One of the features of the stuffed animal collection I have been building since my first son was born is the random goofy animal that is hard to identify. This is a possible Cool Cat minus shades and beret.There are spots where something has been lost and corresponds to what is missing. However, he does not have the simpering smile that I would expect on the puss of that 60’s cartoon critter. He does have an appreciation for good literature.
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Here’s the magical mystical wizard bear, casting his spell with curly bear hair.
the picture above : Davalon and Farbick near Mars (by Leah Cim Reyeb)
I am constantly bubbling over with ridiculous ideas and dreams. After writing the book Catch a Falling Star, I was asked by an editor what happens next to some of the characters. The Morrell family, changed into children, travel into space with the Tellerons aboard Xiar’s Base Ship. Harmony Castille, the elderly church lady who falls in love with the Telleron Commander Biznap marries him and travels with the aliens too. The task; find a new home world and start a mixed civilization. Since the aliens have no inherent religion or morality, it falls to the humans on board to make Christian values the norm for the Telleron frog people. That is a challenge old church ladies can’t resist, but also can’t manage without help.
So what can I do with this story? Where can it go? I am trying to build my work in fiction around certain rules or boundaries that will give it the consistency and power that I need to achieve with my work. Well, the biggest rule is that all my stories have to fit like puzzle pieces into the entire picture, an imaginary history of the universe centered on the little town where I grew up. Space empires in the future, time travelers popping in and out freely, and imaginary breakthroughs in physics, astrophysics, and various sciences cannot be allowed to interfere with the unified history of the future of the galaxy. I know how silly this sounds, but silly rules inform the under-structure of all reality. How else can you explain things like the politics of Texas? Further, I adhere to other silly rules. It must be science fiction or fantasy. It must also be humor. And the most important characters are always children.
So what will this book I am planning be like? Well, first of all, there must be strong elements of science fiction. Of course, silly me, my heroes are on a starship looking for a new home-world. You can’t get too much more science-fictiony than that. But I have been overwhelmed with internet researches of late into the looniest of the internet conspiracy theories. Besides my obsessions with who killed JFK and what really happened on 9/11, I have also found cartoon characters like Alex Jones (the conspiracy world’s version of Elmer Fudd on PCP and prodded to ridiculous levels of vitriolic-aggressive anger management failures) speaking about lizard men from outer space who have taken to controlling our government by shape-changing and masquerading as Hilary Clinton. Whew! Humor is a breeze! All I have to do is set my lost space-colony down on the hostile, warlike world of the space lizards, the world of Galtorr Prime. The science fiction is then firmly grounded in the pseudo-science of paranoid madmen. And, joyfully, further research into the lizard people trying to take over earth will be justified by the creation of this book. Who knows? I may actually uncover their secrets in real life!
The humor, as I already indicated, is built in. Warlike lizards who want only to conquer and destroy! And don’t forget, this will be set on their war-torn home world. The satire is set. I will be writing political satire about Republicans and Democrats. Hot dang! And I can depict crazy folk who would gleefully destroy their own government and their own environment in order to spite their worst enemies, who are thankfully not us, but themselves. I can continue to describe the battle between good and evil in my book in the same religious terms I have always tried to use. It is not good against evil as much as it is Love against Heartlessness. All good comedy, from Mark Twain, to Charles Dickens, to Terry Pratchett, to Douglas Adams, is precisely about that. (Of course it will mean more of the run-on sentences, multi-adjectival descriptions, and infantile allusions and metaphors that I always use in my signature purple-paisley prose.)
And finally, I have the characters already fairly well set. Davalon, the boy Telleron explorer, his nestmate/sister Tanith, their friend and mentor Farbick, Davalon’s adopted child-parents Alden and Gracie Morell, and the crew of Xiar the Slightly Irregular’s whole wacky starship are already living and arguing in my head. Of course, the moldy underwear and dirty dishes in my head are not a particularly good thing. When will fictional characters ever learn to clean up after themselves? Only time will tell.
