Revenge of the Long-Suffering Lawn Gnomes
I am a bit depressed about events that I don’t have permission to tell you about. It isn’t something entirely bad, but it isn’t entirely good either. So, like all the other things that conspire to make my life miserable, I will blame it on lawn gnomes.
Yes, lawn gnomes are evil, and spread their misery to my yard and home. Back in the seventies we were shown the secret life of gnomes in the best-selling book by Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen called simply Gnomes. What they don’t tell you in this book is that gnomes are closely related to gremlins. Gremlins tear apart engines on airplanes and cause all sorts of random bad stuff. Gnomes could care less about airplanes, but they do care about lawns and green growing stuff. Thus, the nightmare in my yard.
On July 29th the city of Carrollton notified us that we were in violation of yard maintenance regulations. The lawn is overgrown and the lawnmower is broken down. No matter what I do to repair the mower and get it restarted, nothing works. I am pretty nearly sure that the gnomes have clogged the air intakes in the engine, and they secretly re-clog it every time I clean it. They also do something to the trees. Now, I know, even though Ronald Reagan never quite figured it out, that trees themselves are not evil, and do not cause pollution. But gnomes have a strange relationship with trees, living in secret underground houses underneath the roots. The past three years the trees in my yard have been pumping out dead leaves to bury everything in our yard under three layers of leaves and old acorns. Now, this is rendered particularly suspicious by the fact that the trees are almost all live oaks, evergreen trees that have green leaves all year round. How can trees like these lose so many leaves on an almost constant basis? Gnomes. It has to be gnomes. The trees are not the only hyperactive plants filling the yard with raging greenery and detritus. Johnson grass, dandelions, thistles, and other weeds fill every corner of the yard.
Now, I know I need to keep the yard clean and better groomed than I have managed. It becomes hard when you have six incurable diseases, including diabetes, arthritis, COPD, psoriasis, BPH, and hypertension. I am too often in pain or feeling ill to get the yard work done. So why can’t the kids or the wife do the work? I ask them this often. Apparently yard work is a man’s work and only a man can do it, a point my wife would never be caught dead making except for the fact that she would have to do the work if she didn’t argue that. So, there it is. I have a large amount of work to do that will not stay done, and the lawn gnomes, for their own amusement, keep making it more and more impossible to do. And that is definitely not why I am depressed, but it is all I am allowed to say. (And, no, the gnomes are not holding my dog hostage.)
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Toonerville, the Current City Overview
Mm-hmm, Toonerville is a town I founded and built. I know that sounds strange, but I can explain. It used to be my HO model train layout. It used to be, when I owned a house in Cotulla, Texas, I had room for a four by twelve sheet of plywood on which to lay track, wire it up, build scenery, and run my model trains (and two different versions of the Toonerville Trolley).
Toonerville is named after Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Folks comic strip that appeared in newspapers from 1915 until the 1950’s. A book of Fox’s collected Toonerville cartoons became my most prized possession during my college days, the second half of the 1970’s. More than just a favorite book, it became my religion, my Bible, influencing not only my art style and my cartoon stories, but my very perception of small town life, the only life I knew from 1956 to 1975.
When we moved from South Texas to the Dallas area in 2004, my city of Toonerville had to be torn down, boxed up, and transported. Sadly, it never got set up as an HO train layout again. Now it is relegated to the tops of three bookcases. In addition to train engines that mostly still run (though I am guessing, not basing that on experiment), it includes model houses and city buildings that I put together myself and painted, plaster buildings that I have painted, and other nick-knack-shelf buildings of approximately the right size that I have re-painted (including re-painted Christmas, Easter, and Halloween ornaments, plus one house-shaped candle that my sister-in-law gave me). Oh, yes, you can plainly see the portions of my Pez dispenser collection that sit grumpily amid the streets of Toonerville.
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The Magician’s Spyglass
Here are some of the writing projects I am working on and where they stand in relation to completion;
Snow Babies has been accepted by PDMI Publishing. I signed the contract this week. It will become a book both in print and in e-book form. It is the story of Valerie Clarke (in the Paffooney with the barn and the snow) and four boys who have run away from foster care who are all trying to survive a deadly blizzard in Norwall, Iowa. I like to say it is a comedy about freezing to death, but it is also much more than that. You can look for that book to be published within 12 months.
