Tag Archives: drawing
Stuart’s Tag
So, I get this message from my writer friend Stuart West;
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Well, crap, Matthew Peters tagged me in a new writer thingy. So I’m tagging five of you unlucky folks as well. Apparently it’s all about the opening sentences. So…drop the opening sentences of the first three chapters of your current WIP. Then pass on the love and agony.
Here’s mine: *Bombing, crashing like an airplane dipping into an ocean, but worse, I couldn’t even make a splash. *So I have a daughter. She just turned eight. She bugs the crap outta’ me with a lotta’ tough questions. *Twenty minutes after seven, and halfway through my second cup of Sake, I began to experience the sinking feeling I’d been stood up. Taken out of context, it does read kinda’ strange, doesn’t it? It’s called Demon With a Comb-Over. It’s complicated, it’s complicated. Okay! Here’re the unlucky writers I’ve chosen to pester/bug/tag: Chat Conversation End
Seen by Meradeth, Jeff, Matthew |
My current WIP (Work In Progress) is a novel called The Bicycle Wheel Genius. It is in the rough draft stage, so I am not even familiar with the chapter leads myself. Here goes nothing…
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.
Canto Two… Norwall, Iowa, population 278, in the Year 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.
Canto Three – At the Ghost House on the Edge of Pixeley’s Junk Yard
It was hard to believe that it had been almost three months since the last time a meeting of the Norwall Pirates had been called at the Ghost House.Tim arrived there well before the agreed-upon time and was slightly miffed that no one else had shown up yet. It came from having a girl as a leader. His cousin Valerie was a good person, and he loved her, and all that, but she was far too caught up in doing girly things to really take her job as grand and glorious and mostly notorious leader of the Pirates seriously enough. He dropped his bicycle in the un-mowed grass and marched through the burrs and the weeds towards the foundation and cellar that was now all that remained of the Ghost House.
Okay, okay… incredibly mundane, I know… It’s just a rough draft. The opening of Canto Two is particularly clunky. Time and multi-facet crap-detectors with supercharged triple D batteries should help. Here’s a Bicycle-Wheel Paffooney to make it a little better.
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Sean “Cudgel” Murphy
The kind of writing I do requires a special class of character that I refer to as a clown. I revealed one already that I used in my novel Snow Babies, that character is the unsuccessful businessman Harker Dawes. He is a pratfall clown, the kind used in Three Stooges movies. He is the subject of numerous physical abuses from other characters and from his own incompetent hand. He is funny because he always seems to survive these terrible episodes, and we are really, really glad that we are not him.
The second clown from Snow Babies, and also used in the novel I am now writing, The Bicycle Wheel Genius, is a dirty old man named Cudgel Murphy. He is a Mrs. Malaprop sort of character who says things that are wickedly mistaken, but not totally unintentional. He loves to drink (drinks other than water, coffee, or sodapop), and what he drinks makes him less than sociable. His is Irish by ancestry and by temperament. He is quick to fight, and slow to forgive, but able to laugh at himself when he discovers he is in the wrong. He loves to fight verbally with his daughter-in-law, Mary Murphy, and adores her children, his grandchildren, particularly Danny Murphy and little sister Dilsey.
The great love of his life was not his wife, who apparently died fairly young as a way of escaping the evil old man. It was instead a car, a 1955 Austin Hereford, an English-made car that Cudgel routinely says is, “the finest car made anywhere in the world in 1955.” She is his baby, and he keeps her running for more than thirty years despite driving her far too fast, too far, and with all sorts of evil brews in her gas tank in place of normal gasoline.
The Paffooney shows the evil old man posing with his wonder-car in front of the Congregational Church in Norwall, Iowa. His face, though unnaturally red by both liquid and temperamental fire looks far more innocent and harmless that it really is. One never knows for sure what is on his scrappy old mind, but you can be sure it will turn out to be funny in one way or another.
Clowns are essential to the kind of fiction I like to write. Sean “Cudgel” Murphy is a good one of those. So good, in fact, I may have to kill him off in the current book. He has a tendency to take over the story and make himself a hero.
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Miss Morgan Begins
As one novel is finished, another begins. Here are the first cantos written for Magical Miss Morgan.
A creative young teacher named Miss Francis Morgan
Canto 1 – Under the Classroom
Three of the bravest representatives the Erlking could muster were walking through the metal tunnel that the slow ones called a heating duck. Why they called it that was anyone’s guess. The three had seen nary a single duck. It was a big risk, entering the land of the slow ones. You never knew when they might squish you with a fly slapper or zap you with an ani-bug-lite. These were three of the bravest of the Wee People in all of the Kingdom of Minutiae. The leader was a Pixie, tall for his kind at two inches. His name was Donner, Thunder in the language of the Wee People. His lithe body was a creamy greenish tan with gossamer wings of transparent stained glass. The girl was called Silkie, a Storybook who looked completely human… completely blond-haired, Nordic human, but only an inch and a half tall, dressed entirely in green leaves stitched together by one of the Erlking’s stitch-witches. And the third, brought along for the sake of muscle, not brain-power, was Garriss the weak-minded, a fire-bodied Wisp. His naked form was made of actual flame, but held together by magic in a way that he could not burn anyone or anything without using the cone of fire spell burned into his flaming hands. He could’ve burned the entire structure of the slow ones to the ground, so powerful was he… Yet he would not have the first idea how to go about it without careful direction from one of the others.
