.  The goofball rock-and-roll crew that flew it for Trav Dalgoda was now very adept at handling the alien thing, and Tron had kept them to help in his mad last stand.  They were not smart enough to be scared of the upcoming battle. 

He was able to send his son onward to Ged Aero on the unknown planet Gaijin, where little Artran would be safe and well-cared-for long after Tron and Maggie’s bones littered the airless sands of Outpost.     He had put Artran on the scout ship himself with the somewhat strange courier that had come with the ship from Don’t Go Here.  This Bill the Postman really worried Tron.  The man was not entirely right in the head somehow.

“Boss,” said Hassan the Elf, breaking Tron’s train of thought, “I have made something that I think might be of help.”

Tron looked at the child-like Peri and the invention he was now holding up.  “A suit of armor?”

“Yes, boss.  A special kind of suit of armor.  It is made up of nanites.”

“What?  Nanites?”

“Yes, microscopic robots that share a command pulse and can reform themselves into any sort of armor that might be needed.”

Tron looked quizzically at the bluish suit of nanite armor.  “How do you make it work?” 

“Well… for instance, if you want it to form an anti-grav pack on the back, you just say FLIGHT-PACK.”  The suit rearranged itself at Hassan’s command, and an anti-gravity flight-pack instantly took shape on the back side of the armor’s breastplate.

“Does it have weapons?”

“FUSION-GUN!” said the elf with a grin.  A man-portable fusion generator and its discharge-barrel formed on the pauldron.

“That’s really good, Elf.  That will help.  But one isn’t going to be enough to save us.”

“Oh, that’s the best part,” said the Peri.  “Nanites can replicate themselves from raw metal ore.  Since the planet is mostly metal and crystal, we can set them to making a million copies of themselves in an hour.  You have to specify the number, though.  We wouldn’t want the little buggers transforming the entire planet.”

“Amazing,” sighed Tron.  “If only I had a million commandos to fill them with.”

At that moment Maggie came trotting up to him with a handheld communicator.  “The call is for you,” she said, looking grim.  “Arkin Cloudstalker has found some allies to help us fight.  He says he will visit one more planet and then be on his way to this system.  Admiral Tang is sure to follow.”

“Yes.  Sure to follow,” said Tron automatically, still gazing at the grinning elf and his newest invention.

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April 6, 2020 · 5:01 pm

The Truth is…

  • The truth is… this pandemic will not be the end of the world even if it is the end of me.
  • The truth is… if we don’t learn some fundamental things about ourselves, the whole world won’t survive very long after the pandemic is over. We have only a few short years to get our environmental act straight.
  • The truth is… the people who are most in control of our world have far more than their reasonable share of the wealth and power in this world, and it is not fair and healthy for our society.
  • The truth is… too often it is the selfish, narcissistic people of the world who rise to the top, and they have no compassion or regard for the rest of us.
  • The truth is… we have to change things. And violence is not the most effective answer. But besides extraordinary acts of heroism and ultimate grace from unnoticed individuals, it may be the only answer we have left. The good things Obama tried were mostly shouted down and defeated by the corrupt and greedy among us. The power of the vote may have been completely undermined.
  • The truth is… wisdom only comes through time and hard experience. If you don’t face hardships, you will never learn how to deal with hardships. That is the gift we are being given by this pandemic.
  • The truth is… our leader at this moment is a criminal. He has stolen wealth from the American people and wrecked parts of the government that are essential to the American way of life as we have always known it. And in his incompetence, he has done things and failed to do things that have caused people’s deaths in this pandemic.
  • The truth is… Trump needs to be prosecuted and put in prison once we have removed him from office.
  • The truth is… if we don’t do something to solve these problems and fix these things, we don’t deserve to survive as a species.
  • The truth is… the Truth is sometimes a very hard thing to hear.

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April 5, 2020 · 7:21 pm

Critical Steps

Last night I reached the climax of the novel, A Field Guide to Fauns. I pulled the scene off in a way that made me cry and feel like a part of my soul had been pulled out through my nose. But a critical question remains to be answered. Does it matter to the reader as much as it does to me?

