February 26, 2014 · 2:23 am

Snowboy

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Yesterday I may not have fully explained about the Bond villain-esque villain that I have deployed into the dark waters of my manuscript novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  Snowboy is not fully human, but he is trying.  He was a robot built by a joint American-Alien project in Area 51.  He was created as a living weapon and deployed against the brother-in-law of the Bicycle-Wheel Genius himself.

During the course of the story his robot brain is turned off by sudden electro-magnetic trauma, and the scientist is able to piece him back together in the form of a boy.  But he’s not a normal boy in any way.  His nuclear core malfunctioned and caused his cooling units to ice him over, making him a living Snowboy.

What makes him the villain is his determination to torment and destroy those people who gave him his resurrected life.  He has emotions for the first time in his life, and he totally misuses them.  His internal struggle with the truths of life translates into destructive treatment of others.

Okay, I know it doesn’t all make sense.  I’m still working on it.  But it gives me an excuse to show you another picture of him, this time with a less washed out photo of the drawing.

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February 25, 2014 · 2:37 am

Writing Good Villains

Right now in my writing I am in need of a sinister villain.  The story I am writing, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, is the story of a super genius who has lost all the people he loves in a terrible fire caused by a lab accident.  The themes of the book include that human beings are inherently good.  Another theme is that those good human beings need other human beings, friends, family, acquaintances, experts, clowns, entertainers and those people who will ultimately help a person define himself and become the person he or she is meant to be.  The science fiction in the story includes instances of time travel, electro-magnetics, genetic manipulations of age and even species, alien encounters, and robots who are nearly human.

So how do I make a good villain to support stuff like that?  Villains are by definition not good.  They pervert the basic nature of human beings to serve their own selfish ends.  Goldfinger uses his financial and technical genius to defeat James Bond and enrich himself with Fort Knox’s gold.  Of course, he’s a bad guy, so the good guy, Bond, defeats him.    Moriarty is a dastardly villain who tries to outthink and outwit Sherlock Holmes for the selfish satisfaction of beating Sherlock, possibly to prove himself the most intelligent force in the universe.  Of course, he’s also a bad guy, and when both he and Sherlock plunge over the waterfall, only Sherlock survives to be victorious.

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My villain has to be so caught up with self benefit, that he must be willing to pervert goodness and cause others to suffer and die.  What better villain, then, to use other than the government assassin robot that the genius rebuilds into a pseudo-replica of his own son?  And because of his robotic, soulless nature, violent government assassin programming, and human elements introduced by his re-animator, he becomes a philosophical and existential mess.  The assassin Crackerbutton is transformed into a boy-robot whose cooling unit overcompensates for loss of mass and turns him into the Snowboy.  Okay, I know I should explain why he’s evil and how things work out, but forgive me if I save that for my book.  In a selfish and perverted way, I am seeking to entice you into buying that book and reading that book to see if the Mickey-villain stands any chance at all of being what I am claiming it to be.

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February 23, 2014 · 4:15 pm

The Reasons I Put it in my Pocket Revisited (originally posted January 9, 2013)

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I wrote Catch a Falling Star. Believe it or not, my comedy science fiction novel is about real people.  Oh, I changed a few things to make them harder to recognize.  I changed their names, and who they are related to, and what religion they really were, and I even made some of them green.  But honestly, they are either characters I grew up with back in my little home town in Iowa, or people I have known in my career as a public school teacher.  A few of the brighter ones are combinations of both.

I first created the story idea, back in about 1977, around a pair of frumpy farmer types who desperately wanted a child of their own and couldn’t have one.  They are natural-born parents from medium-large Iowa families, and in real life theydo have kids of their own.  I just imagined what they would be like if they never had a child of their own.  And then, I gave them one, but not a normal one.  It had to be an alien born in orbit around Barnard’s Star and accidentally left on Earth during a blurped-up attempt by the aliens to conquer the Earth.  They were incompetent aliens who had been adversely affected by watching too much Earther television.

I have always been a story-teller.  Anybody from the town of Rowan, Iowa who remembers me will attest to that fact, probably with certain air-curdling metaphors of the obscene variety attached to the recollection.  I renamed the town Norwall so nobody would recognize it (all the same letters, but all stirred up, and with two L’s added for Love and Laughter).   Rowan… I mean, Norwall is a small town of about 250 people counting the squirrels (and you have to count the squirrels because they are some of the funniest people in town).  It’s a small rural farm town with lots of green growing things, corn, cornball people, and plenty of pretty powerful pig poo.  It’s the kind of place that’s so sleepy and quiet that you either have to develop a powerful imagination or go mildly insane.

So, those are the terrifying and traumatizing reasons why I just had to inflict my novel upon the world.  I hope people will find it funny and laugh a little, rather than dropping the book at their feet and then running away screaming.

 

 

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To Dance in Heaven

To Dance in Heaven

Sometimes I think of a Paffooney as a cartoon poem. Such is this one. I drew it a long time ago when I went through a quasi-religious phase and imagined myself turning inward as the Asian religions do.

