This old word-wizard is having a spot of trouble with his magical tools. More than just the usual cussing at crazy computer antics too.
I like to move the cursor as I write with the mouse pad on the keyboard, rather than the actual mouse. And this preference often leads to unintended zooms and shrinks when my thumbs stray too close to the hyper-sensitive zoom spots on the edges of the pad.
My alternative theory is that the laptop became both sentient and crazy because I dropped it on its micro-chipped little head one two many times. It now likes to mess with me constantly because the tiny computer fairies that move its thoughts around inside its dented brain are vindictive and vengeful.
So, yesterday it got way worse. Some Russian hacker sent me a link in the messages section of Twitter. I clearly saw that supposed YouTube video link was fake with the word “account” embedded in it. But the fairies took over the mouse pad and clicked on the evil little bugger without me even touching it again.
To make a long story short, so to speak, my computer is now sick with Russian computer flu again, and my anti-virus program is locked in the 26th hour of a life-or-death struggle.
I swear, of course, that this is all true just as I said it. And hopefully I come through it with all my passwords still secret. I am too old to be doing wizard war via computer. It makes me long for the old days of wands and potions. I had to write this post on my phone today.
Canto Five – Everyone
is Naked Under Their Clothes
The night was typical.
Six nasty old hens pecked Valerie’s hands as she searched under them for
eggs. The last one of those took a
girl-fist to the side of the head. That,
of course, didn’t faze the stupid hen.
Chickens apparently have their brains hidden safely in their butts. But chores always came to an end. Mom was always sympathetic about
chicken-stupidity-caused peck marks, and rubbed salve on them, visible wound or
not. Then it was time to finish any
homework needed, and up to bed. And Val
always slept naked under the quilts and comforters. She slept well because… well, because naked
was good when you were asleep.
Morning came, as mornings do, with a stupid rooster crowing
the sun up. Of course, if hens are
stupid, roosters, having the additional mental handicap of being male, were
stupid times ten. No, stupid times
twenty. Beau the rooster always got it
wrong. The sun was never actually up
until at least a half hour after the stupid rooster claimed it was up. Chicken pot pie. As Valerie pried her eyes open, she imagined
chicken pot pie cooking on Mom’s stove.
Beau-flavored chicken pot pie.
When she got to the bathroom, Daddy Kyle was already in
there shaving. No problem. Once again Valerie marched in naked as the
day she was born, though with considerably more hair on her head. She went straight to the shower, grabbed the
shampoo off the shelf, and twisted the water on to just the right level of warm
she always used. Warm, soapy water all
over your body… piles of foamy shampoo in your longish hair… it was a little
like Eden must have felt to Eve. And Eve
liked being naked too… at least, until the mistake with the snake. Of course, Eden had to end when the water
began to grow cold. Even in the
summertime the well could put out near freezing levels of cold once the water
heater was drained.
Kyle looked at her when she stepped out and grabbed a towel.
“No hot water left for me again, huh, Princess?”
“Sorry, Daddy. I need
a good hot shower in the mornings.”
“Shouldn’t you put on a robe or something, dearest? You come in here every morning completely
naked. You are getting too old for
that.”
“Old? Too old for what?”
“When a girl reaches a certain age, she starts to
change. When that happens, well…”
“But, Daddy, you are used to seeing me naked. You changed my diapers while Mommy and I were
still in the hospital after I was born.”
“I know… I know… And
it isn’t that there is anything wrong happening. It’s just…”
“You can’t be getting shy.
I’ve seen you naked too… a lot.”
Kyle’s face reddened.
He was apparently trying hard to stutter on.
“When a girl reaches a certain age… well, she…”
“Yeah, she changes. I
know Dad. Mom told me what to
expect. But honestly, I don’t even
really have boob bumps yet. I look like
a little boy when I’m naked… except I don’t have one of those water hoses to
pee with.”
She was standing with the towel in her hand, looking at him
while she was completely bare and being mildly amused by his extreme
discomfort. He finally sat down on the
closed cover of the commode, completely defeated. She decided to push things a little. She dropped the towel and went to sit on his
knee even though she was a little damp around the edges and quite sincerely
still naked.
