And so, 2026 begins. My seventieth year. Will I get to live it? Will the Pumpkinhead Dicktater be thrown off our backs? Or will the evil Empire tighten its suffocating grip? Will I publish at least one more book? Will the sun continue to shine without withering the world?
The adventure will be in finding out the answers.
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This year has been the worst year of my life. I was hospitalized in May and came out of the hospital with a pacemaker implanted under my collarbone. I was in the Emergency Room five times this year. Two of those were probably not necessary. The other three prevented my death.
My ability to write and complete novel projects has nearly disappeared. One e-book novella was the only thing I published. I successfully moved to the farm in Iowa, separating from my wife in an attempt to live a little longer, leaving her to finish her teaching career in Texas by herself.
The year could only be worse if I die tonight, before the year ends.
But for now, I am still hopeful of more good things to come before the end. Did I live the life I was supposed to live? How could I be wrong about that? I am not. Life was good.
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The little red bird that never flies away when the winter comes… is a symbol of who I am. I lasted for 31 years as a public school teacher no matter how hard it got to be, no matter how many brick walls I ran into, and no matter how little respect the world gives me for what I have done. I persisted in a difficult relationship for thirty years because it didn’t matter if she didn’t love me. I loved her and I made a commitment. And no matter how cold the relationship has become, it will continue. I don’t fly away when the snow begins to fall.
Life is hard. Terrible people do terrible things, and they seem to always get what they want and make the huge profits. Good and lovely people who sacrifice their comfort and wealth to help others always seem to be the ones who get kicked whenever they are down. Still, people are basically good. The depths of evil some of them sink to are the exception, not the rule. The heights of behavior and accomplishment are achieved by more people than the depths of the sinkers and the vile. Some people are amazing, inspiring, and the light the majority of us live by.
This world breaks many a soul under the hammer of God, but His forge is also where heroes are created from the truest of steel. There is hardship and pain and disappointment everywhere… constantly. But when you balance it all… life is good.
This is the philosophy I have come to live by. Work hard and take your lumps and wounds with grace and determination. And when it is done, celebrate. You may call me a fool or an idiot. I cannot prove I am not. But in the end, I know what happiness truly is.
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As the snow and the wind roar around the house, I have a chance to reflect on a difficult holiday week.
On Christmas Day, a little after 11:00 pm, I had to make the choice to ask my sisters and brother-in-law to get me to the ER. My constipation had reached the point of pain and impending explosion. It was a rough ride to a Cedar Rapids hospital that I had never been to before.
That resulted in a couple of hours of having my blood vessels, innards, and personal nudity exposed to female nurses, doctors, and technicians. I had a CAT scan, blood drawn, and finally, rancid-tasting medicine that had to all be drunk, even though the vaguely orange-tasting stuff was vile enough to be hard to get down.
So, after we got back to my sister’s house, four explosive expulsions of horrid liquid corruption over four hours improved my health significantly. Four hours of sleep the next morning helped a bit, too.
We got back home in the Belmond area later on Friday, in time to get to the grocery store before the oncoming blizzard got to us. The snow would start today, on Sunday. Around 9:00 a.m., the snow began blowing, probably about three inches’ worth, with almost all of it suspended in the air on the wind.
I called my daughter in Texas and joked about freezing to death, saw that the Cardinals lost their seventh football game in a row, and finally hunkered down under blankets to survive the heavy snow.
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When you make the mistake of admitting to others that you are a writer, they immediately assume you know things that are kept secret from “normal” people. For instance, they will simply assume that you can tell them where you get your ideas for writing. Well, I am fairly sure that I got the idea for this post from watching a YouTube video in which the Master, Neil Gaiman, says that every author has a joke answer for that one with enough sarcastic wit in it to punish the asker with public humiliation.
I asked the dog if she knew any jokes like that which I could use to prepare for someone asking me that question in public. She said, “You could tell them that your family dog tells you what to write every day.”
“No,” I said, “people would never believe it.”
“Well, it is supposed to be a joke. But you are right. No one would ever think you were actually smart enough to write down what a dog tells you.”
“Yes, it’s a good thing for me that you know how to speak in English. I could never translate and transcribe Barkinese.”
So, I began thinking of where some of my best ideas came from.
Some of my stories come directly from dreams that I had. The nightmare about being chased down a street in Rowan at midnight by a large black dog with red eyes was an actual dream I had in the 1970s. So was the nightmare of the werewolf climbing out of the TV during a late-night viewing of Lon Chaney in The Wolfman.
Those two dreams together were the start of the story that became my recently published novel, The Baby Werewolf. Both dreams visit the protagonist in the story I wrote almost as if they were his dreams and not actually mine.
Snow Babies, the best novel I have ever written, was based on two different blizzards I experienced, first as a child in the 1960’s, and then again as a high school kid in the 1970s. Each blizzard involved being snowed in for a week at someone else’s house. As a child, I was stuck at Grandpa’s farm place until the snow plows could finally do their work and open the gravel roads. As a teen, I was stuck in Great Grandma’s retirement apartment near the high school in Belmond.
That novel also is based on the next source of ideas;
I can’t think of any story I have written that isn’t based on real people I have known in one way or another. Valerie in the novel above is based on three different girls I have known or taught. One of those three is my own daughter. The four orphans on the bus in that story are all boys from my junior high classes in the 1980s.
