Tag Archives: books

February 4, 2024 · 3:23 am

Goooooaaaaaaal!

Being an ESL teacher (teacher of English as a Second Language) in Texas means a lot of exposure to kids who are nutty about soccer.  I didn’t get to teach more than one football player in my time as a high school teacher.  But soccer?  Who can count?  Both boys and girls.  But don’t panic.  This will not be a post about the joys of soccer.  Or even Shakira’s amazing soccer videos where she dances and sings with very few clothes on.  Whew!  You dodged a bullet to the brain there.

This post is about achieving goals.

Cool School Blueclass Miss Mcoverstudents in colorMiss Morgan oneDonner n SilkieGarriss n Torchy  The recycled Paffoonies are all about my novel Magical Miss Morgan.  It is my teacher-novel.  After finishing a 31-year career of teaching and loving it and loving kids…  I still needed a purpose in my life.  In the Alan Watts and Carl Sagan videos I am going to site here, they both say that the only purpose human beings really ever have is the one the individual person chooses for himself (or herself).  I chose to take all the things I learned as a teacher and boil them down into a stew of wisdom, humor, fairies, and silly words.  The novel, then, represents the purpose I chose.  And that is probably the reason why, when I finished the final edit last night, I was absolutely certain that this is the best novel I have ever written.  I will submit the silly thing to the Chanticleer Book Reviews & Media YA novel contest as soon as I can scrape together the entrance fee.  This is a better book than even Snow Babies.  I foolishly believe I can win this time around.  But the contest is hardly important.  That is just a tool in the quest to build my book into a successful piece of work… to get others to complete the process and actually read the book.  It will be published, even if I have to do it all myself and pay the money, as well as the blood, sweat, and tears.  I have already scored the goal.  It only remains to be seen if it ever gets posted on the scoreboard.

Here are the inspirational videos I wanted to share as well.  One is from Alan Watts… if you have never heard of him, you seriously need to look him up.  The other is from Carl Sagan.  I offer both of these in the knowledge that most of you who bother to read any part of this will ignore them, but with the reminder that all the best treasure in life is found after some serious digging.  My shovel is dinged-up royally, and my hands are covered in dirt.  (Dang! Only 451 words today!)

The Sagan video is number 3 on the list this link gives you.

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February 3, 2024 · 1:35 am

People All Have Worth

2nd Doctor  I know that you are probably immediately listing all the reasons that my title is totally wacky monkey-thinking in your head.  And if you want to lay into me in the comments, you are more than welcome.  But the reality is that teachers have to develop the mindset that all kids can learn and all people have value… no matter what.  That can be hard to accept when you factor in how corrupted, warped, and badly-taught so many people have turned out to be.  It honestly seems, sometimes, that when faced with the facts of how people act… being violent, or greedy, self-centered, thoughtless, un-caring, and willfully stupid… that they really don’t even have value to others if you kill them, let them rot, and try to use them as fertilizer.  The plants you fertilize with that stuff will come up deformed.

But the Doctor I have pictured here, the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton always seemed to find Earth people delightful.  Alien people too, for that matter, unless they were soulless mobile hate receptacles in robotic trash cans like the Daleks, or mindless machines powered by stolen human brains like the Cybermen.  There is, indeed, music in every soul, even if some of it is a little bit discordant and awkward.  And people are not born evil.  The classic study done on Brazilian street kids showed that even with no resources to share and living empty, hopeless lives, the children helped one another, comforted one another, and refused to exploit one another.  As a teacher you get to know every type that there is.  And there are stupid kids (deprived of essential resources necessary to learning), and evil kids (lashing out at others for the pain inflicted upon them), and needy kids (who can never get enough of anything you might offer and always demand more, MORE, MORE!)  Sometimes they drive you insane and make you want to resign and leave the country to go count penguins in Antarctica.  But the Doctor is right.  No matter what has been done to them, if you get to know them, and treat them as individual people rather than as problems… they are delightful!  Andrew

So let me show you a few old drawings of people.

Cute people like Andrew here.

Or possibly stupid and goofy people who never get things right.

