These are ESL portraits, a quiet Chinese girl and a pencil-chewing Hispanic girl inspired these two, but they look nothing at all like this picture.
I have been doing most of these Saturday art posts from my WordPress library of images. I generally try to organize around a theme. Having exhausted myself at Vivian Field Middle School yesterday, school-ish pictures are my theme for the day.
I have a tendency to think in pictures, and these are all school thoughts of one kind or another.
Basketball practice when I was a high school freshman inspired this picture of Brent who was an athletic young friend of mine I went to practice with.Being a school teacher is also being a story-teller. That is essentially what this picture is about.If this much-used picture looks familiar, it is because this is what teaching looks like through my eyes. Reluctant Rabbit holding the big pencil is me in my teacher-self. The students are Amanda, Ruben, Fernando, and Flora.Kids don’t literally go to school naked, but metaphorically they do. They have no secrets from a teacher who knows them well from talking to them and reading their classroom journals. Talking about themselves out loud or in writing is how little people make themselves into bigger people.This classroom portrait is a picture made from my own classroom in Garland, Texas.Some of the characters in my school-ish pictures are actually me and my own school-aged classmates and friends.
Some of my favorite students over the many years in the classroom were major nerds.
I liked them mostly because they were the same exact species as I was when I was a monkey-house-aged student.
Monkey-house is a synonym for Middle School.
Wally shared my obsession with Japanese anime and could draw them better than I could. He was a major nerd. And a totally enthusiastic learner whom other students treated like he was radioactive. I always had time for him when he needed to talk to someone. He was a teacher’s kid at a time when my own son was still little.
This is a class picture from AeroQuest, a novel series about a teacher in space. All of these kids were based on real-life students I had in class once upon a time. One of these kids, pictured as a blue alien, was actually Wally. So, now I need to post this post as there are next things happening on my schedule. Like these silhouette students, I need to get there on time.
Timothy Allen Kellogg is a fictional character who has lived in my fictional world since 1976 when he first appeared in an illustration I created at my desk in my college dorm room.
Tim is a main character in Catch a Falling Star, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, and Magical Miss Morgan. He will likely be written into a few more as well.
One could make a good case that he has become the fictional avatar of my eldest son. He is the son of an English Teacher who has always been a me-character. Lawrence “Rance” Kellogg is a character created during my college days as a crucial part of my own fictionalized life story. But if Tim is my son in fictional form, you have to realize also that the character existed nineteen years before my son was a reality. So there is some kind of magical evolution…
I am not, at this writing, feeling very spry anymore. I substituted for an ESL teacher in Irving yesterday. I enjoyed it. But the frosty cold weather took its toll on me, as did the misbehavior of clownish 11th graders. I am left exhausted, and thoroughly convinced that huge high school classes averaging thirty kids in them are not something I am well enough to deal with anymore. I probably need to decide against taking any future high school sub jobs. They make me deathly tired and inspire creepy poetry about mortality in me. Anyway, it caused me to do some picture-making, and some silly poetical complaining.
When Tron sent a
message to Frieda’s Starbase at Don’t Go Here, he requested Ged himself
come to Outpost for little Artran.
Frieda, however, knew that Ged was at Gaijin with Xavier
Tkriashav. She sent a courier in a brand-new
Express Boat to Gaijin. It was
listed for Tkriashav or Ged Aero only, but somehow it got delivered to Vince
Neill aboard the Megadeath.
Scarpigo Snarcs
wore an X-boat officer’s uniform as he gave the message to Vince.
“All right,
dude! I’ve heard of this kid-dude. It’d be an honor to serve Ged-dude and the
pirate-dude at the same time. We leave
immediately!”
“Thank you,” said
Scarpigo in his guise as Bill the Postman.
“I will just be hitching a ride.”
“Wha…?” said
Cold Death, his bright green Mohawk shaking in confusion.
“ME RIDE WITH
YOU!” said Scarpigo in that extra loud way you normally talk to stupid people,
as if they were deaf rather than merely mentally impaired.