The climax occurs after a group of four characters participate in a Chicken Dance, and the critical conflict is resolved by talking about the past.

Devon Martinez as he appears in A Field Guide to Fauns.

Probably not the most cinematic approach I could have used.

But this is not a cinematic story. It is introspective. It grapples with chronic child abuse and suicidal depression. It deals with recovery from a seriously traumatic event. And it is set in a nudist park featuring characters who are trying to rebuild families after divorce.

Can I leave it like it currently is? Knowing me, I probably will. It is an essential sort of story that I need to write because of who I am, who I was before, and where I am trying to be. I don’t write for anybody else but me. But I do hope others will read it. I will, in fact, continue to coerce family members and friends who are not sick of my story-telling (if such rare creatures still exist) to read it and make faces afterwards. And I firmly believe it is well-written, but it is a well-written, introspective and highly metaphorical novel. How many people do I know, after all, that read and enjoy Marcel Proust or William Faulkner or Saul Bellow? (I myself have only read multiple books from two of those three, and that because I can’t read French to get the book in its original language),

Starlord and Spiderman as they appear as blue elves in Onward, the Pixar movie.

Last night I watched what I thought was a marvelous movie on Disney Plus. And the truth is, the gut-punching climax of that movie happens when the main character is reviewing his to-do list while sitting on a rock. So, it is not only me who sometimes soft-peddles the critical steps in a story plot.

In truth, then, the next critical step for me will be to finish the falling action of the novel, carefully re-read and edit the manuscript, and then publish it. The novel will be done soon.

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April 4, 2020 · 6:56 pm

The Art of the Paffooney

There was a rollerskating rink in the little town of Lake Cornelia in Iowa from the 1940’s until the 1980’s. The first time I went there as a ten-year-old learning to roller-skate for the very first time, I spent the entire time cleaning the dusty floor with the knees and seat of my pants. My parents could both skate with fantastic ease. Dad could even skate backwards. During the couples’ skate, when they turned the lights down and turned on the blinking colored lights, they didn’t merely skate, they danced in circles around the rink.

But I wanted desperately to skate like that. We went numerous times to that same rink that Summer of 1967. The second time I went there I had spent a couple of nights dreaming of myself successfully skating. And practicing in my dreams apparently worked. I could skate the complete oval of the rink, and I only fell down three times the entire couple of hours we were there. We went to the A&W drive-in for root beers to celebrate afterwards.

We kept skating and I kept improving. In 1969 the song “Sugar, Sugar” was a number one hit. It played at least five times a trip to the skating rink, often during the couples’ skate. That Cornelia skating rink was the place where I skated hand in hand with a girl during the couples’ skate for the very first time. To that song, of course.

That rink was also the site of my worst embarrassment in junior high school. I fell because of a dreaded gum-wad on the floor and split the inseam of my pants from the crotch all the way down the right leg. When I got up, the girl I had a crush on and three of her female friends got a good look at my fruit-of-the-looms. Strangely, nobody made fun of me for it afterwards. The rink manager came up with enough safety pins to hold my pants together for the remaining hour of skate time. Embarrassed within an inch of my life being over, I was still not going to miss out on skating-time,

I hadn’t thought about skating in long time. I am not able to do it anymore with arthritis in my knees and feet. But this old colored-pencil drawing of a girl I once adored on roller skates brought the memory of it back again. It is a permanent part of who I am. A core memory. A foundation-stone in the edifice of Mickey-ness.

And a picture I have made with the story that goes along with it is what a Paffooney is. If you want to see more examples of Paffoonies I have created, you can do a Google picture-search of “Beyer Paffooney” and you will see a lot of them, mostly linked directly back to this blog. It is word I invented that nobody else is using (as far as I know), and so, it functions as a sort of magic word for my silly little blog.

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April 3, 2020 · 8:37 pm

Ramping It Up

Time is probably running out for me. I am too susceptible to this pandemic, and I am living in a Red State where they didn’t take social distancing seriously until Tuesday of this week.