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Or long-dead people who made their contributions long ago, and sacrificed everything to make our lives different… if not better.DSCN4448

Supe n Sherry_nOr young people who live and learn and hopefully love…

And try really hard at whatever they do… whether they have talent or not.

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And hope and dream and play and laugh…

And sometimes hate… (but hopefully not too much)…

And can probably tell that I really like to draw people…

Because God made them all for a reason…

even if we will never find out what that reason is.

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February 3, 2024 · 1:29 am

The Dog-Walk

Yes, I will admit to walking the dog for all the wrong reasons…  I take her to prevent more poop piling up in the house on the living room carpet, but that’s just the most obvious reason that my wife and kids truly believe is the only reason.  The truth is more sinister.  When life goes against me (like my recent trouble with anti-teacher policies in Texas and the scourge known as insurance pirates) I take the dog out for walks so I can stumble and grumble and swear at the dog.

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I took my camera along on this walk because I needed something to post for today even though I am all grumbly and rumbly and not ready to write.  As we were taking off, I noticed my wife’s daffodils had sprung up to look around, confused by the warmer, wetter weather than we normally get during the time of year when Dallas is known for freezing Superbowls solid.

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Daffodils, like most Texas residents, are a little naive and a little too ready to think only good things can happen to them because they are white and relatively wealthy and very Republican, living in the State at the center of the universe.

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Then the second one pops out.  Like any other Texans, two together make the average IQ in the room drop.  Opinions get tossed back and forth to snowball into masses of prejudice against Mexicans crossing the border, too many black folks, too many people on food stamps eating up all the profits, and other massively bright blossoms of bigotry.  Sometimes they watch Fox News together and get really dangerous.  But fortunately, when two or more fear-charged brain-cells come in close proximity to each other (a feat that requires at least five Republicans) they begin to develop an electro-magnetic sixth sense and begin to perceive truth on the far perimeter.

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The forecast in North Texas for this coming week is for a strong chance of severe winter weather (for North Texas that is the code for a slight chance of snow).  So, I got a good laugh at daffodil expense.  But, I guess I don’t really hope they die an icy death.  I’m just grumpy because sometimes my life just doesn’t progress very well.

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January 28, 2024 · 1:02 am

Where Do Ideas Come From?

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.

Dreams

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.

Events

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;

Characters

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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January 24, 2024 · 11:41 pm

Reading Bag of Bones

This is not a book review. I did finish reading this book in a 3-hour-end-of-the-book reading orgy, spending an hour last night, and two more early in the morning before the rest of my family was awake.

This is certainly not a book review. But I did read a Stephen King book, 1998’s Bag of Bones, which I picked up from the dollar sale shelves at Half Price Books. And I did love the story.

………………………………………………………………………This is not a book review. Instead, I want to talk about what a novelist can learn and reflect on by meta-cogitating over what this book reveals about King’s work habits and style and author’s voice.

Mike Noonan, the protagonist, is a novelist who writes books that routinely land in the numbers 10 through 15 slots in the New York Times Bestseller List. Obviously, this first-person narrative is coming directly out of King’s own writing experience. But, remember, this is not a book review. I am discussing what I have learned about how King puts a story together. 

King sets a back-story for this novel that digs deep into the geographica and historica of the city in Maine where the story is set. The literal bag of bones revealed in the book’s climax is almost a hundred years old. And he takes a compellingly realistic tour back in time to the turn of the Twentieth Century more than once to reveal who the undead characters are and why they do what they do. One thing that makes a writer, a novelist, truly solid is his ability to set the scene, to grow the story out of the background in the most organic and realistic way possible. But this is not a book review. I am saying that King always does this with his books. And if you wish to write at that level, you must do that too. I know I am sincerely trying.

At the end of the story, he clearly tells the reader that he learned from Thomas Hardy that “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones”. So, he is definitely aware that a character is a construct that has to be crafted from raw materials. It takes a master craftsman to build one with the right words to make it live and breathe on the page. He does it masterfully in this book with several characters. The protagonist, the beautiful young love interest, the love interest’s charming three-year-old daughter who is nearly slain in a horrific manner at the end of the book… The living villain is a well-crafted bag of bones, as is the ghost, the actual bag of bones in the story. But this is not a book review. Most of his books, at least the ones I have read, have the same sort of masterful characters.

