Here is the complete Chapter 1 at this link; https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2018/11/24/hidden-kingdom-chapter-1-complete/
Hidden Kingdom – Chapter 2 adding page 4
Filed under comic strips, fairies, Hidden Kingdom, Paffooney
Simple Christmas Gifs
It’s that time of year again.
No, that is not a typo. I only meant “gifts” in pun form. Sometimes you don’t feel much like talking and, after all, the “picture can be worth a thousand words”, especially if the picture moves.
As you can see, I am spending the day with the Ghost of Christmases Past. Have a wonderful holiday, however you may celebrate it. I will offer more goofy stuff by Mickey after the Ghost of Christmases Future gets done with me.
December 22, 2018 · 8:38 pm
Saddle Up the Rooster
If you are wondering why a crazy old man who writes a daily blog would re-photograph and post a picture he did thirty years ago of a naked fairy princess riding on a chicken with her bug-boy boyfriend, then the answer is simple. He is ill again. Possibly coming down with the flu or something equally horrible and potentially fatal. And thinking is hard for him. He cannot even manage to shift his feverish head into first-person point of view. So enjoy the picture and save the complaints for when he is smarter again and answering with a cool head… or possibly when he croaks and becomes a ghost writer.
The picture is modeled on reality, by the way. And that is not merely the fever talking. He made the picture of the girl from a real nudist girl riding on a horse instead of a chicken. The rooster was also real. But probably not as large as portrayed here. Of course, the bug-boy was actually the girl’s older sister, and not entirely green. Oh, and the saddle that fits over chicken wings is entirely imaginary. So, there you have the proof. Real! 100% real! …well, if you subtract 65% for vivid imaginings anyway.
I am sure that once the goofy artist and blogger is healthy again… or relatively not dead in any case… he will be totally embarrassed at having posted this Paffooney picture and the accompanying positively perforated prose. So forgive him his indisposition, and better things will come tomorrow.
How the Smurfs Averted Fascism
As things heat up for old Trumpy, I decided to re-post this old Smurf tale for no good reason whatsoever.
Trumpy Smurf and General Kelly Smurf, his chief of staff
Right now I think this country needs a good lesson in how to avoid a fascist dictatorship. And we can’t look to 1930’s Germany to get an example. They didn’t avoid it. They got Hitler even though he did not have a Twitter account to use for making himself der Fuhrer.
So let’s tell a story about fascists and infringe on copyrights at the same time by telling you a Smurf story.
There was a time in Smurf village when their local politics became entirely too polarized into only two factions. One side was made up of the good-time Smurfs who had all the money. They called themselves the Pub-Lickins because they liked to win elections by cheating and through massive donations from the richest Smurfs among them, and also because they loved to lick up all the liquor at…
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The Baby Werewolf
My latest book is now for sale on Amazon. Here’s the paperback link. https://www.amazon.com/Baby-Werewolf-Michael-Beyer/dp/1791895379/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1545236655&sr=8-2&keywords=michael+beyer+books+the+baby+werewolf
Its companion book is this one, Recipes for Gingerbread Children. The two books happen at the same time with the same characters and events. But it comes to the story from different viewpoints and weaves different portraits of what happened.
Here is the link for this companion book. https://www.amazon.com/Recipes-Gingerbread-Children-Michael-Beyer/dp/1790129915/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1545237129&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+beyer+books+recipes+for+gingerbread+children
The Kindle e-book version is cheap, costing only $1.50. It’s even free to read if you subscribe to Amazon Prime.
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Filed under announcement, novel
Novel News
My novel, The Baby Werewolf, is in the process of being published. The Kindle e-Book version is already approved. The paperback is pending.
I was actually beginning to worry that I might not live long enough to get this one published. But it has turned out to be a very good book. I am pleased with the story, themes, and sense of depth and complexity. It is a young adult novel, basically because the characters are young adults. Well, thirteen and fourteen-year-olds, actually. So, almost adults.
Todd Niland, an eighth-grade farm boy, and fan of black-and-white horror movies like The Wolfman, is the main character and first first-person narrator of the book. He is in love with a freckle-faced girl and too shy to ever tell her how he feels. He has a keen sense of adventure and longs for the day when he can do something heroic.
Sherry Cobble is his girlfriend’s best friend, and ends up being the first girl Todd sees naked. But that’s because she and her twin sister Shelly are both nudists and like to walk around with nothing covering them but skin and wind and sunshine. She is the one who decides she is going to help Todd discover romance and the secret fact that the girl he loves actually feels the same way about him. Sherry becomes the third of the trio of narrators who tell this story.
Torrie Brownfield is the second narrator of the story. And even though he is, in some ways, the werewolf of the title, he is not really a werewolf. He is a boy with a condition called hypertrichosis, a hair-growth genetic disorder like the one that created P.T. Barnum’s sideshow sensation, Jo Jo the Dog-faced Boy. And he has a tremendously difficult time finding his place in a world that sees him as a freak and even fears him.