“Okay, Bill,”
said Vince. “You can ride if you try to
be just a bit quieter. That gnarly voice
of yours can surely give me a headache.”
Nikki Sixx looked
over the coordinates to Outpost, tried to figure out the navigational
logarithms in his head, and then gave up; inserting the computer crystal with
the jump program that Bill the Postman supplied him with into the ship’s
navigational computer. The Megadeath
roared musically to life.
Now, travel
between the stars is a miracle of physics and mathematics that only takes place
in certain narrow corridors of gravity and space. A space ship creates a field around itself
that alters the fabric of space nearby. Space
will actually fold itself around the matter the star ship is made of. It appears to disintegrate in one place, and,
after a period in which the space-time continuum percolates around it, reforms
itself in the new location. The location
could be anywhere within a range of six parsecs, even empty space. But spacers only found it useful to travel
from star system to star system. Fuel
would eventually be necessary and none was available in empty parsecs of space.
Twenty-seven
hours after they had taken flight from Don’t Go Here, the Megadeath
arrived at Outpost. Immediately
they were surrounded by Pinwheel Corsairs.
“Alien ship of
unknown design!” called the nearest corsair, “state your business here.”
“Yo, Dude!”
warbled Vince Neill from behind his mirrored shades. “We come on a mission of mercy from Ged
Aero. We come to pick up little dude
Artran and take him to Gaijin.”
“We don’t
recognize you and we don’t know any Gaijin. Prepare to be atomized.”
“Whoa, not cool!”
said Neill into the communicator. He
immediately threw the Megadeath into maneuvers that the corsairs had
never seen attempted, let alone being able to catch up with them. The highly efficient ship made with Ancient
technology danced out of reach of all Pinwheel weaponry.
“Is this an attack?”
rasped Tron’s voice over the communicators.
“No, Dude. I just don’t want my biscuits fried by you!”
“Stop, then, and
prepare to be boarded,” said Tron.
“Whatever you
say, Dude.”
Despite everything
that was sensible, the Megadeath and her Rock-and-Roll crew had fallen
into the hands of a desperate pirate who faced total annihilation at the hands
of the Galtorrian Imperial Fleet.
It’s a good book. It is themed with an interesting idea about hopes and dreams, happiness and sorrow, and life and death. I believe people will like it if they try reading it. In fact, it could become popular if people would allow themselves to fall in love with it and promote it by word of mouth.
The problem is, of course, that even though I am a good writer and storyteller, I suck at marketing.
Seriously, I worked with editors on Catch a Falling Star who had experience with major publishing houses. They told me that my book was competent and better than a lot of very successful novels that were not written with the skill that mine was. The problem that I ran into was how expensive that method was and how little help they actually gave me with the marketing part that was theoretically supposed to make the money back. The professional editing was worth the money. The marketing investment was not.
Amazon and KDP is a free publishing service, but it is almost not worth the price either.
It comes with the stigma of being an Indie writer, so, by definition, a hack who is not very good at writing. There are literally millions of books self-published by people just like me that go a long way towards validating that assumption. So, skill at writing is something to be proven through the actual written product, which is really hard to do if nobody is willing to read your book.
Every review I have gotten on my books so far is a five-star review. Of course, that means little when there are so few reviews. All the reviewers could simply be over-enthusiastic author-likers. And the trolls and the harsh critics haven’t taken their stabs yet.
So, I am stuck trying to brainstorm promotional strategies that I am well enough and financially sound enough to carry out. And all of those my stormy brained has lightning-bolted out so far have been failures. I don’t know how to break through the ice sheet to be noticed. And not even global warming seems to be helping. Ah, well… que sera sera… what will be will be.
The link above is still capable of giving you a free copy of this e-book until midnight on Tuesday, November 12th, 2019. By all means, click on it and get yourself the free Kindle e-book.
I write this plea as my third free e-book promotion is half-way done. It is, as expected, failing miserably. As of this writing, the promotion using Facebook and Twitter has managed to give away six free books. And one of those is me grabbing a free e-book for my own free Kindle reader on my laptop. So, basically, I can’t give away copies of my own book for free.