There is so much more to be learned about novel writing from this book. He literally shows you how ideas are captured, how they are developed into stories, how you overcome “writer’s block”, and Noonan’s book he is writing within this book is even used as an example of how to poetically advance the plot. But this is not a book review. You should read this book. It is a very good and scary piece of work. But you should read it because it shows us how to write and do it like a master.

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January 21, 2024 · 1:19 am

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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Some books come along telling a story that has to be taken seriously in ways that don’t make sense in any normal way.  The Alchemist is one of those books.

What is an alchemist, after all?

An alchemist uses the medieval forms of the art of chemistry to transmute things, one thing becoming another thing.

Coelho in this book is himself an alchemist of ideas.  He uses this book to transmute one idea into another until he digs deep enough into the pile of ideas to finally transmute words into wisdom.

There is a great deal of wisdom in this book, and I can actually share some of it here without spoiling the story.

Here are a few gemstones of wisdom from the Alchemist’s treasure chest;

“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting…” (p.13)

“It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.” (p.17)

“All things are one.  And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”  (p.24)

“And when he had gone only a short distance, he realized that, while they were erecting the stall, one of them had spoken Arabic and the other Spanish.    And they had understood each other perfectly well.  There must be a language that doesn’t depend on words, the boy thought.” (p.45)

All of these quotes from the book, as you can see, come from the first third of the book.  There are many more treasures to be found in this book.  I should not share them with you here.  Just as the main character of the story learns, you have to do the work for yourself.  But this book is not only an enjoyable read, but a map for how you can execute your own journey towards your “Personal Legend”.  In fact, you may find that the book tells you not only how to go about making a dream come true, but, if you are already on that journey successfully, it tells you what things you are already doing right.

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January 15, 2024 · 2:10 am

The Heart of Shakespeare

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Despite my skepticism about the accepted wisdom in regard to the historical William Shakespeare, I do deeply love the body of work that is Shakespeare.  My most favorite play is The Tempest, the final play in the canon.  I also have read and loved As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello,  and King Lear.  I know that is not all of the plays, but that is probably more than most people have read.  And of course, as an English major in college, and later as a teacher, I have actually analyzed, compared, studied, and taught some of these plays.  So, the Shakespeare I know is the Shakespeare of the writer’s own mind, his communicated wit and wisdom, imagination and intellect.

shakespeare

And I do not have any disdain or disrespect to give the Stratford guy.  To say that, in the Elizabethan world, the actor son of a tradesman with only a grammar school education could not have been the mind behind the literary masterworks is foolish.  The Stratford guy owned and operated the Globe theater at a time when “the play was the thing”.  All of London society, rich and poor, gloried in the theater, and Shakespeare did for Elizabethan plays what Babe Ruth did for baseball.  He was a good enough business man to make himself a decent fortune.  Although, apparently, this world-shaking author didn’t spend any of his money on owning books, which in my experience is extremely rare among writers.  His life, bound up in an urban existence that never traveled outside of the country also somehow produced great works that were set in places in Europe, especially Italy, that described those settings in accurate detail.  As a working actor, he also apparently had the time to study law and somehow learn the inner workings of the royal courts of more than one country.  And the plots were not original.  He took existing stories that already were a part of European literature and lore and wove them into rich tapestries of human striving, laughable foibles, and a deep understanding of basic human character.  But I do have doubts that the businessman and actor from Stratford was the real writer of the plays.

I have already told you that I don’t believe Sir Francis Bacon was secretly Shakespeare.  Christopher Marlowe wasn’t either.  And I have unsuccessfully made a case against Shakspere, the Stratford guy.  So who could possibly be the real William Shakespeare?  Well, I am not going to be able to make a decent case for him in the 100 words that I have left to end this essay with.  So there has to be more to come.  (And stop screaming obscenities at the computer screen.  I am going to reveal the name before the end of this essay.  And I promise not to make my case for him in coming days too boring and horrible.)  I have to show why I believe that the true heart of Shakespeare could only have beaten within the body of Edward deVere, the Earl of Oxford.

