As Big MacIntosh welcomes more little ponies into my insanely large doll collection, I have been reading my published novel Snow Babies. The novel is written in third person viewpoint with a single focus character for each scene. But because the story is about a whole community surviving a blizzard with multiple story lines criss-crossing and converging only to diverge and dance away from each other again, the focus character varies from scene to scene.
Big MacIntosh finds himself to be the leader of a new group of My Little Ponies.
In Canto Two, Valerie Clarke, the central main character of the story, is the focus character. Any and all thoughts suggested by the narrative occur only in Valerie’s pretty little head. Canto Three is focused through the mind of Trailways bus driver Ed Grosland. Canto Four focuses on Sheriff’s Deputy Cliff Baily. And so, on it goes through a…
A Paffooney used in the act of promoting Snow Babies this week.
This week, April 1st through 5th, I created a promotion in which my novel Snow Babies is available for free in e-book format. This is supposed to put the book out there and make people want to read it. I hope I can learn how to use this promotional thingie better than I have for the first time.
I tried to get people to buy it by putting out ads like this, self-created, that had a link to the purchase page on Amazon.
It looks better on Twitter or Facebook than it does here.
I posted it daily on Facebook, Twitter, here on WordPress, and through individual emails and direct messages. So far this week, I have given away four free copies and sold three paperbacks. The paperbacks were bought by me, two of them to give away to specific people, and one that my sister bought before I could send her one. I also intend to send one as a surprise to the girl from my grade school class that the main character on the cover is named after. I am hoping that she and her daughters and granddaughters will read it and love it rather than burn it.
I made a connection over Twitter with Prince Hamdan Mohammed of Saudi Arabia over it, a surprise to me to say the least, though I have no reason to believe that he even accepted the free copy of my book.
But that’s the sum of my promotional results it seems. I may have earned $5 in royalties this week. I may have bargained for one positive review. I have a Saudi Prince for a pen-pal. And my literary work will probably remain in obscurity until long after I am dead, if it even splashes then.
The picture above is not a recent session of Uber driving. The truth is, I haven’t earned a single fare since the accident in August. Don’t get me wrong. I am still bankrupt and desperately in need of extra money, but I have had a long road of recovery and a serious loss of confidence to overcome.
And the mean streets of Dallas and the DFW Metroplex are easily as hairy to navigate as the scene above (Which is an artist’s recreation of events on Keller Springs Road while construction was still going on due to mini-mudslides.) It takes a good deal of confidence just to make your way along in a car and at the same time stay alive with a functional automobile beneath you. (Notice the little-boy passenger who was actually rescued by aliens rather than eaten by an alligator.)
And yet, you can’t avoid city driving. I have to do it every day even if I am not making any money from Uber. And there’s the rub. I was forced to retire early from teaching because my 45-stop-light-one-way commute was wearing me out. I experienced a black-out while driving to work one morning and narrowly avoided crashing into a light pole. I am not forbidden by doctors from driving, but diabetes and age are making long drives perilous. Signs were pointing to the end of enough energy to handle a classroom too. So, I retired on a pension and started Uber-ing for extra dollars. Any time I am planning to drive and feel the least bit light-headed, I have to change the plan and cancel the drive. I can still drive for Uber since I can drive whenever I’m actually well enough. And Uber is desperate as there is more work than there are available drivers much of the time.
Another rub is the fact that things have changed while I was forced into a break from Uber driving. Uber has gotten greedy. They have reduced fares in order to take business away from Lyft. But they didn’t take that reduction out of their profits. No, it had to come out of drivers’ pay. So, now if I do work up the nerve and energy to drive, I have to work harder just to make less than I did before. And we are independent contractors, not employees. We have to pay all our own expenses and we get royally screwed over at tax time since they don’t withhold any income tax.
I tried to do my first-in-a-long-while drive yesterday. I sat in my car, ready to go, for fifteen minutes before giving up due to “Still no requests.” And today I passed out after breakfast. So, maybe tomorrow, although possibly not then too. I really don’t know when I will see a giant armadillo driving a Cadillac again as I am on the road for Uber. I believe I must. But not today, and maybe not tomorrow.
Mom had a point about Conrad Doble. Every single time Valerie was in the same
room with him, he looked at her with a look that meant… Well, it seemed that way. She made very sure that she was never alone
in the same room with him. She almost
wished some times that Mary Philips wasn’t so accepting and was willing to just
kick the old slime-bucket out of the Norwall Pirates. But he was a link to the old Pirates. Valerie’s cousin Brent had led a group of
Pirates that included Milt Morgan, Andrew Doble, Eddie Campbell, Todd Niland,
and King Leer when he was the littlest pimple-head in the gang. Doble even claimed there were times when the
Cobble Sisters, Sherry and Shelly, were considered Pirates too, but it was
difficult to believe Conrad Doble because he always added random x-rated
details to the stories whenever girls were talked about. But this particular time, when Valerie had
been invited to the Philips’ house to discuss the Pirates, Doble was not even
invited.