So there you have it, an entire book idea that came into being in the last week and a half. It will be interesting to chronicle the progression and creation of it. Will it actually get written? Will it take twenty-two years the way Catch a Falling Star did? Will it be worth doing more with than merely writing it and then burning it to save future generations from reading it and burdening themselves with the corrosive insanity it will most likely cause? Well, please, don’t bet any actual money on it. Imaginary or funny-money will be good enough.
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I have started work on the next novel which I will call The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. It takes two of the important supporting characters from my novel Catch a Falling Star, and weaves them into a story that can only be called a prequel-sequel to the previous book. It begins when the characters first meet and become friends. It incorporates some of the events from the alien invasion in Catch a Falling Star, and it concludes the incredible story of a friendship between a really nice mad scientist and the only son of a rural English teacher.
I have included here the first two cantos of this humoresque hodgepodge novel so you can get a sense of how truly awful the whole thing is going to be. (If you choose to skip this first-draft nonsense, I will completely understand. Not forgive you, mind you, but understand.)
Canto One – In the dark corners of the house in 1984
The stupid boy was easily followed home. When he patted the little Pomeranian dog on her fuzzy head, he entered through the back door, unlocking it with his key. He went in to make his afternoon peanut butter sandwich, stupidly leaving the door unlocked. The man in black couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.
The strip of bacon the man in black offered to the canine moron was soaked in a fast-acting, taste-free poison. The barker was silenced. The man in black quietly slipped into the house. Standing in the back entryway, he could peer in and see the stupid boy bending over the peanut butter with the knife in hand. The boy was handsome in a way. He had his father’s stupid blond hair and myopic eyes. The glasses on his little face were thick enough to magnify his blue-gray eyes. He had that same owlish look that the genius father always wore. But he had his mother’s lovely mouth and the same child-like oval face that always made his mother seem so appealing, so girlishly lovely.
As the man stepped into the kitchen, the boy looked up startled.
“Why are you dressed like that?” he asked. “You look like some kind of burglar.”
The man in black grinned. He whipped out the chloroformed cloth and pressed it over the mouth and nose of the boy. The stupid boy melted into his grasp. Swiftly bound and gagged, the boy was left tied up in a chair at the kitchen table. Now, the real work could begin.
The basement door was the first obstacle. It had a keypad lock. The man in black dusted the key pad with fingerprint dust. He could easily see the four keys that the genius always pressed. He remembered the pattern of code entry he had seen the genius using a hundred times from afar. Two in the upper corner, the one and the four, the key in the middle, the five, and the one at the bottom, the eight.
It worked! With a snap-hiss the electronically sealed door opened. Down he went into the lab.
The small safe was still open. Leave it to a genius to be sloppy about replacing paperwork and locking it up again. He never re-locked the safe upstairs with his wife’s jewels in it. Why would this safe be any different? The safe-cracking tools could be left in the old black pocket!
Inside the safe, just where he’d been told it would be, was the manila envelope marked Tesla Project. He took it out. It was worth a fortune apparently. Soon he would have the whole pile of money the ambassador had offered him. The man in black licked his lips. He stuck the envelope in his pocket.
Next would come the cover story. Yes, the experimental prototype sat on the table where the ambassador’s advisor had said it would be. How did the advisor know so much about the crazy genius? He had never been at any of the family reunions. The man in black smiled to himself. Easy enough to do. He used his lighter to start some of the papers on the table burning. He added some more flames to the nearby desk. Then he turned the prototype on.
Electricity began to shimmer and shine, crawling over the surface of the silver metal ball. Tiny electrical bursts that looked like lightning arced out over the table and connected with some of the water pipes overhead. The fire began to blossom faster than the man in black had anticipated. Time to get out, or be immolated too.
At the top of the stairs he was horrified to see that she was there too. She was bent over the boy, trying to untie him from the chair.