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January 10, 2024 · 1:48 am

Krazy Kat

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I told you before about a cartoonist from ancient ‘Toon Times” named Fontaine Fox.  He was a master, and I acknowledge him as one of my greatest inspirations.  But he was not the original master mentor for my teenage ‘Toon Training”.  That honor goes to the inestimable George Herriman.  He was the Krazy Kartoonist who died more than a decade before I was born, yet, through his Kreation, Krazy Kat, did more to warp my artistic bent into Krazy Kartooniana Mania than anybody else.  I discovered him first.  I found him through Komic books and the Kard Katalog at the local library.  I own a copy of the book I pictured first in this post.  It is the first Kartoon book I ever bought.  I couldn’t post a picture of my actual book here because I have read it so often in the past forty years that the Kover has Kome off.  It is now more of folder of loose pages than a book.

Herriman KK 1920-12-05 (2)

Krazy Kat is a newspaper Komic strip that ran all around the world from 1913 to 1944.  Comics Journal would rate Krazy Kat as the greatest work of Komic art of the 20th Century.  Art critics hailed it as serious art, and it fits snugly into the surrealist movement of Salvador Dali and others.  It has been cited as a major influence on the work of other artists such as Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware.

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The centerpiece of the strip is a love triangle.  Krazy Kat the Kharacter is a feline who may be female or may be male but is definitely deeply in love with Ignatz Mouse.  The Krazed rodent hopped up on seriously stinky fromage (cheese to us non-French speakers), is Konstantly throwing bricks at Krazy’s head… obviously out of serious disdain, however, Krazy sees it as a confession of love.  Offisa Pup, the police watchdog, wants to jail the malevolent mouse for battery and protect the precious Kat, whom he obviously loves with an unrequited love.  Explanations are superfluous in the weird world of Krazy Kat.  How can I explain the charm, the humor, the good-natured violence of a strip such as this?  There are echoes of it in Tom and Jerry animated cartoons, but nothing like it really exists anywhere else.  Krazy has her own unique language, a language that you naturally learn to interpret as you read the strip.  Ignatz exhibits psychotic frustrations that he takes out on the world around him in our name, that we might experience hubris at his expense.  And what’s with that mysterious sack of “Tiger Tea” that Krazy carries about and keeps a Klosely guarded “sekrit”?

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I honestly hope you will give Krazy Kat a thorough “look-see”.  Because if you like Kartoons at all… and it doesn’t have to be the Krazy Kooky love of a seriously overdosed addict like me… you will fall desperately in love with this one.   It is a world of its own, a superbly superfluous abstract anachronism.  It is a surrealist’s dream of fun with puns and tons of buns… or something like that.  Simply put… read it and don’t like it… I dare you!

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December 31, 2023 · 1:25 am

The Journey Through 2023

2023 has been a year of recovery. I don’t believe I published a single book in 2022. I experienced in that year the very first complete year with both of my parents gone. Neither of them died of Covid, but I lost both of them during the pandemic. My father died of Parkinson’s Disease in 2020. My mother died of heart and kidney failure the year after in 2021. Then in 2022, I came down with Covid Omicron Variants twice even though I took every vaccine and booster I could up to the time I first came down with it. Depression, fatigue, and serious degradation of both my ability to see color due to increasing color blindness and my loss of some of my drawing skills due to arthritis.

My sons have both left me behind, the former Marine now going to college on a military scholarship in Oklahoma, and my number-two son joining the Air Force. My daughter is still at home, but she is an independent adult in most of the ways that matter, and I am now more or less unemployed in the job of parenting, really for the first time since 1981 because when I became a teacher I was suddenly swamped with fatherless boys and girls who attached themselves to me as the significant adult father-figure in their lives. I didn’t become a parent of my own children until 1995. And now that I am no longer really accepted in my wife’s religion for reasons of atheism and agnosticism, as well as retired from teaching, there are no more captive audiences in my life. (My wife only talks at me rather than to me… for reasons of atheism and agnosticism.)