I find my computer acting up as I try to write this, so time for different measures. More about this matter soon.
Filed under Uncategorized
Today’s IRS Rant (but please don’t garnish my pension)
Last year at about this time, the lovely russet potato with a wig of uncooked spaghetti and a heart of black obsidian who we elected to run this country passed a tax bill that gave huge tax cuts to some people who didn’t need the money and a small amount to others in the middle class. When I complained about the tax bill on Facebook, my Iowegian conservative friends pointed out that if I didn’t like the tax cut, I could always send the money back to the government.
But, no, I couldn’t.
You see, I didn’t get anything back from the government. In fact, they wanted $1,300 more. The tax bill made adjustments to withholding requirements for pensions. And because Don Jr. wanted to get millions back last year, the russet potato made the tax bill retroactive to cover all of 2017.
So, I should’ve paid off what I owed last month when the IRS debited my account for $200. Then, the first of this month, they debited again, By my calculations, this time was for money I didn’t even owe. $200 dollars is a big bite, especially when I am paying off a Chapter 13 bankruptcy and three hospital bills.
So, today, I called the IRS customer service line, where the telephone operator put me through to what was apparently the proper office out of the 300,000 layers of the IRS to find out what went wrong. I got put on hold for only 30 minutes (shorter than the hour and a half I waited the last time I called) and then I got cut off about 15 minutes in. So, I tried finding out what my tax bill looked like from irs.gov. This involves setting up an account which I failed to successfully do last time. This time I tried to verify I really am me with, first, my credit card (which I am paying them off with) and they didn’t accept it because it is technically a debit card, and then with two of the account numbers to our mortgage loans, which didn’t take because my wife’s name is on the mortgage and mine is not. So, I am not me, and three failures mean I can’t try again until tomorrow. Perhaps they will identify me by my shoe size tomorrow.
The conclusion I am forced to draw is this; when you owe them money, the IRS is the most efficient and dangerous organization in existence. But when they owe me money, they are suddenly the Three Stooges.
Filed under angry rant, Paffooney
Dave Barry
Here’s an old post about an old humorist who isn’t me, but who I wish was me… or I wish I was him… or him is good and me is good but him as me would be good-er… or something like that.
dave barry
I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea. They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins. Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight. I can barely see what I am typing. You don’t believe me? Here’s what it looks like at the moment;
They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features. Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French. They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry. And why do you suppose that is?
Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension. He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early…
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December 17, 2018 · 4:19 pm
Lighting Candles in the Darkness
I recently got word that my octogenarian father is in the hospital again for the third time in the last three months. I am fairly sure the end of my father’s long and epic life is near. And though I have basically come to terms with not only the coming end of his life but my own life as well, human beings, real ones, were never meant to live forever.
But I do not welcome the coming sadness, never-the-less. There will always be something in the mysteries of death and darkness that is to be feared… and avoided for as long as possible.
One of the most important avoidance measures is to light a few candles. A candle holds back the darkness for a while. And of course, I mean that in only the most metaphorical of multiple senses.
There are many ways to light a candle. I have lit three in this essay. I lit them with my ink pen and my drawing skill (modest though it may be). And drawing alone is not the sum total of the ways a candle may be lit.
Each of the novels I have written is also a candle. They may be useless piles of pages that nobody ever reads, but they are the summation of my already long life and work as a writer. I may not be well known, and probably am not as talented as the better-known writers, but I really do have something to tell. And being published where someone may eventually… even accidentally read some of it, there is no telling exactly how far into the darkness my light will reach.
And the even-more-amazing fact about the reach my candlelight into the darkness has is this, my candles were only lit because my father first lit the candle that is me. As I have passed the candle-lighting responsibility on to those who read my writing, and to my children who have many more candles of their own to light.
I love you, Dad. Raymond L. Beyer. My next novel is dedicated to you. Let’s continue to hold off the darkness for as long as we can… together.
Really Bad Jokes
Here’s a good old post to make you groan about the depths of Mickian humor.
If you have the bad habit of reading this particular blog more than once, then you are probably aware that I used to be a public school teacher. Even worse, I used to be a middle school English teacher. Aagh! Seventh graders! It explains a lot about how life has warped my intelligence, personality, and world view. It also explains somewhat where I found such a fountain-like source for some of the worst jokes you ever heard.
Now, as to the question of why I have chosen in my retirement early-onset senility to become a humor-blogger… well, that is simply not something I can answer in one post… or even a thousand. But kids are the source of my goofball clown-brain joking around.
Kid-humor, you see, is stunted and warped in weird ways by the time period you are talking about. The eighties, nineties, two thousands, and the tens are…
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