But I have been living one day at a time for six years now. I have already lived longer and written more novels than I ever expected to since the beginning of my health crisis in the year 2000.

Still, I am now adding almost a thousand words a day to one novel or another. With A Field Guide to Fauns, I am currently on page 100 and at about 28,000 words of a planned 35,000. I reached crisis point one of three planned for the plot.

I have to admit that several surprises have added themselves to this story. When a novel comes to life like this one has, it often surprises you with directions you never expected it to take. Hence the family trip to Fiesta Texas and Mandy’s inexplicable love of Selena and dancing the Cumbia.

Just a reminder, if you haven’t been following my sporadic narration of the writing of this novel, the Field Guide is set primarily in a nudist park in Texas, and it is about a boy who is forced to become a nudist, and at the same time confronting the naked truth about himself. This novel will be done before the quarantine is over. Hopefully also before I get sick and die.

I will be ready to take up The Wizard in His Keep soon after it is done.

Plus, I have been working hard on the rewrite of AeroQuest 3 : Juggling Planets.

Juggling Planets now stands at about 20,000 words and 82 pages.

I will try to finish both that and AeroQuest 4 : The Amazing Aero Brothers before I breathe my last. (Though possibly not writing my last. Remember, I plan on getting a job as a ghost writer after I am dead.)

If I have time after all that, I have an idea ready to go for Kingdoms Under the Earth, my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom, and a rewrite of my ghost story, Monstro.

I am doing my best to write as much as I can before the end.

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April 2, 2020 · 9:35 pm

Getting By

Texas is finally closing down like other States where the virus is a little better under control. That means a little less worry about going out to buy groceries. Every positive step we take in this direction improves my chances of surviving, or, at least, being able to finish one more novel before I die. I’d have written a better and longer post if I felt better today. I don’t have Covid 19 yet, but I do have diabetes and five other incurable medical conditions, so feel-bad days like today are normal, and fee-good days are rare. Meanwhile, like George Appleby, I am stuck at home with the wife.

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April 1, 2020 · 5:50 pm

Never Say Die

Amazingly, I am still not dead. Even though this invisible virus-monster is totally new to our species and we have zero resistance and no vaccination for it, I am in a position now that, with a lot of hard work and even more good luck, I can continue to survive and stay alive.

Of course, there are evil people out there that would love it if those inconvenient poor people would just die out (people like me who spent their lives doing useless stuff like educating the next couple of generations to be people who can read and write by being a teacher). Poor people cost rich people money.

One wealthy governor has kept his State full of beaches (that benefit economically from things like Spring Break and Easter weekend) fully open for business, thus infecting scores of people that go back to home States like Texas (where I live) to spread potential death to people whose cheap-o health insurance (like mine) won’t pay to save your life because that would cut into profits.

One wealthy President has down-played the seriousness of this pandemic up until now. He has been more concerned with suppressing knowledge of how bad it is going to be (because that could sour people in his base from re-electing him in November) rather than preparing in a way that would allow healthcare workers to adequately protect themselves as they treat waves of the infected and dying, and providing more respirators to save those whose infections are suffocating them (which he simply cannot do without limiting corporate profiteering by his super-rich CEO-type buddies).

Maybe those of us who survive this pandemic should see to it that the rich, evil dudes who made this so much harder to survive lose power and profits, and maybe even go to jail for a change.

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March 31, 2020 · 4:14 pm

AeroQuest 3… Canto 84

Canto 84 – The Lords of the Jungle (the Green Thread)

King Killer returned to consciousness in the midst of an elaborately built tree house.  His right arm and shoulder were burning with excruciating pain.  His vision was somewhat blurry, but he could make out two smiling faces looking at him, neither of which was familiar in any way.  The boy was nearly nude, wearing only some kind of fur loin-cover that really wouldn’t have covered anything if he had had anything to cover.  His red hair was wild and uncut, something like a lion’s mane with tangles.  The woman was dressed in an expensive leather suit, the kind nobles often wore in order to tour the more dangerous parts of resort planets.  She was a beauty with large red lips and liquid brown eyes.  Her hair was well kept and perfectly arranged in this steamy jungle.