My books do not really take the place of having a captive audience to carry the big pencil in front of. When you write a manuscript, it never laughs at your jokes… or at you when a joke fails spectacularly. You don’t really get feedback from a book the way you do from a captive audience… even an audience of sixth-grade non-readers. It is a one-way conversation with nobody but whatever fools make the mistake of picking up one of my books and actually reading it. To be fair, though, there are some who read and review my books to tell me how well I connected with them across the void. Mostly being an author means speaking into the void to the greater universe and the future, where whatever answers or echoes you get come only after you are dead. It is frustrating to put on a show with all your best tricks now refined… to a visibly empty theater.

But I have rediscovered my writing mojo (hiding under my bed with stacks of old notebooks and drawings and Paffooney-making materials.) And I bought an electronic stylus and a Chromebook computer with a touch screen to start doing digital art. (The Chromebook, however, died a mysterious virus-related death before I had it a year, making me regret not buying the Best-Buy warranty that usually is only a waste of money.) I started doing art digitally, a process much easier to make corrections and changes on. And I even found an AI program called AI Mirror that can edit my art and remove entire ranges of mistakes I could never alter before. (This last thing proved crucial because the only touch screen I had access to was the tiny one on my phone where my fat, arthritic fingers make whole ranges of mistakes.)

I used the rediscovered mojo and new digital art skills to create and publish another book, the first one since my mother died. And it has proved to be a real boost to my author’s delusions, scoring about three days on the top-seller list for its category. It is an essay about overcoming the loss of innocence, and it is filled with stories, poems, and art about writing about nudism, drawing and painting nudes, and being one myself. It is a delicious irony that this is how I recovered in 2023, and I hope to recover more in 2024.

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December 27, 2023 · 2:31 am

Chuck Dickens and the Origins of Writing

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Don’t make the mistake of thinking I have any earthly idea where writing comes from or how it began.  I am only talking personal history here, nothing grander or more meaningful.  This post is only self-referential hoo-haw, which is a fancy way of interpreting “conceited crap”.

So, the truth is, I am writing about Charles Dickens because he is the author I most want to become.  True, I rant on and on about Twain and his humor.  And a good deal of my artwork owes everything to Disney, but everything I am good at in writing is based on Dickens.

The first actual Dickens novel that I read was accomplished during my extended illness as a high school sophomore.  I read in bed, both at home and in the hospital, from my library copy of The Old Curiosity Shop.  I was enthralled by the journey and subsequent tragedy of Little Nell.  I thoroughly loathed the villain Daniel Quilp and was roundly thrilled by his well-deserved fatal comeuppance.  It was my first encounter with the master of characters.  I followed that reading with a biography of Dickens that revealed to me for the first time that his characters were based on real people.  Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield was actually Dickens’ own father.  Little Nell was the cousin he dearly loved who died in his arms.    The crafty Fagin was a caricature of a well-known fence named Soloman, a Jew of infamous reputation, but not without his redeeming quality of caring for the orphaned poor.  So it is that I have chosen to make my silly stories about real people in much the same way Dickens did.  If you are now worried that since you know me, you may end up in my books, never fear.  I change names and splice characters together.  You will have to make an effort to recognize yourself.  And, besides, nobody reads my books anyway.

I also like the way Dickens uses young characters and follows them over time as they grow and change.  Oliver Twist was the first child protagonist in English literature.  David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and Pip in Great Expectations are also like that.  David Copperfield, in fact, is Chuck’s own fictionalized self.  I fully intend to do the same.  It is the reason my books fall into the Young Adult category.  I also intend to employ the same kind of gentle, innocent humor that Dickens used.  I mean to portray things that are funny in a disarming, absurdist way rather than resorting to attack humor and bad words.

There it is, then, my tribute to Charles Dickens, a writer who makes me be who I am and write what I write.  I am not supposed to do Christmas posts because of my avowed religion, but you can consider this to be as close as I can come.  The author of A Christmas Carol… it doesn’t get much more Christmassy than that.

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