“Leo!” she said. “What have you done?” Her beautiful brown eyes were filled with horror.
It was a real shame. He hadn’t expected her to get there so quickly. He had intended for the boy to be the only one caught in the “accident”. Ah, well. He wasn’t actually Leo anyway. Leo was dead. He only looked like Leo and had taken Leo’s place in the family for a time. He hit her with a violent blow to the temple and she crumpled.
The flames were roaring up into the kitchen from the lab. The place would go up quickly. In his haste to leave the conflagration, he failed to notice how her hand, as she crumpled, had managed to clutch at his pocket on the way to the floor. He hadn’t noticed how the envelope had been dislodged by her fingers and also knocked to the floor. As he strode swiftly out of the house, he did not realize that his prize had remained behind to burn with his innocent victims. The perfect crime. He would never be suspected. But he would never be rewarded either. He was congratulating himself as he slipped away from the blazing inferno, his handiwork. And everything that mattered to the genius was on fire. A whole world was passing away.
Canto Two… Norwall, Iowa, population 278, 1988
Norwall, like many small towns in Iowa, had not changed more than a particle or two a year from about 1919 to around 1982. It had a main street. The houses were done mostly in the Victorian style, with its various porches and bay windows and corner tower-like structures. It was a sleepy-quiet little farm town where practically nothing ever happened. It was mostly set up for farm business. There was a grain elevator at the west end of Main Street, and a lumber yard at the southern end of Whitten Avenue. It was not unusual to see tractors parked in town along with the family cars and farmers’ pickup trucks.
Tim Kellogg had been born in the Belle City Hospital in 1978, and had lived in the town of Norwall all his life. He would’ve been bored to tears early on if it had not been for the Norwall Pirates. They were the local 4-H softball team, but they were also the greatest secret club and eternal fraternity of liars that was ever put together on a boring Saturday afternoon in Iowa. They had an interesting oral history. It was rumored and asserted by former club members that once they had chased a werewolf and defeated him even though he had killed an old church lady and a local minister. They also supposedly fought and defeated an undead Chinese wizard once, though details about that one were far more likely to change from tale-teller to tale-teller.
Not only was Tim a member of the club, but he was second in line to be grand and glorious leader. His older cousin Valerie Clarke was the current leader, but she was in high school now and so beautiful that she couldn’t help but always be busy with boys. Soon the club would be handed over to him, and no more girls would be members, possibly for eternity. This was an idea of no small attraction to Norwall boys who were less than enthusiastic about having a girl for a leader. You really couldn’t walk around the clubhouse naked or fart as much as you wanted to if your leader was a girl.
And Tim was very definitely looking forward to getting to know the mysterious new neighbor on Pesch Street. In the very house next door a man with thick glasses and eyes like an owl kept bringing in the most fascinating stuff. Computers, the big mainframe sorts of computers, fish tanks, hoses, machines both sleek and junky whose purposes were totally mysterious. And there were so many bicycle wheels! Bicycle wheels, gears, flywheels, chains, and driver cords. What did this man intend to do with all the wonderful junk? It was fuel for the wildest of speculations from the Norwall Pirates.
Tim rode up to the grocery store on Main Street and sat there on his bike in the middle of the sidewalk waiting. His best friend and fellow Pirate, Tommy Bircher, rode up also and grinned a silent greeting. Tommy was only a month younger than Tim, but was also different in that he had not lived his whole life in the little Iowa town. Although his grandparents, uncles, and various other relatives were rooted here, Tommy’s father and mother both traveled to distant places in pursuit of their business interests. Albert Bircher was an executive officer in a large Chicago-based business. Tommy and his family had moved back to Norwall only temporarily two years ago. Tommy had spent three years of his ten living in France.
“So, Tim, you got it all figured out yet?” Tommy grinned puckishly.
“Oh, you know… yes. The gossips in this town know everything about everybody, and all the gossips talk in the Post Office. We just hafta go there and listen.”
“That could take some time.”
