If I never earn a dime from it, it is a wonderful feeling to see so many years of your life finally result in a book in print.
Time Travellers
In role playing games I was always willing to go where no other game master has gone before. Such was the case with the role-playing game Traveller and the matter of time travel. No rules existed in the rule book to cover time travel. But I didn’t let that stop me. I made them up as we went along.
I got a boost when one of my players wanted to create a character based on Dr.Who. The British series played on Friday nights on PBS in the 1980’s. But that particular player, though very creative, was not a precisely cerebral type of kid. He spelled it “W-H-O-E”. So, forever after, we referred to the character as Doctor Hooey.
Good old Hooey was always getting the group into impossible situations that took a great deal of thinking to get out of again. He had a penchant for crashing time machines. And when he got the destination right, he would get the time wrong on the year, century, or millennia. And when he got the time right, well, what do you know? He got the place wrong. The players never seemed to realize that I was taking them to planned adventures no matter what the dice rolls supposedly said.
Many such adventures would encounter weird and wild characters who would inevitably also become time travelers, whether fellow travelers for the sake of goodness and light, or as recurring villains.
For example, Brech was a student space ninja traveling through space and time with the teacher characters among the players. And by time traveling, they ran afoul of the Revenant, a time-traveling cyborg assassin who stalked the players for accusations of serious “time crimes”. The cyborg turned out to be young Brech’s future self. Which proved lucky. Brech was able to establish a psychic link with his future self just as the cyborg was about to execute everybody, and Brech thereby turned a deadly enemy into an ally.
We tended to adapt movie characters who were time travelers into important NPC’s, and they did not all come from the Dr. Who show. The characters shown above were Doc Brown from Back to the Future and Professor H. G. Wells.
When I stole characters from Dr. Who, like I did with Lady Romana here, I tended to adapt them totally to my own game universe. Romana was nothing like her TV counterpart. In fact, only the name was the same.
We soon had so many time-traveling characters in their different time machines that we had to organize it all. This we did by founding the organization known as the Time Knights of Gallegos.
And we needed a leader to coordinate the various initiatives through time and space. For this we chose a specific NPC, the boy super genius, Ryan Beowulf. He was a charming super-brained perpetual ten-year-old who worked with his own future self, the thousand-year-old Time King Beowulf.
Traveller, it seemed, was never more fun than when we were free to go rock and rolling through both space and time. We had some harrowing adventures and even made use of my own vast storehouse of useless historical knowledge that can wow ’em in the moment and make them wonder why they needed to know about that upon further reflection. Time traveling, like fez’s and bow ties, is cool.
Filed under characters, Dungeons and Dragons, imagination, Paffooney, science fiction
Life as a Texican
We here in Texas are still the way God made us.
Stop cringing so much when you hear me say it. Texas is where God goes to spend the Winter. Everything is practically perfect in Texas. The weather never varies more than 60 degrees in any single hour. Our tornadoes and hurricanes are way bigger and way more destructive than you get in other States. You think your school systems are producing learners who are spectacularly dumb? They don’t even begin to compare with learning levels here in the Lone Star State. Why, we are the Lone Star State mainly because we don’t want too many stars for our college graduates to count. You think health care in your State is poor quality and high priced? We have million dollar mortuaries that are profitably close, no more than a block or two, from every hospital. We break records in the number of bankruptcy filings over hospital bills while our health insurance providers are making record-breaking profits! You can’t beat that with a stick! No, I mean it. Look how big my stick is, and I couldn’t successfully beat it.
And we choose only the best politicians to represent us. Senator Ted Cruz is not only a former front-runner in the 2016 Presidential race for the GOP nomination, he’s the Zodiac Killer in addition to that. Just ask the internet. If the internet says it, it must be true. And Representative Louie Gohmert of the Texas First District is so bald you can be blinded by the Texas sunshine reflecting off the top of his stupid head. And his name reminds you of TV’s Gomer Pyle, someone Louie is almost as smart as. And he’s a Texas Tea Party Congressman who does Tea Parties so well he makes the Mad Hatter jealous. And Senator John Cornyn tells jokes that make country people laugh. After all, he has “corny” in his danged name!
And Texas motorists are among the best in the country. No, check that, they are the best! No other State has the kind of yearly highway kill score that Texas has. Believe me, pedestrians routinely get bounced off the hood and into ditches, slow-going vehicles and semi trucks are routinely forced off overpasses to beautiful fiery displays of chaos and carnage below. Texas killer grandmas in their shiny Lincoln Continentals with the longhorn horns on the grill will kill you deader than the local rocks. Nobody drives faster and more aggressively than a Texas killer grandma.
We have way more millionaires and billionaires than other stupid States. And we outscore them all in the numbers of poor people and immigrants holding down three jobs at once and still needing food stamps to live.
Yes, everything’s bigger in Texas. We’ve got all y’all beat all to heck!
Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, irony, Paffooney, satire
Weekend Fun with Heart Attacks
I’m not sure why I decided to have a heart attack over the holiday, but my body decided it was time and didn’t really give me a chance for input. I should qualify it a little bit. I didn’t have an actual heart attack according to the final tests, but the preliminary tests were all red flags and shouting.
