Pen and ink, black and white drawings are the place where my art career started. Line drawings like the ones in the newspaper cartoon pages. I collected newspaper comics. I copied them. I drew Blondie Bumstead and Moonshine McSwine naked. I drew Pogo Possum, Popeye, and Hagar the Horrible. I also drew Steve Canyon and Buzz Sawyer. I still draw Mickey Mouse. I learned cartoonist skills from the best in comic strips and comic books.
Filed under artwork, cartoons, comic strips, drawing, humor, illustrations, Paffooney, pen and ink
This week I ran afoul of the gypsy fortuneteller Madame Pumpkinwrinkle. She crossed my path and gave me the eye.
I, of course, immediately gave it back, and she popped the glass eye back into her right eye socket.
“You shud be seeing wot I am seeing, you silly, seely man.”
“Why? What are you seeing?”
“Your future is weary grave. You needs to be gibbing me ein nickel, und I weel tell you ov it.”
Well, I don’t credit her prophesying ability any more than the Trojans credited Cassandra. But I had a nickel in my pocket. So, I thought, “What the heck! Why not?”
She took the nickel and handed me the eye again.
“Yeck! I don’t want this!”
“I will look into your mind. Hold it up to the ear so I can see in.”
I held it up to my ear.
“What do you see?”
“Light from the udder side.”
“Somehow I knew that is what you would say.”
“I see many grave tings.”
“Like what?”
“Trumpy is elected again 2020. You is gedding so mad that you is having a strobe.”
“You mean a stroke?”
:”No, you is flashing in and out of existence. Strobe!”
“Ah, yes. So, is that what kills me?”
“No, you is not gonna die until after dat.”
“So, will I die before I get out of bankruptcy?”
“No, Bank-o-Merica not gonna let you die until day after you pay off everting.”
“Oh, so I die with everybody else from global warming?”
“No. You is gonna die before that.”
“Oh? How?”
“You is gonna try to be a substie-toot teachum. You will forget to wear cloze one day, and you is dying of embarrassment.”
“Well, then, I guess I already got my nickel’s worth. That’s enough for today… and maybe for a lifetime.”
“You come back wit anudder nickel. I got lots more.”
“Oh, good.”
So, after having books available on Amazon since 2012, I finally figured out how to update my Amazon author’s page. Stupid me. I could’ve been using this to help me market books for seven years now.
Now, if you click on the link in the caption of the above picture, you can look at my updated author’s page with 9 of the 10 books I have already published. I couldn’t add Aeroquest because that miserable thing is now out of print, and Publish America is finally sued out of existence. But like Frankenstein, I have the means to resurrect that monster. I will now cut it up into at least three separate books and republish it on Amazon.
But that book #10 thing will have to wait. I will soon be publishing When the Captain Came Calling. I have just stupidly warned you now of an upcoming publishing event that you will probably hide from and fear because, comedy or not, there are some very sad parts in it that I have alluded to in my blog. I am a regular Tom Holland when it comes to letting cats out of bags.
I also have to figure out what to do about Magical Miss Morgan. Page Publishing sent me notice that I have to pay $50 to get them to continue offering print-on-demand copies of my book and e-book copies of my book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I don’t figure I have to pay them for continuing to do nothing but make profits from my book. My publishing contract says clearly that I only have to call them to get all my publishing rights back and put the thing on Amazon KDP. This is the course of action that I have stupidly chosen to do. I have called them seven times now, stating clearly on their answering machine that I want the rights back. They continue not to answer my calls or call me back. They also continue to offer that book without any kind of notice that I have not paid for that priviledge for the last six months.
Stupidity continues to pile up in every corner of the box I put my novel-writing in. But I continue to fight the battle. I made $1.06 as an author in July.
Filed under novel writing, publishing
My aunt died this July. The day after her 80th birthday, she had a massive heart attack and was gone with a suddenness that left us all apprehensive.
My summer sunflower, the one that came up voluntarily in the pile of extra dirt left behind by the re-setting of the retaining wall around our yard, a DIY project for 2019, had dropped over from lack of water while we were gone to Iowa and attending the funeral. I thought it was going to die.
The blossoms you see in the picture above all shriveled and died. But the thing is now growing again.
Watering the sunflower’s sad remains twice a day has yielded two new large and healthy blossoms growing upward from the decimated stalk.
We are not easily defeated, my sunflower and I. And neither of us can stay down and unhappy for long without being ourselves deceased.
Filed under Uncategorized
Someone late at night rediscovered this old post and looked at it. Didn’t like it. Just looked. So, here you see what they saw.
I was planning to write a piece about insult humor for a while, and then Don Rickles had to up and die… that danged old hockey puck!’
So the master of insults is gone, and it will be even harder to explain why calling someone a proud and prissy poo-poo head is not a bad thing to do. Because, really… strong language is not really strength and it takes intelligence to be a mean little picky-wit. (No pun intended… because no pun was used, Duh! How slow are you compared to molasses around Christmas time?)
You may have heard me say that I don’t like hurtful humor. I don’t believe bad words are required to make something funny. I don’t think humor should be weaponized. Jokes that make you die laughing are too much like murder, and people who have no sense of humor can’t be hurt by them anyway.