“Yeah, but it will be worth it. We gotta find out somehow.”
“Okay, you’re the boss.”
Together, the two infamous Pirates stealthily walked over to the Norwall Post Office between what had once been the grocery store and what was now and always had been the fire station. They parked their bicycles in the fire station bike rack. They went in nonchalantly, trying to be nonchalant like they really belonged there, and hoping they really knew what nonchalant meant.
“Hello, boys,” said George “the Salesman” Murdoch, Post Master and gossip aficionado of the highest order.
“Uh, hello,” said Tim, trying to cover for both of them. He quickly looked at the wanted posters and missing children flyers on the medium-sized bulletin board near the East end of the counter.
Marjorie Dettbarn and Wilma Bates, two of Norwall’s middle-aged church ladies were there trading juicy stories and other tidbits with “the Salesman”.
“You know, George,” Wilma was saying, “the police really should be looking more carefully at the backgrounds of people like that.”
“Why do you say that, Mrs. Bates?” asked the Post Master with a sly grin.
“You know his wife is dead. They say it isn’t out of the question that he might’ve murdered her.”
“You’re so right, Wilma,” said Mrs. Dettbarn. “He’s such a suspicious-looking character. He never seems to hear you when you say hello.”
“Yes, “said Bates, “always has his nose in some book or other.”
“Do you ladies say hello to him a lot?” asked Murdoch the Post Master.
“Oh my, no,” said Mrs. Dettbarn. “I said it once. That’s all the chance a spooky young man like that really needs, don’t you know.”
“Yes, yes,” said Bates, “I never spoke to him at all. You can’t be too careful around a person like that!”
“Oh, you are right there,” said the Post Master. “He gets a check from the government twice a month, and numerous ones from different corporations. I think he may be quite wealthy in many ways. Who knows how a person like that earns so much money. Probably something suspicious, I say.”
Tommy and Tim were both wide eyed as Tim nudged Tommy towards the door.
As soon as they were outside, Tim nearly exploded. “A murderer! And lots of money coming in all the time!”
“Yeah, he could be a professional killer who works for the government!” gushed Tommy. “Oh, but who were they talking about?”
“You poophead! They were discussing my new neighbor, Orbit Wallace!”
“Orbit Wallace?”
“Well, something like that! The new guy that moved in next door.”
“Hey,” said Tommy, “maybe we should go stare at his house for a while!”
“Yeah! Great idea!” said Tim.
So the two Pirates were now on a mission to catch the hired killer red handed. Tim had visions of apprehending him literally red handed, with blood dripping from his fingertips. Red handed in the worst possible way.
*****
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I am a teller of lies. Yes, I can’t help it. I do it for a living. Telling stories is simply what I do.
Now, for those of you who know the secret, that I am employed by a Texas public high school as a teacher of English, I must confess that Texas teachers are all expected to be liars. Not merely the tellers of small, innocuous white lies, but big, powerful, dark black hoo-haws that would curdle the innards of those you have to tell them to if they ever found out the truth. In Texas, all teachers must tell these particular lies by State mandate;
If I just shot down your illusion balloons of sacredly held beliefs, I’m sorry, but you must not have paid attention when our State Emperor for Life tried to step down a notch in his career and run for President of the U.S. The man with all the tact and wisdom in Texas said that he wanted to do away with the Department of Education at the federal level. At least, I think he said that… or was that the one he forgot during the debates? I don’t remember. Oops. I guess it rubs off.
Teachers in Texas have had to deal with billions of dollars in cuts in our education budget. Yes, I actually meant BILLIONS. I know the difference between M and B. And, of course this exercise in thriftiness comes at the same time that the yearly state test by which all programs are evaluated, trimmed, and ultimately obliterated is being morphed into a harder test of higher level thinking skills, and multiplied by four core subjects so that high school seniors will have to pass not one, but TWELVE (or possibly sixteen, the state has not made up its mind yet about what number will do the best job of improving graduation rates) high stakes, pass-or-no-diploma tests. Sorry, I meant to say TESTS. We have to shout things in Texas education or no one listens… No, that’s wrong too. No one ever listens.