“Princess…”
“I love you too, Daddy.”
“No… I mean, yes, I love you… but this is not a good thing
for a big girl to be doing. I worry you
are getting so used to being naked around a man like me… even though I’m your
Daddy… and one day… when boys, um… get curious… the way boys are… and, well…”
“If that’s what worries you, Daddy, no boy besides you has
ever seen me naked. And I won’t let a
yucky thing like that happen… until the time is right.”
“Okay, but promise me the time is not right until you are
thirty.”
“Daaaad! You know
everyone is actually naked under their clothes.
Everyone has a body… so no one should be ashamed of it.” Surely he recognized that bit of wisdom. After all, it is what he’d said to her on the
subject more than once.
“Okay. I trust you
and believe in you. But develop a little
modesty maybe? Put on a robe when you come in here. Or wait till I’m done.”
“Don’t you like me like this?”
“I love you. But you
are getting to an age where you being naked like this around me… well… begins
to get… um, uncomfortable. And your
little wet behind is making my pants wet.
I have work to do today, and now my pants have a wet spot shaped like
your butt.”
“Oh, Daddy!” She
leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
He put an arm around her shoulders and gave a squeeze.
“I hope we can start getting some better habits going,
Princess. We don’t want to get your mom
mad or anything.”
Valerie
hopped off his damp lap and padded over to retrieve the towel. She wrapped it around herself and then gave
him one more grin before she barefooted it out of the bathroom and toward her
waiting school clothes. You never knew
anything for certain. Maybe one day she
would just have to go to school naked… to show Daddy that… well, okay… maybe
not to school.
Nothing ever goes all well, or, even, all badly. Life is a roller coaster. Terrifying drops are followed by uplifting swoops. Good news about getting half of my deductible back from my auto insurance was quickly followed by a rise in my insurance payments that takes away more in the long run than I got back. Of course, that’s why banks and insurance companies are all part of the pirate class. They are going to take away more than they ever give as you sail the next wave or two.
My octogenarian parents survived the big chill from the polar vortex last week, only have to have to pay for a hospital bed for Dad for two extra days because the storm prevented him from going home.
Brekka didn’t get eaten by the man-eating plant because she wasn’t a human and so, didn’t taste good. He-she-or-it tried to eat her and had to spit her out again.
My stats on this website are like that too. One week there are a hundred views per day, the next week back to forty again.
But some things are constant. I am still writing every day. The stories keep coming, and when I go back and reread them, I find far fewer wincible warts and blunders than I ever used too. And they are mostly of the easily-fixed variety.
So, I am probably the last stupid goomer who should be writing this post. But I do have a lot to say on the subject that will more than fill a 500-word essay.
At my age and level of poor health, I think about ghosts a lot because I may soon be one. In fact, my 2014 novel, Snow Babies has ghosts in it. And some of the characters in it freeze to death and become snow ghosts. But it doesn’t work like that in real-world science. My ghosts are all basically metaphorical and really are more about people and people’s perception of life, love, and each other.
Ghosts really only live in the mind. They are merely memories, un-expectedly recalled people, pains, and moments of pandemonium.
I have recently been watching the new Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. It creeps me…
I was a comic book nut from a very early age. I started collecting comics in 1966 when I was ten years old. Almost as soon as I started collecting them, I began copying the drawings, copying Spiderman, Hawkeye, Captain America, Avengers, and Batman. I am a comic book lover, and I am also a comic book plagiarist. But I promise to use my own artwork and photographs to illustrate this blog post. After all, I am illustrating being a copy cat.
Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad in the style of artist Curt Swan in 1962.