Lucky Catbird Sandman, the hobo who wears the quilted coat of many colors, is based on the poet Walt Whitman, whom I knew well in a past life, and my own shiftless, storyteller self. Some characters are just so key to a story idea that they themselves are the reason for a book to exist.
In conclusion, the dog doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. None of these things are really where I get my ideas. But I am out of time. I will have to write about the bottle imp another day. No, really. A magical imp trapped in a bottle. You can make one of those give you ideas for novels with only a slight risk to your life and soul.
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I am past the 50,000 word mark. It is almost finished. Here I wish to show you the main characters of the novel through illustrations I have created over the years..
Milt Morgan is one of the four main narrators of the novel.
He is a fifteen-year-old Belle City High School freshman in 1976. He is the most imaginative of the Norwall Pirates softball team and liars’ club.
He tells his portion of the story in the form of journal entries.
Anita Jones is the most central of the four narrators in that she is the cousin of Icarus Jones, the character at the center of the whole plot.
She is a fifteen-year-old freshman girl who has had a steady boyfriend since the spring of 1975. She tells her part of the story by writing letters about Icarus and the things happening in the little town of Norwall in the summer of 1976. She is writing to her cousin Dot who is much more interested at the start about Anita’s boyfriend Eddie than she is about cousin Icky.
Brent Clarke is the high school freshman athlete and leader of the Norwall Pirates. He is interested in becoming a policeman or detective, and as one of the four narrators, he tells his part of the story through his investigator’s notes which he takes religiously on practically everything.
He feels responsible for all the Pirates, especially Icarus when he comes under attack during the adventure in the summer of the Bicentennial year.
The fourth narrator is Sherry Cobble who has a twin sister named Shelly and is dedicated to being a nudist. In fact, she very much wants to convince all the Pirates to be comfortable with their own naked bodies. Realizing that dream, though, is complicated.
Especially because it’s Bible Belt Iowa and her nudist family is looked at as being the somewhat crazy hippie-type kind of people that are barely tolerated by the law.
She writes about it all in her Lovely Nudist’s Diary where she can write about her naturist beliefs, successes and failures, and her boyfriend, Brent.
Icarus Jones is the central character of The Boy… Forever. He tries to kill himself early in the year of 1976 and finds out by jumping off the MacArthur Bridge in St. Louis that he cannot die naturally. And worse is in store. Beyond the fact that he is an immortal, he is being pursued by an undead Chinese wizard who is a dragon in human form.
Fiona Long, usually called Fi, convinced her stepfather to move to Norwall, following Icarus as he moves to Norwall from St. Louis. She tells everyone in her freshman class that Fi is really short for Firefang, and she is a red dragon in human form.
She becomes friends with the Pirates. She learns to trust and like Anita and Sherry. And she is mightily attracted to Brent who is actually Sherry’s boyfriend.
Fi’s stepfather, Tien Long, is the villain. He is in reality a Chinese Celestial Dragon in human form. He also needs Icarus’s blood to continue to live his long, nearly-immortal life.
It is almost done, this novel. And as you can probably tell from the character pictures, this is not the first novel about the Norwall Pirates. So, it is a pirate novel with dragons and immortals in it. It has been fun to write. And soon it will be complete.
Filed under characters, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
When you spend most of your time writing and thinking with the Sword of Damocles hanging over your head and the hourglass of your life looking more and more like the sands of time are running out, you are tempted to take the curves too fast and make extremely stupid mistakes that make your brain crash into a brick wall of stupidity. You are stuck in a stupor of stupidity that must somehow un-stupid you with downtime and do-nothing brainless activity. I won’t try to explain what I did wrong, because, after all, I am still stupid at the moment and don’t really know what I did wrong.
I bought myself a doll yesterday. I spent some of my birthday money on it. My octogenarian mother sends me birthday money every year to remind me how many years beyond sixty I have aged, especially now that, after more than twenty years spent not celebrating birthdays as a nominal Jehovah’s Witness, I am now no longer associated with prohibitions from God due to the arbitrary rules of religion. It was a stupid act based on the fact that I have been avoiding wasting money on my doll-collecting hoarding disorder for a matter of months. It could be like an alcoholic taking a drink after months of being sober. But the doll is pretty in a magical sort of way and provides me with someone else to talk to when I am brooding about being stupid.
It may seem like, since I am writing this while still stupid, that I am saying that being stupid is, by definition, a bad thing. If I am saying that, it is only because I am currently stupid.
If you look at the smiles on the faces of the gentleman with the brown cap and Scraggles the mouser, you can easily see that being happy is a simple thing. And it is the province of simple people, not complicated and extremely smart people. I can testify from hard experience that being too smart is a barrier to being simply happy. So, I benefit emotionally from being stupid this Sunday.
As to being stupid today and what caused it, well, it may have something to do with the fact that I am currently editing The Baby Werewolf, the most complex and potentially controversial novel I have ever written. Horror stories often mine and expose the author’s own traumas and fundamental fears. And I am trying to publish it as the fourth novel I have published in 2018. Is that biting off more than I can chew with my old teeth? I don’t know the answer. I am currently pretty stupid.
“Hurry, Grandpa! Before the snow is all gone! We gotta make a snowman, and we will name him Fred!”
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It never flies away when winter comes.
When raptors hunt high above, it wears bright red in a white world.
It sings to rule its territory, especially in Spring
When troubles come, the red bird digs in.
And my troubles double daily.
I must be a redbird, too.
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Catch a Falling Star 