Superchicken is a novel I started writing in the 1980’s. It is about the secret origins of the infamous gang of Norwall Pirates, a secret society of young boys dedicated to 4-H softball, fighting evil, and seeing girls naked. Edward-Andrew Campbell, in the Paffooney, is the title character. Superchicken is his nickname. He struggles to make a place for himself in the close-knit Iowa farm town where he is the new kid, the weird kid, and the only kid so gone on the subject of superheroes that he doesn’t even notice when the Cobble sisters trick him into going to a nudist camp with them just so they can get revenge and a naked picture of him. It is not a comedy about freezing to death because, fortunately for Edward-Andrew, it happens in the summer of 1974. I have finished the manuscript and it has been revised twice. It is time to start submitting the dang thing.
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is a novel half-finished in rough draft form. It is a novel starring Orben Wallace, one of the heroes of Catch a Falling Star and Tim Kellogg, son of an English teacher and also the Grand and Glorious, Mostly Notorious Leader of the Norwall Pirates. It is a comedy about science and never really knowing what it true and what is actually possible until it has been proven by experiment. The primary theories involved include the impossibility of time travel, turning rabbits into people, defeating evil government secret agents who want to take away your Tesla ray and intelligent machines, and the answer to the very important questions; “Are all people good?” and “Will you be my friend?” I hope to have this thing finished shortly after Superchicken gets submitted to a publisher (or two… or seven).
I have also started a novel about being a teacher and fighting the good fight in the war against ignorance. It is called (as a working title) The Magical Miss Morgan. It, of course, stars the teacher in the Paffooney, Miss Francis Morgan, who is really me (in a very weird and almost perverted sort of way). I have two Cantos done on this one. It may be the next big inspiration after The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.
The final bit of nutbread I am going to give you a taste of here in this goofy future-looksee postie thingie is the sequel to Catch a Falling Star. I have written four Cantos in this one (Canto is the inexplicable name I use for chapters in my goofy books). It follows the aliens after their failed invasion of Earth as they reach and are forced to colonize an even more dangerous planet than Earth (if you can get your mind around such an impossible concept). It will be called Stardusters and Lizard Men. I have to confess that I do indeed write more than one story at the same time. It will probably continue to grow as I write The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and will probably be finished some time after I finish The Magical Miss Morgan.
Now, if you are one of those brave, weird people that actually make it this far in this silly post, I hope I have caught your interest in at least one of these ideas. If not, I may have scared you off and permanently scarred you. I apologize. But if you didn’t read this far, I don’t apologize, because I didn’t actually apologize until the very end. I’M SORRY! OKAY?
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What Mickey’s Magical Tome says about Horror and Fear
I never could watch only the start of the monster movie, the late-night Saturday creature feature. Once begun, I had to see it to the very end. I had to know the evil was ended and the horror was defeated.If I did not find out, then nightmares ensued. The night I watched John Carpenter’s original Halloween, I had to get up in the night and check the closet fifteen times. I almost didn’t survive number thirteen, nearly dying from dread, and the light stayed on for the rest of the night. I need to see that which scares me in the light of reason and hope. I need to face my fears and overcome them with mental and spiritual power. No story is ever wholly unreal, and no enemy stalks me forever without end.
(You probably can’t read it, but my magical tome contains a list of magic words, words that mean “magic”, incantations against the fear of the dark.)
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One… Two… Three Little Things!
One thing you can always count on when you read something by Stuart R. West is a good laugh. He has such a firm grasp on the awkwardness and life-or-death embarrassments of being a teenager in high school. I know what I’m talking about. As a teacher I have been laughing at teenage troubles for 31 years now. Tex, Olivia, Elspeth, and the gang are so realistic that I could name the kids in real life they correspond to… well, except maybe for the witch thing… and the ghost thing… and the opening the gateway to Hell thing… Oy! Two things you can always count on when you read something by Stuart is a good laugh and some utterly creepy and scary supernatural hoodoo. Yes, ghosts in the boys’ restroom… undead possession of teenage female souls… sleep spells that can save your life and electrical spells that can blow out the lights in the whole city… there’s a real creep-a-thon going on here. And there’s a little thing about an unsolved murder… Oy! Oy! Oy! Okay, Three things you can always count on when you read something by Stuart…! Yeah, there’s the whodunit factor too. I used to be pretty clever at reading Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie… I knew the solution to the mystery nine times out of… well, a thousand. But Stuart always fools me. I didn’t get this one, and I’m betting you won’t either. So… now, wait a minute! Is it four things? Five? I’m going math-challenged here! Anyway, if you know anything about good books, you will like this book, second installment in the trilogy, at least as much as I did.
This is a review of Stuart R. West’s book Tex, and the Gangs of Suburbia, available at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Tex%2C+and+the+Gangs+of+Suburbia).
You should definitely give it a look.
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Catch a Falling Star 