So, I woke up in the middle of the night on Wednesday night with a pain in the left side of my chest. My left arm was hurting and tingling with numbness.
Now, it is not something new. I have arthritis in my rib cage and I tend to sleep on my left side. So, although the pain was concerning, it was not reason to make a middle-of-the-night dash to the emergency room. I eventually got back to sleep on my right side. I was sluggish and ill the next morning, but I got a lot of house cleaning done and the chest pains were gone.
Thursday night the pains returned, but still not different than the arthritis pains that sent me to the cardiologist before, and not nearly as harsh and painful as the night before. Again the pain went away in the day.
Friday night I picked up my son the Marine at the airport. He was home on holiday leave. We talked about my chest pains over a meal at I-hop. He pulled rank on me and vowed to take me to the ER. I talked him down to Primacare because it’s cheaper, still not believing it was real heart pain.
The next morning Primacare didn’t go so well. The EKG machine there predicted a major earthquake… or a typhoon, or something… and the Prima-doctor got all serious in the face. “Do you want me to call an ambulance? We are required to make the offer in these situations.”
“No, no. My son is with me and can drive me to the Emergency Room. I promise I will go.”
And so I did.
At the ER they are very concerned that you don’t have anything in your pockets. They quickly dressed me in a hospital gown and then surgically removed $200 (due to the wondrous way my insurance company has of not paying their portion of the bill). So, lighter by that amount, they immediately hooked me up to their own EKG machine. I had so many patches attached to the hair on my chest that I was guaranteed to be bald-chested when it came time to rip them all off again. Then they repeated the EKG testing done earlier in the day. I swear, the same squirrel that was visiting Primacare when I was there earlier, sneaked into their EKG machine too and vigorously jumped up and down. So, there it was. The proof they needed that I had too much money left in my bank account. And so they put me inside the hospital.
Once inside, they rigged me up so one arm could be crushed by a BP sleeve every two hours, or more if they felt like it, and the other arm could be drained of blood so that they could tell if there was any further money in my bank account.
Three days later, the enzymes in my blood said that what I had was mysterious and not a heart attack. The stress test I had on Monday nearly killed me, and told them that I didn’t have enough money left in my bank account to keep in the hospital any longer. I got out still wearing my arm band and allergy warning band as reminders that I really, really didn’t want to go back, but life is like that, and I still don’t know what caused it all, or if I will have to return to deal with it later on.
Filed under autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, healing, health, humor, illness, Paffooney
Aeroquest… Canto 4
Canto 4- Don’t Go Here, the Outposts
As the Leaping Shadowcat slowed and dropped out of jump space, Ged and Ham got their very first look at a world beyond the borders of charted and well-known stars. Don’t Go Here was a planet orbiting a spectral class K orange star. It was a bright green-and-brown world with relatively small patches of blue sea. The surface was cloaked in a thick atmosphere, and many cloud swirls played across its bright face. There were two small moons and a pair of apparently lifeless space stations. One looked like an abandoned space port with nothing docked there. The second was obviously a Grange station, filled with greenery under glass and a few artificial lights showing on the night side.
Trav came up from the quarterdeck where he’d been tending to the Nebulon Princess and her son. He looked out through the portal and examined the electronic overlay.
“Life signs on that old greenhouse?”
“Yes, Trav,” said Ged, “One life sign. It appears to be canine.”
“Somebody left their doggie aboard that old wreck?”
“It appears that the Grange Station for this planet is still working,” said Ham. He smiled, which tended to make him strikingly handsome. “It’s probably automated, so if there’s food growing there, it could be priceless to us.”
“We will have to board it,” said Ged, “and take possession. But we still need to talk about your treasures, Goofy.”
“Hmm, uh… well, yes. What do you want to know?”
“First of all, the Princess and her son. You intend to set them free.” Ged was not asking a question.
“Yes, um… well, You know she could be a very valuable asset to us.”
“In what way?”
“There’s a very good chance we will run into Nebulons out here. She could negotiate for us.”
“Trav,” said Ham, “she doesn’t speak our language.”
“Oh, right… But I can teach her.”
“All right, Goof,” said Ged, nodding solemnly, “but your first task is to make her understand she is not our slave.”
“Oh. Sure.”
“Now,” said Ham, “what about the blue box?”
“Blue… um, uh… box?” stuttered Trav, obviously faking it. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“What’s in the box that Tron and the pirates wanted so badly?”
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
“Try me.”
Trav looked into Ham’s laughing eyes. Ged could see how much of a strain telling the truth was on the little one-eyed liar.
“It’s an Ancient Artifact from the Devil’s Rift. It’s called the Crown of Stars.”
“Oh, you’re kidding me!” shouted Ham with a laugh. “The fabled device that gives a man the power of God?”
“That would be it, yes.” Trav cast his eye downward.
“You’ve heard of this thing, Ham?” Ged asked.
“It’s a liar’s tale from the Imperial Rim. An archeologist apparently uncovered a high-tech site from the time of the so-called Ancients. He supposedly found this device with three bright crystals on it. When he put it on his head, it melted his brain and gave him Godlike powers. He had to be killed by the Imperial Navy to prevent him taking over and ruling the galaxy.”
