Tag Archives: books

February 23, 2013 · 7:32 pm

The Liar’s Club

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; 

  • Texas values education.
  • We put the students first and make our decisions based on what is best for them.
  • We only put smart people in charge of education in our state.
  • We only put smart people in charge of our state.
  • We don’t let politics affect the quality of our education.

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!Image

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January 23, 2013 · 10:24 pm

The Alien in the Classroom

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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January 16, 2013 · 6:49 pm

To be Real or Not to be Real? Science Fiction Vs. Reality

BookCover

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.

old-teacher

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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January 9, 2013 · 8:43 pm

The Reasons I Put it in my Pocket

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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