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Filed under Uncategorized
Canto Thirty – Rage in the Clarke Name
Kyle Clarke came storming into the Zeffer house before either the sheriff’s deputy or Mrs. Philips could arrive. He was angry to the point of curse words over what apparently had happened to Valerie. He made Mrs. Zeffer and Ray repeat the story of how Ray found her three times before he even started calming down. He made it clear he wanted the story from Ray, not Valerie. Once he had learned she had been unconscious, he didn’t even want to hear her version of events. He told her she would not be able to make sense of things until she was well rested and recovered. He wanted Mrs. Philips, a registered nurse, to examine her before any other investigation took place. Valerie could only imagine in horror what he suspected.
“Mrs. Philips! We need you to examine little Valerie Clarke,” said Mrs. Zeffer as Mary’s mother arrived at the Zeffer home. “She’s been attacked by someone.”
Mrs. Philips was very pale, and also seemed shaken.
“What is the matter, Mrs. Philips?” Kyle asked. “You seem unwell.”
“My daughter Mary and her boyfriend Pidney Breslow are missing. I’m afraid it has something to do with what happened to Valerie.”
“Oh, no! We’ve phoned the sheriff already and he’s sending Deputy Harper from Belle City to investigate,” Kyle said in a concerned tone.
“Do you know what happened?” asked Mrs. Zeffer.
Ray was sitting on the bed in Bobby’s room next to Valerie who was already wearing the clothes Kyle had brought her. Both of them looked at the adults standing just outside the bedroom doorway. Valerie’s fear for what might’ve happened to Mary and Pid was overwhelming. She leaned against Ray’s shoulder and began to cry softly.
“It was the strangest thing. The three of them were all in our basement, reading some old book. Then, suddenly there was a purple fog in the house. It smelled so sweet it made me sick to my stomach. It apparently knocked me out. When I came to, I found my daughter Amy and her brother Jason were both sleeping on the floor. They had been knocked out too.”
“And the kids were taken from your house?” Kyle looked alarmed and upset.
“Yes, all we found were their clothes in the basement. I have never seen anything so strange. Whoever took them must have stripped them naked first.”
“Oh, you poor dear,” said Mrs. Zeffer, taking hold of Lady Philips’ shaking hands and guiding her to a chair in Bobby’s room. “Sit here. Let me get you some tea.”
“Was there any indication who might have done this terrible thing?” asked Kyle.
“I… I don’t know,” Mrs. Philips said as Mrs. Zeffer bustled out of the room to make tea. “We found the empty clothes… and then you called asking me to come here and examine Valerie.”
“You should’ve said something then,” Kyle said.
“I… I just felt numb. I told Jason to look after Amy and came right here to see what I could find out.”
“All right… um, Mrs. Philips… I called you over here to examine my daughter Valerie. I was worried someone might have… well, she was found naked in the alley, unconscious.”
Lady Philips made a small strangling sound in her throat. Valerie knew immediately what she must have thought had happened to Mary.
“I’m okay, Daddy. I know for a fact that nobody did anything like that to me.”
“Valerie, princess, you were unconscious. Somebody drugged you and stripped you naked. We need to be certain what happened.” Daddy Kyle was trying to be comforting and soothing, but there was a cold, desperate edge to his voice that actually scared Valerie. She looked at Ray. Ray’s eyes were frightened too.
“Your dad is right, Val. You need to be checked. Mrs. Philips is an RN, a professional nurse. She’ll be able to tell.”
“Okay, Ray,” said Valerie’s dad coolly, “You should go help your mother in the kitchen. Deputy Harper will be here soon.”
Ray reluctantly let go of Valerie and stood up. “You know, sir, that I would never hurt your daughter.”
Kyle’s angry glare softened a bit. “I… I do know that, son. And believe me, I am grateful for the way you rescued her and brought her somewhere safe. I’m on edge right now. I don’t know what was done or who did it. You know what I mean?”
“Of course. If I were in your shoes, I’d be afraid for my daughter too.”
Ray nodded resolutely. Then he went out of the room.
“I will examine her in private, Mr. Clarke. I will be able to tell. I have treated rape victims before. I don’t have a kit with me, but I will know if one needs to be used… Only…”
“What?” Kyle asked.
“After we know, I am going to need you and Deputy Harper to find Mary.” Valerie’s dad was grim-faced, but he nodded his agreement.
I know this title sounds like a total bummer of a post written by a sixty-plus-year-old loser in poor health and totally obsessed with his own imminent mortality. And I know why you might think that based on the general trends you have observed in my reflections-on-life sorts of posts, especially if you actually do more than only look at the pictures in this goofy blog. But it is not the ending of me that I am obsessed about. It is the ending of a novel.
I wrote the first draft of When the Captain Came Calling in 1996, twenty-three years ago. And I knew then that it was not finished. And I thought, perhaps, that it would never be finished. It was a hard thing to write. And I knew from the writing of the novel Snow Babies that I could not write this book without writing directly about the suicide. Something like that can’t just happen to a major character in a series of novels in between what happens in novel one and the start of novel two. It has been a twenty-three-year struggle with a plot-knot that was almost impossible to untangle.