“So it isn’t real?” asked Ged.
“Of course it’s real!” said Trav hotly. “It’s in the blue box in the bag I brought aboard, and I’ve seen it work without being on anyone’s head.”
“What does it do?” said Ham skeptically.
“Well, I don’t know exactly. But it can light up a generator and create power even on a wrecked ship. It started up and repaired the scuttled spaceship we stole it from at the Mingo Downport.”
“Well, I think if it can provide power, it will help us reclaim this old spaceport,” said Ham, still sneering at the idea of the ancient artifact.
Outside the main viewport, they were coming into docking range with the orbiting outstation. It was a spoked wheel with four main docking ports. The nearly obscured markings on the outside indicated the Galtorrian Colonial Service. Everything was written in the squiggly letters of the Galtorrian script.
Filed under aliens, novel, NOVEL WRITING, science fiction
Hospital Selfie
Well, being in the hospital with heart monitoring machines is not the way I wanted to start the holiday season. But I didn’t have a heart attack after all. And it gives me fiction fuel for the future.
Filed under Uncategorized
The Current Cartoon Administration…
I don’t need to tell you what I really think about Trump, because I don’t use language that bad in public, and because cartoons capture what I think better than anything else does (except maybe the Mueller investigation… hopefully that captures Trump’s antics better.
It is really hard to believe all the fascist Shiite that is going on.
Filed under angry rant, cartoon review, cartoons, feeling sorry for myself, humor, politics
Now on Amazon
For this holiday I am thankful for the chance to break into print. My best novel to date is now available in Kindle E-book and paperback versions. I have a lot more to say in the near future about the ever-changing nightmare world of publishing, but for now, I am happy. And I will be even happier if you read my book.
Filed under announcement
Snow Babies at Last!
I tested out Kindle Direct Publishing through Amazon and will soon have the best book I have ever written out in paperback and e-book forms. I had a contract to publish this with PDMI Publishing and then the publishing company died before my book was actually in print. I tested out KDP with Stardusters and Space Lizards. I can now hold a copy of that book in my hands. That went OK and I learned how to make the next book better. So be looking for an announcement soon that it is for sale on Amazon.
Filed under announcement, Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 
An Unexpected Gift
This post is a movie review for Thor : Ragnarok , though I don’t really plan on talking about the movie very much. It was an excellent comic book movie in the same tongue-in-cheek comedy tradition as Guardians of the Galaxy. It made me laugh and made me cheer. It was the best of that kind of movie. But it wasn’t the most important thing that happened that night.
You see, I spent the weekend in the hospital thinking I had suffered a heart attack during the Thanksgiving holiday. I thought I was facing surgery at the very least. I knew I might have had an appointment to play chess with the Grim Reaper. It is a lot to worry about and drain all the fun out of life.
Well, one of the things that happened that day, Tuesday, my first full day out of the hospital and, hopefully, out of the woods over heart attacks, was that I received my new replacement bank card because my old one had a worn out, malfunctioning chip in it. So, I took my three kids to the movie at the cheapest place we could find. I tried to run my bank card for the payment, and it was summarily declined. I had activated it previously during the day, and there was plenty of money in the account compared to the price, but it just wouldn’t take. So I had to call Wells Fargo to find out whatever the new reason was for them to hate me. It turned out that it had already been activated, but a glitch had caused it to decline the charge. While I was talking to the girl from the Wells Fargo help desk, the lady who had gotten her and her husband’s tickets right before us put four tickets to the movie in my hand.
The middle-aged black couple had lingered by the ticket stand before going in to their movie just long enough to see a sad-looking old man with raggedy author’s beard and long Gandalf hair get turned down by the cheap-cinema ticket-taking teenager because the old coot’s one and only bank card was declined. They were moved to take matters into their own hands and paid for our tickets themselves.
That, you see, was the gift from my title. Not so much that we got our movie tickets for free, but that the world still works that way. There are still good people with empathetic and golden hearts willing to step in and do things to make the world a little bit better place. The gift they gave me was the reassurance that, as bad and black as the world full of fascists that we have come to live in has become, it still has goodness and fellow feeling in it. People are still moved to pay things forward and make good on the promise to “love one another”. I did not have a chance to thank them properly. I was on the phone with Wells Fargo girl when it happened. The only thing that couple got out of their good deed was thank-yous from my children and the knowledge that they had done something wonderful. I plan to pay it forward as soon as I have the opportunity. Not out of guilt or obligation, but because I need to be able to feel that feeling too at some point.
I do have one further gift to offer the world.
After we got home from the movie, I opened an email that contained the cover proof for my novel, Magical Miss Morgan. Soon I will have that in print also if I can keep Page Publishing from messing it up at the last moments before printing. It is a novel about what a good teacher is and does. It is the second best thing I have ever written.
Sometimes the gifts that you most desperately need come in unexpected fashion.
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Filed under commentary, compassion, happiness, healing, humor, illness, movie review, NOVEL WRITING, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as gifts of love, goodness in people, paying it forward, Thor Ragnarok