But writing this book was not a matter of making myself famous or wealthy or even acknowledged as a good writer. Those are not the things I need. I wrote this story because I myself have been badly damaged by life. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy when I was ten. I had teenage bouts of depression that nearly made me end myself. My sex-life did not develop normally and led to chronic prostatitis and the precursor to “Priests’ disease”, a prostate gland the size of a grapefruit. Yes, it may ultimately end in prostate cancer. And then when I finally made a family for myself in my late middle years, I was besieged by depression again, this time not my own, but others in my family. So, in many ways, I have lived a sad life.
The novel itself is a means to self-healing and recording how I rebuilt myself using love, laughter, and artistry. The singing orphan boy wearing clown paint and singing only sad songs is a metaphor for me and my struggle. The clowns that haunt the main characters’ dreams are also a metaphor. I was always known as the laughing teacher, the one who joked around in class, and let laughing grow into a means of instruction in the English classroom. I used humor to make learning painless. I used it to take away many other kinds of pain as well. The book is about how a family can be healed by someone who has nothing, yet selflessly gives everything to make that family come together and be whole. It is a story, just as the introduction claims, about what love really means.
But the world is stacked against lying truth-tellers like me who make up stories only to heal themselves. Facebook stopped me from messaging everybody who is a Facebook friend whom I wanted to send the book link from Amazon. They called it spamming, which really means, “advertising something on Facebook without paying Facebook lots of money.” I discovered on Twitter that sending the link in DMs makes more of my followers stop following me than it makes followers click on the link to obtain a free book. Ah, disappointment again. At least I gave away three more books than I did on the last promotion.
So, this is like a blacklight, shining on my promotional inspiration. It only shows in ultraviolet the opposite of what I thought I would see. And it resigns me once again to be only ignored as a writer of novels. I suppose it is my proper place in life.
Important parts of the book that I am currently promoting by offering Kindle e-books for free are based on dreams that I had years ago. The clowns who are dream denizens of Zoomboogadoo and the white city of Celephais, were first encountered in a dream I had in college. Boz is also named Mr. Dickens. The Bard is known as Mr. Shakespeare. Diz is Mr. Disney. And Poe, of course, is Mr. Poe. The literary references should be as clear to you as they were to me in 1978.
This painting was also from a dream in the 1980’s. I’m not sure exactly when. But in the dream, I was the stag and I believed in my dream that the other deer there were my family. It is also, of course, influenced by the Disney Movie Bambi. Particularly the scene of the forest fire. But, oddly, the dream predicted my future family. I met my wife in 1994. My eldest son was born in 1995. My second son was born in 1999. My daughter was born in 2002. You see their deer selves in the picture.
I now have published in paperback the second book in the AeroQuest re-write, AeroQuest 2 – The Planet of the White Spider. My first paper copy appeared in the mailbox yesterday. I am busily now working on both AeroQuest 3 – Juggling Planets and The Boy… Forever. So, I have been busy writing.
I am also planning to start a Free-Book promotion for last winter’s published book, Sing Sad Songs, tomorrow. So, I am definitely getting book stuff done happily and productively. It is just the rest of my life that sucks now.
A Frosty Full Moon in a Pink Dawn Sky
Under the Full Moon
The air is cold in the age of old.
We’re no longer brave, in the moonlight wave.
Day has ended, night impended,
And darkest dawn looms for the faun.
We cannot wake with a sudden shake.
Our sacred lore responds no more.
Silence abounds on the frosty ground.
And the final score has left us poor.
A more reasonable paragraph;
I am not, at this writing, feeling very spry anymore. I substituted for an ESL teacher in Irving yesterday. I enjoyed it. But the frosty cold weather took its toll on me, as did the misbehavior of clownish 11th graders. I am left exhausted, and thoroughly convinced that huge high school classes averaging thirty kids in them are not something I am well enough to deal with anymore. I probably need to decide against taking any future high school sub jobs. They make me deathly tired and inspire creepy poetry about mortality in me. Anyway, it caused me to do some picture-making, and some silly poetical complaining.
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