You see, the most important character in the patchwork-quilt-book that is Snow Babies, is Valerie Clarke, a skateboarding thrasher of a girl from the 80’s based on a girl I taught in the 90’s and named after a classmate I had a hopeless crush on in the 60’s. And she could not have been the character I wrote about in that book without having survived the fact of the suicide in the previous book. But when I completed Snow Babies, the Captain still didn’t have the suicide in it. And believe me, writing about suicide is hard. It is something that has been a life-long hardship to explain and to deal with.
You see too, that suicide has been a thing I have had to deal with in real life. Ruben got himself killed in a car accident in a car-theft joy ride. Osvaldo took his own life with a gun after getting out of prison. J.J. got drunk and ran his pickup truck into a train. And they were kids I taught and learned about from talking to them about their lives. And two of them I loved like they were my own children because that’s how teachers do… And I have spent three whole days in emergency rooms and one terrible night in ERs with suicidal teens, two long conversations with kids over the telephone when I had to talk them out of hurting themselves, and I had no idea where they actually were. And I have talked to counselors at three different schools about suicidal things kids shared with me more times than I can count accurately. And some of those incidents I am listing are about family members. And my cousin’s son… Well, you can see how that kind of battle can make a suicide something hard to write about. Especially since all the scars it leaves makes you hyper-aware of how precious and fragile life really is.
But you see three, now that I have taken time out to cry a bit for having written that last horrible paragraph, that it is important, as a writer, to share your truth with the world in the best way you know how. And as the spirits of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Terry Pratchett nod knowingly from beyond, I can honestly say that the best way that I can deal with it is by writing comedy, making readers smile and laugh and feel good about enough good stuff to make up for the bad stuff that everybody faces… even suicide. And I have finally passed the test. I wrote the chapter about the suicide. I have written about Valerie’s recovery, and I am nearing the end of the book, my current Work In Progress, When the Captain Came Calling. A good story can heal the world, the way Oliver Twist did, or the way The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did. And while the jury has not yet convened on this book of mine, and I can’t begin to compare my book to those, I don’t hate it now the way I did for the last twenty-two years. It is going to get finished. And then the whole world can ignore it the way they have all my other books.
Filed under autobiography, family, feeling sorry for myself, humor, novel, novel writing
We came back from Iowa, Corporal Dorin, the Princess, and I, to find the hot Texas sun had been scorching everything since the day we left.
The watermelon patch is now occupied only by brown and burned stems.
The grass is sick yellow with sparsely spread spots of green.
And my solitary sunflower…
…has gone down for the count.
I added water to the yard. Hopefully the plants will come back. But the heat is no friend to us anymore.
Filed under Uncategorized
I draw things as illustrations to stories. Take, for example, the protagonist and hero of Catch a Falling Star.
Dorin Dobbs is boy from Iowa. That tells you some terrible things about him right there.
He was ten in 1990.
He hated girls.
He met some pretty green-skinned girls from outer space, amphibianoid frog-girls with fins on their heads. He danced with them to Mickey Mouse Club music while he was their prisoner on a sectet base on the planet Mars. They were dancing naked in the nutrient bath that all Telleron tadpoles use daily.
Brekka and Menolly are two of the Telleron frog girls with fins on their heads. They love Earth music in the 1990’s. They are background characters in Catch a Falling Star. They are main characters in the book Stardusters and Space Lizards, where they help Davalon and Tanith to conquer the dying planet of Galtorr Prime after the Telleron invasion of Earth failed in the previous book.
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Galtorr Prime is undergoing drastic climate change and environmental collapse and ends up being saved by superior Telleron technology and the lizard-girl heroine, Sizzahl, who has a plan for fixing the atmosphere and saving fundamental eco-systems. Of course, this is all science fiction-y stuff based entirely on fantasy and imagination and has nothing to do with the real world we now live in.
Of course, not all characters I illustrate are people or aliens.
Millis, Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit, is an ordinary albino bunny who eats a piece of alien technology that evolves him into a talking, walking-on-two-legs, near-human form.
He becomes the chef (who cooks only vegetable dishes) for Norwall, Iowa’s own mad scientist, Orben Wallace, in the book The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.
I think I have now given out far more spoilers for stories than I have any right to do. But the thing about character illustrations is that your get to know the characters at a glance. And to know them is to love them.
Filed under aliens, artwork, characters, illustrations, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Every year that passes, life becomes more challenging, more difficult.
Ill health denies me many things. The poverty that comes with ill health and teacher retirement denies me even more. But I made it home to Iowa to visit the family farm once more. It could well be the last time. My parents are in their 80’s and more ill than I am. I lost my aunt a little more than a week ago. She passed away one day after her 80th birthday. Nothing is permanent. But those things that resist the ravages of time, the places, the people, the culture, the wind in the corn…
…Give me comfort, give me peace.
Filed under autobiography, family, Iowa, sharing from YouTube
Catch a Falling Star 