In the basement of Mary’s house, Dagwood Philips, her
father, had built a comfortable family room.
It was heated by a Franklin stove that Dag had put in with his own
carpentry skills and ingenuity.
“This is a really nice room,” Valerie said.
“Thanks,” said Mary.
“Pidney’s mother Julianna calls it our make-out room. She says it’s where Pidney and I kiss so much
we give each other kissing disease.”
Valerie was shocked.
“You kiss a lot here?”
“No,” said Pidney.
“My mother is always joking about it.
She says that if I know a girl as pretty and smart as Mary, then why am
I not already proposing? Why am I
always saying that she is just my best friend?
She is my best friend.”
That was a relief to Valerie whose inner little
jealousy-fairy had suddenly been shouting in the back of her mind somewhere
until Pidney had said that one perfect thing.
“Your Mom has a thing about mononucleosis, too,” said Mary.
“That’s true. She had
it when she was a teenager in Poland.
She claimed she got it from kissing a boy too much.”
“Does that kind of joking bother your Dad?” Valerie asked.
“Of course not,” said Pidney. “When Mom tells the story, it was Dad that
gave her the disease. They both had it
at the same time.”
Valerie laughed, even though it was not funny.
Danny Murphy plumped down the big leather-bound album that he
had brought to the meeting. It stirred
up clouds of dust from the second-hand coffee table where he plumped it. It was fat with added pages, being one of
those loose-leaf albums held together by a decorative cord, one you could add
extra pages to.
“What’s that?” asked Valerie.
“That is the Sacred
Big Book of Pirate Secrets,” said Mary.
“I asked Danny to keep it for us until we needed it to look at.”
“What kind of secrets?” asked Pidney.
“The secret kind,” said Danny Murphy. “All of the Pirates wrote down things they
thought were important, wise, or… maybe wicked.”
“Did you read some of it?” Mary asked.
“I did,” said Danny.
“In several places in there, different Pirates wrote that seeing Sherry
Cobble naked was a very good thing.”
Pidney was suddenly blushing furiously. “Sherry Cobble? Isn’t that Brent’s…?”
“His ex-wife,” said Valerie.
“She was a nudist even back then.
I guess they all saw her when…”
“Yeah,” said Mary.
“About that. I got that book from
my brother Branch. Not everything in
there is necessarily put there by the original Pirates. My brother likes to tell funny stories.”
“He wrote down all the Pirate stories, didn’t he?” asked
Danny.
“Yes, he has a very big imagination.”
“Still,” said Danny, “it is written in different
handwritings. And I think Brent Clarke
signed his name to one of the naked-Sherry comments. And there’s a lot of other dumb stuff and
cool stuff in there as well.”
“Anything in there about Tiki idols and talking cats?” asked
Valerie with a laugh.
“Not yet,” answered Danny.
“I think that’s gonna be for us to write.”
“Is Ray coming today?” asked Pidney.
“He said he couldn’t.
It’s just the four of us,” said Mary.
“But we have more than just this silly thing to look at. Here’s the log book we talked about.”
She plumped the leather-bound volume down on the table next
to the Pirate book. It had an anchor
symbol embossed in gold on the front cover.
And the title, Log of the Reefer
Mary Celeste.
“Wowsers!” said Danny.
“Can we read it now?”
“I thought Valerie and I might read parts of it out loud,” said Mary. “There are parts of this that just beg to be read out loud. And Valerie’s Aunt is a librarian after all.”
Please buy a copy and help me get this Rosetti Award finalist in the Chaunticleer Reviews’ YA Novel-Writing Contest in 2014 to find an audience. It has to be worth at least $0.00, right?
Self-reflection is the bane of stupid people. Essentially, they don’t want to risk encountering evidence that they actually are stupid. It would shatter their world to learn that they are idiots and most of what they believe is true is actually wrong. This fact goes a long way towards explaining why the Republican Party in its current form even exists, let alone the actions of the current mutant Cheetos monster that pilots their agenda and hates healthcare, the Special Olympics, and Puerto Rico.
So, if I am doing a self–reflection piece today, then that proves I am not a stupid person, right? What do you mean you agree with that? Yes, I can actually hear you mentally answering my questions as you read this. And if you believe that, then you have proven that even relatively smart people like you and I are capable of stupid thinking.
I believe in some stupid things, even though I think I am not stupid.
An example of this stupidity factor is my lingering belief that I am a nudist. I mean, I am rarely ever nude any more. I keep most of me covered up constantly because when my psoriasis plaques dry out they tend to flake and itch and force me to scratch to the point of infected bloody sores.
Obviously this is not totally a photograph from the 60’s. That does not make it a total lie either, though.