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February 22, 2014 · 9:07 pm
February 22, 2014 · 12:57 am

Sleeping Beauty (a silly poem of love and illusion)

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Sleeping Beauty

 

In the dark and in the light

In candle flame and purple night

The beauty sleeps and fails to heed

The young man’s life of lust and need

What happens next is often sad

The want, the hope, the love so bad

And fluttering faery wings of light

Carry life and love and fuel the sight

With never a thought to what could be

If only love would call to thee

And wake the sleeper from her dream

To make the two but one to seem.

 

Love poetry is basically nonsense.  Fueled by hormones and lust, dreams and assumptions, it is never real.  It is only a vision, an apparition, and fools you into believing what could never be real.  So why write it?  Because it is in our nature, in our stars, to love.  Just because something is foolish, or impossible to pin down, there is no reason to give up on it.  That’s what the Paffooney faeries are for.  They cast faery light on what you should never believe, but always, always do. 

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February 21, 2014 · 3:46 am

Paffoonies By The Numbers

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So, here is one secret recipe for baking a Paffooney with some humor in the process.

Step 1 : First you have to get a stupid idea and draw a witless drawing of it on a nice fresh piece of paper.  Here the Princess is holding step one, a portrait of what I believe Valerie Clarke, the main character of Snow Babies might look like.  She is supposed to be the most beautiful little girl who ever lived in Norwall, a small Iowa farm town.  

Step 2 : Then you must get a good digital picture of it.  Here I used the Princess as a makeshift picture stand and took the picture in sunlight muted by clouds.

Step 3 : I must then remove all clutter and background from the image using the big old eraser thingy on the Microsoft computer paint program.  sometimes I need to erase pixel by pixel until I am thoroughly pixelated.

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Step 4 : This gets me ready to use my handy-dandy cheap-o photo program (I always wanted to use both handy-dandy and cheap-o photo in the same sentence!  Item 128 on my bucket list.)  I can layer the image over any of a number of stolen and parolin’ background photos.

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And so, I thus become a pretend world-renowned unknown clown artist with a penchant for multiple uses of internal rhymes as well as multiple uses of the same boring, wretched sketches.

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The Ice Alchemist of Frozencastle

The Ice Alchemist of Frozencastle

This blue wizard, Viktor of Frozencastle, has a penchant for making fire magic, even though it will ultimately melt his house. His son Davion tries hard to put out the fires and keep his father from drinking too much evil ale, but when dealing with an icy eccentric who loves a good fire, you have to expect a burst of the worst (or is that spelled “wurst”?)

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February 20, 2014 · 3:55 am
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“Yay!” Says my Daughter, the Sun

Mickey now has 1001 likes on his WordPress posts. Whooda thunk thet Gooof wood git so dang far?

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February 19, 2014 · 3:16 am
February 18, 2014 · 3:43 am

Space Ninjas and other Bright Ideas from a Dim Bulb

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As cartoonists go, I am rather a failure and a flop.  I have not made a single dollar on my cartoon art.  Instead it has all gone into lessons at school, charity programs, and various role-playing games with geeky boys.  Still, I have brilliant insights into what would make good adventure fiction, especially for geeky boys.  You take outer-space teenage travelers, turn them into ninjas with ninjitsu powers, and then give them special mutant mind powers like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, and clairvoyance.  Little Mutant Space Ninjas I call them.  And, yes, I know how lame and goofy that all is, but I love it.  I think others will love it too.

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These are a few of my Aeroquest mutant space ninjas.  (Left to right; Taffy King, Billy Iowa, Gyro the Nebulon, Sara Smith, Sensei Ged Aero, Ham Aero Junior (an adopted Nebulon), Shu Kwai, Jadalaqstbr, and Alec Songh.)

Kids identify with child heroes.  They also like action, adventure, and wild Sci-Fi special effects.

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This it Tiki Astro, the artificial boy.  He’s an ultra high tech metaloid (robot) who is made to be practically indistinguishable from a real boy.  He was built by his “father”, a metaloid nanny-bot that was infected with Ancient technology and adopted the pseudonym Happy Jack.

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Space ninjas have to be really cool and really really destructive to capture the interests and imagination of today’s young boys.  This ninja boy is Sejii Killer, the son of the space pirate King Killer.  He can single-handedly mow down whole armies of minions and deadly Nathir plant men.  He can seriously alter the populations of whole worlds.  That’s the kind of killer kid I need to put into space ninja cartoons.

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So look out, World!  My cartoon ninja kids from outer space are on their way to invade your sci-fi dreams and adolescent fantasies.

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Self Portrait

Self Portrait

For those of you who thought that my Gravatar picture was the real me, here’s what I looked like on February 15th. I am older than in my previous pictures. I am grayer and hairier and wrinklier. I am also a little more bonkers than I ever used to be. I am an ESL Teacher (English as a Second Language. I write science fiction and fantasy. I was a Cowboy for 23 years, a Wildcat for one year, and have been a Ranger for the last seven years.

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February 16, 2014 · 9:53 pm