My parents didn’t approve of kids with comic books. I desperately wanted Spiderman comic books and Avengers comic books, like the ones I read in the barbershop every time I was waiting for a haircut. But they had gotten wind of Frederic Wertham’s campaign against comic books two years before I was…
I suppose it was inevitable, given my spectacularly bad luck at marketing. that I would have to move into new ways of self-promoting and marketing my books. So, I decided I had to move on into the realm of YouTube video blogging. I can handle this, right? It is just talking to people on video. I don’t expect to be as skilled as some of the other content creators you find there, but if I can get some people to be foolish enough to click on my videos, I might… well… you know, sell a book.
My goodness! That was certainly more difficult than I thought it would be. Of course, I only did one take. After all, as a teacher. you don’t normally get do-overs. I know some of you do videos, and you know how to do them a lot smoother than that, and time them better too. But I am trying to teach a really old dog new tricks here. (My age expressed in dog years is 434.) I will get better with practice. And since the first video is always expected to be the worst video, I anticipate having nowhere to go but up.
Well, maybe the second one is worse. I can’t help it. I am old and not exactly media savvy. I know too that video editing software is available to make things better. But I don’t really have the time and money to spare on that right now. Seriously, even five dollars is too much to spend on this blog post. But perhaps it will add to my two huge paychecks from Amazon this month, one of $0.85 and the other at $0.35, to help me afford better in the future. Creativity can help you through a lot of things. But technology you can’t afford ain’t one of them. And I hope you weren’t too badly traumatized by my hairy old face. We’ll try again next week, next Thursday most likely, and hopefully do a bit better.
This is not a book review. I did finish reading this book in a 3-hour-end-of-the-book reading orgy, spending an hour last night, and two more early in the morning before the rest of my family was awake.
This is certainly not a book review. But I did read a Stephen King book, 1998’s Bag of Bones, which I picked up from the dollar sale shelves at Half Price Books. And I did love the story.
………………………………………………………………………This is not a book review. Instead, I want to talk about what a novelist can learn and reflect on by meta-cogitating over what this book reveals about King’s work habits and style and author’s voice.
Mike Noonan, the protagonist, is a novelist who writes books that routinely land in the numbers 10 through 15 slots in the New York Times Bestseller List. Obviously, this first-person narrative is coming directly out of King’s own writing experience. But, remember, this is not a book review. I am discussing what I have learned about how King puts a story together.
King sets a back-story for this novel that digs deep into the geographica and historica of the city in Maine where the story is set. The literal bag of bones revealed in the book’s climax is almost a hundred years old. And he takes a compellingly realistic tour back in time to the turn of the Twentieth Century more than once to reveal who the undead characters are and why they do what they do. One thing that makes a writer, a novelist, truly solid is his ability to set the scene, to grow the story out of the background in the most organic and realistic way possible. But this is not a book review. I am saying that King always does this with his books. And if you wish to write at that level, you must do that too. I know I am sincerely trying.
At the end of the story, he clearly tells the reader that he learned from Thomas Hardy that “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones”. So, he is definitely aware that a character is a construct that has to be crafted from raw materials. It takes a master craftsman to build one with the right words to make it live and breathe on the page. He does it masterfully in this book with several characters. The protagonist, the beautiful young love interest, the love interest’s charming three-year-old daughter who is nearly slain in a horrific manner at the end of the book… The living villain is a well-crafted bag of bones, as is the ghost, the actual bag of bones in the story. But this is not a book review. Most of his books, at least the ones I have read, have the same sort of masterful characters.
There is so much more to be learned about novel writing from this book. He literally shows you how ideas are captured, how they are developed into stories, how you overcome “writer’s block”, and Noonan’s book he is writing within this book is even used as an example of how to poetically advance the plot. But this is not a book review. You should read this book. It is a very good and scary piece of work. But you should read it because it shows us how to write and do it like a master.
Valerie was thinking about chores when she wandered out to
the machine shed. She hadn’t gone into
the house yet for a reason. Feed the
chickens and check for eggs. Put fresh
water in the water bottles. God, she
hated Mr. Boofoo chickens! …Err… un-cool
chickens. The ones that were going to
peck at her for checking their nests were all Mrs. But the other part fit. Lingering outside meant she didn’t have to
march out to the chicken house immediately.
She’d get it done… just not
yet.