I have been pretty much accepted as a member of the nudist community on Twitter. I enjoy the artful pictures of nude people they share with me. And since I did a couple of blog posts for nudist websites, there are actually completely nude pictures of me available on the internet. I can be found on Truenudists.com for one, if your eyes can stand the horror. But I have only been to a nudist park, the Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. one time as an actual nudist. I can tell you, it was a very hot day even though I was not wearing clothes. I am comfortable with nudity. I am comfortable around nude people. I fully accept it all as a non-sexual thing. But am I really a nudist? Or am I only playing at it? If you follow me on Twitter, then you know I don’t retweet pictures of naked people. I engage a lot with other writers there, and most of them are not also nudists, or even open-minded about naturism. I write about nudists in some of my books, but they are not about nudism, and most of them don’t even mention it. So, what good does it do me to think I am a nudist? Well, the very idea of it does a heckuva good job of embarrassing my wife and daughter. So, I do get some crazy-old-coot satisfaction out of it. Otherwise it simply proves that rational and otherwise intelligent people can be committed to irrational ideas.
I am also of the often mocked and ridiculed opinion that not only are alien beings from other worlds real, they are capable of space travel and have been visiting us for as long as there has been an us. I did not always believe this, however. Before I wrote my novelCatch a Falling Star I believed as Carl Sagan said on the original Cosmos that it is wrong to accept things without proof, and true results are testable. My novel was about aliens who watched a lot of Earther TV and learned to speak English from watching I Love Lucy reruns, I wanted to make the aliens different from humans, but at the same time, alike with humans in the most fundamental ways that translate easily into humor and relatability. Not all of my hero-characters were Earth humans.
Brekka the Telleron tadpole (also a nudist) with her friend Lester the man-eating plant (who only ate her once)
As I did research on the internet (a tool I didn’t have when I originally created the story in the 1970s), I found a ton of researchers and writers and con men and MUFON and the Disclosure Project and nuclear physicists and astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell who were all believers and mostly not stupid. Wow! What a huge and complicated hoax! Why would anybody believe , based on so little tangible evidence, and so much contradictory evidence, that the government’s position could possibly be right? I learned that I now believed, until significant further proof comes along, that I believe stupidly in alien visitors.
Today’s self-reflection post has now proven that I am a stupid old coot who thinks he is a nudist and an insightful conspiracy theorist. But the results of my look into the mirror have not made me upset about my stupidity. Maybe I am simply satisfied nudism is healthy and the universe is more complex than I am capable of understanding. Whatever the case, that’s enough with the mirror for today. You have to keep such dangerous weapons out of the hands of clowns.
Big MacIntosh finds himself to be the leader of a new group of My Little Ponies. 
Catch a Falling Star 
Uber Downers
The picture above is not a recent session of Uber driving. The truth is, I haven’t earned a single fare since the accident in August. Don’t get me wrong. I am still bankrupt and desperately in need of extra money, but I have had a long road of recovery and a serious loss of confidence to overcome.
And the mean streets of Dallas and the DFW Metroplex are easily as hairy to navigate as the scene above (Which is an artist’s recreation of events on Keller Springs Road while construction was still going on due to mini-mudslides.) It takes a good deal of confidence just to make your way along in a car and at the same time stay alive with a functional automobile beneath you. (Notice the little-boy passenger who was actually rescued by aliens rather than eaten by an alligator.)
And yet, you can’t avoid city driving. I have to do it every day even if I am not making any money from Uber. And there’s the rub. I was forced to retire early from teaching because my 45-stop-light-one-way commute was wearing me out. I experienced a black-out while driving to work one morning and narrowly avoided crashing into a light pole. I am not forbidden by doctors from driving, but diabetes and age are making long drives perilous. Signs were pointing to the end of enough energy to handle a classroom too. So, I retired on a pension and started Uber-ing for extra dollars. Any time I am planning to drive and feel the least bit light-headed, I have to change the plan and cancel the drive. I can still drive for Uber since I can drive whenever I’m actually well enough. And Uber is desperate as there is more work than there are available drivers much of the time.
Another rub is the fact that things have changed while I was forced into a break from Uber driving. Uber has gotten greedy. They have reduced fares in order to take business away from Lyft. But they didn’t take that reduction out of their profits. No, it had to come out of drivers’ pay. So, now if I do work up the nerve and energy to drive, I have to work harder just to make less than I did before. And we are independent contractors, not employees. We have to pay all our own expenses and we get royally screwed over at tax time since they don’t withhold any income tax.
I tried to do my first-in-a-long-while drive yesterday. I sat in my car, ready to go, for fifteen minutes before giving up due to “Still no requests.” And today I passed out after breakfast. So, maybe tomorrow, although possibly not then too. I really don’t know when I will see a giant armadillo driving a Cadillac again as I am on the road for Uber. I believe I must. But not today, and maybe not tomorrow.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney
Tagged as Uber