So teachers are professional liars. That’s the truth of it in the modern world. You have to go into the classroom every day and tell lies right and left. You have to say things like; “Welcome to English class, all thirty five of you. Ask me any question at any time because I have to make sure each one of you individually understands each and every one of the three thousand points of Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. I am happy to see all your smiling faces. Don’t carve your name in your desk with your Bowie knife or I will have to call the principal, knowing I dare not lay a hand on you or your property, and confident that the administration will back me up and do something about your behavior instead of lecturing me about classroom management skills (assuming I survive this) and sending me to the teacher re-teaching center to re-teach me how to handle dangerous, aggressive, un-motivated, belligerent, and bad-smelling students with learning disabilities (who are not more than eighty per cent of the student population.)
Now that I am old, and parts of me are drying up and falling off, I am seriously trying to take my talent for lying like a rug and turn it into a new career, a fiction author for young adults. I mean, I do have some knowledge of youths and adolescents, having taught them for a quarter of a century plus half a decade (sorry, thirty years for those of you who are used to actually being listened to when you talk). I am also very good at telling narrative lies from having to recount what happened when we had the fight in the classroom because Bozo looked at Bozina from behind and she went into a screaming fit because he’s a creepy guy and she could feel his eyes on her behind even when she was only looking at the girl ahead of her, Bozolette, who was turned around talking to her without permission about how ugly Bozinga is whenever he has to wear shorts for Phizz Ed Class. Of course the principal sends me to the teacher re-teaching center for more re-teaching even if he believes my little black hoo-haw. Therefore I hope that means that I really ought to be able to mash together a bunch of my brilliant, witty hoo-haws, put a nice pink ribbon on them, and sell them as a young adult novel.
So, there you have it. I am a liar. I freely admit it. And I am trying to make the transition from one liars’ club to the next before all my parts dry up and fall off. Dang! There went one leg already!
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As an ESL teacher, or English as a Second Language Teacher, I do firmly believe that anyone can learn to speak English if they have a mouth to speak with, ears to hear with, and a brain that does at least a little more than hold the ears apart. There are ways to get through to an English beginner who already speaks another language fluently. You use body language, simple, repeated words and phrases, picture dictionaries, and enough patience to melt down the next ice age. But how would it work with an alien who not only didn’t have a green card, but wasn’t even familiar with life on this planet?
Well, the Tellerons in my book Catch a Falling Star already come with a working knowledge of English since they grew up watching American TV programs from the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and early 80’s. If you live about nine light years away from Earth, you can watch shows that are older than nine years. In fact, TV helped the Tellerons leap to the erroneous conclusion that we were ripe for conquest. Who wouldn’t want to invade if the enemy were all as stupid as Gilligan and the Brady Bunch? So, let’s suppose the alien youth who enters my classroom straight from the enrollment center is not human, and not a Telleron. Let’s suppose he is from a planet in the Epsilon Indi star system, Epsilon Indi Four. That planet has some interesting kiddos to send my way.
They call their planet Galtorr Prime, in their language “Gaahl Toor Onssi”. They are humanoid in shape, but are actually tailless saurian people, looking all reptilian and toothy-scary. Green and brown are their ordinary scale colors, and their bright green eyes have vertically-slitted pupils like a poisonous snake. They speak only Hiss Language and have trouble making the sounds of English that require a mobile lip. Young Dathoo the Lizard Boy is quite a handful in my classroom.
The first challenge is to get the Hiss speaker to realize that in this country we are not allowed to eat our classmates. Asking the girls to show him how humans make their eggs is a no-no too. Beginning speakers can often get frustrated trying to sort out the wondrous mish-mash of words that is English, but they must learn that not being able to say something correctly the first few times does not require the invocation of the Galtorrian Death Ritual. I also have to remember to teach him to leave his laser plasma gun in his sub-orbital vehicle in the parking lot.