As she wandered into the machine shed, she saw her Daddy
there, leaning up against the combine.
The engine housing was up and various parts were laid out on the white
concrete floor in a very careful rainbow of different size pieces, bolts, and
screws. Kyle was leaning up against the
combine with a paper in his hands. He
stared at it with red eyes. Had he been
crying or something? It looked like a
bill, this paper that seemed to be making him sad. Then, he suddenly wadded the thing up into a
ball and pitched it across the shed. It
plinked off the corrugated tin wall and banked directly into the empty barrel
there. Two points! But it did not make him happy. Then he noticed Val was watching him.
“Oh, hi, Princess.
You are looking lovely tonight.”
His face was happier by a mile and a quarter, but the redness of his
eyes still showed.
“Is something wrong, Daddy?”
“Of course not. You
haven’t done your chicken chores, though, huh?”
“Well, not yet… I
will go in a minute. I wanted to talk to
you first.”
“Oh? What about?”
That was the thing.
What about? She didn’t really
have a what about. She just sensed that
she needed to talk to him.
“You know how everyone thinks Pidney Breslow is going to be
a great football player this year?”
“Yeah. The big goof
is just a freshman and he’s already made the varsity team. What about him?”
She had to say something fast… but that usually meant saying
something stupid because she couldn’t think
fast.
“Do you think he would make a good boyfriend for me?”
“You are ten, Princess.
He’s fifteen or sixteen, isn’t he?”
“I’m eleven. Mom is
younger than you are.”
“Only by two years.
Not as big a deal.”
“You don’t like Pidney?”
“I like him fine.
But you are ten. Any boy who
thinks he’s going to be your boyfriend will have to get past two bear traps,
some electric fencing, and my shotgun loaded with rock salt.”
“Why rock salt?”
“It won’t kill him, but it will sting like hell.”
“Oh.”
“Besides, don’t Pidney and that girl Mary Phillips already
have a thing going on? They are always
together.”
“They are best friends.
They live next door to each other.
More like brother and sister.”
Kyle laughed. “Pid’s
a red-blooded American boy. They may say
friends to each other, but when they
are alone together, well… Dagwood
Phillips needs to have some rock salt in his
shotgun for that.”
“Nobody’s gonna shoot Pidney are they? I mean, I think I am in love with him.” There may have been a look of terror on
Valerie’s face at that point. She
really wasn’t sure.
“No, Princess. No
one is really going to shoot him. It’s
just a joke that fathers say whenever they are thinking about their daughters
and young men. Besides, I never figured
I’d have to shoot Pid anyway. I always
reckoned it was more likely to be somebody like that Murphy brat.”
“You’d shoot Danny?”
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that one.
Kyle laughed. He
walked over to his daughter, put his big greasy hand on her neck and gently
pulled her face up next to his heart.
“I love you, Princess.
I would never intentionally do something to break your heart. But I will do everything I can to protect
your heart from being broken. Just try
not to like the boys I might have to shoot for something, okay?”
He said that last with a laugh that told her he loved her and was only playing with her. Daddy was her real handsome Prince.
Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad in the style of artist Curt Swan in 1962. 
Idealism
Idealism (a poem)
When I was but a stupid boy
I had a stupid thought
That if you told a story well
And that story was easily bought
That you could save yourself from hell
If the story was rightly wrought
And the telling would end in joy.
………………..
But when I was an awkward youth
I tried my tale to spin
And awkwardly my words went wrong
And my story failed to win
And readers sang that critical song
And laughter crept right in
And my steering was not strong
My story was uncouth.
……………….
But as a mostly mature man
I tried to tell the truth
And live my life by a mature code
And profit from lessons of youth
And composed a much more stable ode
That rhymed while showing tooth
And defended my small abode.
I executed my story’s plan.
Finally, I wisely became real old
And I warily and wisely began to lie
I made of life a serious joke
And ate my small piece of the pie
I laughed and watched the faces in the smoke
As the fires began to die
And I made the point as I wisely awoke
My story is now told.
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