“Who… are you?” King finally spit out.

“I am the former movie star known as Wicked Wanda,” said the woman.  “You may have seen me in the holo-epic All Spaceways Lead to Galtorr, or the romantic comedy The Corsair’s Wife.”

“Um, no.”

“That’s okay.  I know my fame and talent haven’t reached all the way to the frontier, yet.”

King looked around.  Hooey and Willie Culver were sitting a short distance away, talking to a man in a black robe with a hood over his head.  He wanted to get up and go over there so he could kick Hooey in the head for doing this to him. 

“What’s wrong with me?  Why can’t I get up from here?”

“You have a terrible infection in the wound from the creature’s carnivorous mouth.  I’m a pretty good medic as well as a holo-epic star, so I’ve been trying to treat it without antibiotics.”

King looked at the boy.  “I guess I owe you my life,” he said soberly.  “Thank you.”

“Me Randy,” said the Jungle Boy, pounding his chest with one fist.

“That’s all he can say,” said Wanda.  “He was apparently the only one to survive from his crashed spaceship, and the monkey people of this planet raised him.”

“Monkey people?” 

“The Lemurians.  They live on several jungle planets, or the jungle parts of medium life-belt planets.  They have a whole city here in the trees.  They built this place.  If Admiral Tang knew they were here and rescuing some of the people he maroons here, he’d probably throw a mechanoid fit.”

“Yes, I owe them too.  I have to survive this place to get revenge on Tang.”

Wicked Wanda smiled a sinister smile.  “Revenge is not a good enough motivation for most people, but I can tell it fits you perfectly.”

“Yeah, I’m a dangerous man.”

“Sure you are.”

“How smart are these Lemurians?”

“Oh, they are very clever.  They can’t talk though, unless Oook means something in monkey-talk.”

“You can’t communicate with them?”

“Oh, we can.  Slythinus over there can use some kind of telepathy on them.”  She pointed at the man in the robe.

“Slythinus?  As in Emperor Slythinus?”

“Yeah, that’s him.  Mr. Golly Bigdeal is a prisoner here just like the rest of us.”

“How?  I mean, he’s still the Emperor, isn’t he?”

“Not really any more…”  Wanda looked at him sadly.  “There was a coup by some guy called Prince Ali.  Slythinus was left here to die while other people took over his empire.  I understand the Imperium belongs mostly to Mechanoids and Galtorr-Human Fusions now.  That’s how I got here, taking pity on a human leader that had fallen out of favor with his planet.  You may have heard of him.  You know, Duke Ferrari of the Coventry Sector?”

“I’ve heard the name.  Don’t know much about the man, other than the fact that we freed him from a dungeon on the planet White Palm.  I guess that’s how Tron’s Pinwheel Corsairs got our behinds handed to us in a basket, payment from the Imperium for freeing the Duke.”

“He’s free?  Oh!  I love you for that!”  Wanda leaned in and planted a big, passionate kiss on King.  He was instantly surprised and embarrassed.

“Well, well, well,” said Dr. Hooey.  “I see you’ve met your future wife already.”

“I swear, Hooey, I will kill you one day.”

“Oh, no you won’t.  I’ve read the proof in one of King Ryan Beowulf’s books about the future.”

“The future?”  Wanda was puzzled.

“Oh, yes,” said King sarcastically.  “Dr. Hooey here is a Time Knight, and destined to get us all off this planet.”

“Really?” said Wanda, obviously contemplating another thank-you kiss.  King found that he hated that idea.  “How will we get off?” she asked.

“There’s a certain device hidden in the ruins,” said Hooey.

“What ruins?” asked the robed man, walking up to King also.  “I know of none.”

As Slythinus approached, King could see that his Galtorrian lizard eyes were gone.  The former Emperor was now blind. “Your monkey friends know,” said Hooey.  “Although, I have to wonder why they’ve kept the knowledge from you.  It is the way they have gotten from planet to planet, you know.”

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