After a month and several trips to the doctor with serrated bite wounds, I have young Dathoo speaking all the important phrases like; “Yes, oh wise and wonderful teacher, I will do that immediately,” and “Teachers deserve to make as much money as corporate CEO’s.”
Okay, so if an alien child from another world wanted to come to my classroom, I could do that. But if it’s okay with the powers that be, I would really rather you picked some other teacher.
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Is the line between science fiction a bit blurry?
I think reality is the one thing that is most critical to science fiction. If you don’t have something real in the story, then you are missing the science part. But the key to that particular treasure chest is in how you mix the reality, also known to some as the truth, with the story, also known to some as the pack of lies. So let me tell you a lie–er–a story about how I tried to build some reality into my little work of science fiction.
1990 was not the year I had the inspiration for the story. That actually came much earlier, in my misspent youth back In the 1970’s. Now, I won’t try to tell you that I had any close encounters of the third kind back then other than in a movie theater, because after all, some lies are too big and hairy for even me to believe. The movie theater had a huge influence on my imagination, as did the Saturday matinees on the television, but the only true parts of that whole mess is how people think and feel in reaction to certain situations.
I could claim a kinship with Davalon and the fact that he was accidentally left behind on Earth because I was accidentally separated from my family at the Mason City Air Show. I know the Mason City Airport isn’t a very big one to get lost in, but there were lots of people there, and I was a dumb kid at the time. I could draw on that wonderful mix of panic, fear, and exhilaration at being completely on my own to help me plot out how a lost alien child would think and act in a small Iowa town. Naturally he would immediately get himself run over on the highway. That’s how it works, isn’t it? Oh, wait, I didn’t actually get run over at the Mason City Airport. That’s one of the big white lies I am trying to separate from truth here.
1990 is significant enough to use as the first word in a paragraph twice because that was the year of both Voyager 2 flying out into the outer darkness after having encountered and photographed the huge gas planets Uranus and Neptune, and the year that a real invasion occurred when Iraq decided to invade Kuwait. Both of those events get an obscure reference in my story because real events, even events that most people try to ignore, can make a pack of lies, er, story seem real.
Everyone has a Ms. Rubelmacher–inspirational by default
1990 is also the year I sat down at my electric typewriter and began pecking away at my first draft of the story itself. 1990 is also the year that happened 101 years after the events in 1889, when Theofrastus Wallace and Thornapple Seabreez flew a passenger train with Pullman coaches all the way to Mars. Of course, that last bit is totally irrelevant because it didn’t actually happen. It is just another pack of lies–er—story that I chose to tell as a screwy plot device to mix up the lies further and make the whole project murky at best.
So… Oops, wasn’t this paragraph supposed to start with 1990 also? I guess not, because it’s all about how you have to use some real science to get your sticky little hands on a label of science fiction for your story. Here you have to make use of all those glorious little facts and details you learned in science class when you were supposed to be paying better attention to what Ms. Rubelmacher was teaching. Here I could place the notion that amphibians absorbed moisture and nutrients through their skin into my story about amphibianoid aliens. I could also use the notion that fusion engines could be fueled by the water droplets in steam, and the imaginary anti-gravity engines were able to make a train fly. I could use my knowledge of Martian Geography to help set part of the story on Mars, again thanks to the fact that Ms. Rubelmacher’s teaching was so boring, er, exciting that I actually had to read ahead in the textbook rather than listen.
So here we have a restatement of my thesis and a summation about all the idiocy, er, wisdom that I have to impart about how you mix what is real with what is a bald-faced lie, er, fictional story. It boils down to this… Any good liar, er, con man, er, story-teller… yes, I mean story-teller, mixes just enough factual and verifiable stuff into the mix to make the lie, er, story believable.
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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 they do 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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Catch a Falling Star 