“If we are going to find the one the wizard spoke of,” said Donner, “We must proceed to the place called a glass-room.”
“I think the wizard said it was a classroom,” said Silkie resolutely. Slow one speech was a mystery to all the Wee Folk, but Silkie at least had studied it with the help of the wizard’s apprentice Pippin.
“I hope it is not a class room,” said Garriss. “I am considered of such a low class that they will certainly reject me.”
“A pain made of brass is the ass without class,” sighed Donner, reciting the old stitch-witch saying.
“Up ahead,” said Silkie, pointing, “is a place where the warm air flows upwards. It is some kind of doorway made of bars, a grate or something.”
“Yes, we can at least look up into that room,” said Donner. “Mayhap it is the correct glass-room.”
The three wee adventurers drew up to the edge. Looking upward they saw a group of children moving desks to the edges of the room, and a lady in her early thirties standing in the center directing them.
Canto 2 – Miss Morgan’s Class
“All right, kiddie-winkies,” said Miss Morgan, “now that we have the space for our talking circle created, we must take off our shoes and socks. Bare feet only!”
“Why must we do that, Miss M?” asked Blueberry Bates, a girl with a very concerned scowl.
Miss Morgan loved the Six-Twos better than any of her other classes… and that was saying something because she really loved them all. Six-Two, however, had the most Norwall kids in it of all her classes, and Norwall kids were a little more imaginative and empathetic than the Belle City kids, or the Goodwell kids, or the Klempke kids. Besides, she had once been a Norwall kid herself. It was a very special little Iowa farm town to Miss Morgan.
“Who can tell Blueberry why we have to have bare feet for this discussion?” Miss M asked the whole group.
“Well,” said Mike Murphy, a Norwall rapscallion and a Pirate, “we’re studying the Hobbit by Tolkien. Hobbits all go barefoot all the time.”
“Very good, Michael. He’s right. But why does it help for us all to be barefoot?”
“Maybe it helps us feel like the main character Bilbo,” said Billy Klatthammer, the plump son of the Klempke, Iowa real estate king.
“Right. But why is it important to feel like Bilbo?”
“He’s an every-man character,” said Frosty Anderson, a Norwall farm kid. “We have to identify with him as we travel through the world of Middle Earth. He’s supposed to be just like us.”
“My, my… Someone was listening when I was talking about the book yesterday.”
“And I think,” said Barbie Andersen from Belle City, “that people are more sensitive when they are barefooted. You want us to feel what Bilbo feels and think like Bilbo thinks.”
“That’s very good, Barbie. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“The real reason,” said Tim Kellogg, Norwall boy and most difficult child in the class, “is that you like the smell of stinky feet.”
Everyone busted out in a belly laugh, including Miss Morgan.
“Okay,” said Miss Morgan, “Now that I can smell all of your stinky feet, I need you to gather around in a circle. As we take on each question from the study guide, we will go around the circle and get an answer or a comment from each of you. We will talk about each question until everyone has said at least one thing and we have made an agreement on what the best answer is.”
At that moment, the first-year teacher from next door appeared in the doorway. “Miss Morgan,” said Miss Krapplemacher, “the noise from this classroom is eroding my standards of discipline again.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Abby,” said Miss Morgan, smiling and speaking through gritted teeth. She resisted the urge to call her Miss Krabby, the way all her science students did. Miss Krabby insisted on a silent classroom and made students fill out worksheets all period. “We will try to be quieter. We are doing a discussion assignment, though.”
“Well, okay. But stifle the laughing. It’s hard to achieve serious learning with all the laughing going on next door.”
“We promise we will only talk about depressing things this period,” piped up Tim Kellogg. “No more laughter this period.”
Bless the little black-hearted teacher’s kid. Miss Morgan silently appreciated the imp as Miss Krapplemacher made vibrating fists with both hands and stormed out. Tim was Miss Krabby’s least favorite science student of all time.
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Superchicken
Today I finished the re-write on my novel Superchicken, I have only been working on it since 1988. The title came from my high school nickname. I was a nerd with the ability to play tackle football to a level that impressed all the guys who were bigger and stronger than me. It became my superhero name. So I put it into a book that is filled with stories within stories. Many of the stories are true. Some are just big goofy lies. I hope to make people laugh a little with it. I hope people are not offended a lot. But if I polish it any more than it is, I will have polished holes clear through it
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The signature on the portrait of the Superchicken is simply my name spelled backwards.
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The Island Girl
When I was yet a boy in high school, I had a dream that seemed so real. I knew that one day it would come true. It was a dream of an island in the Pacific Ocean and an exotic island girl who was as intrigued by me as I was by her. I began drawing pictures of it. I don’t have the first pictures I drew any more, but here is one from college, in 1979,
As time went on, and I became a teacher, I had more dreams of who she might be and what it might mean. I met her in real life while teaching in South Texas. We were married and have three kids. The next Paffooney is from 1995.
No matter what else it might mean, it proves to me that dreams can come true. In fact, I believe that through dreams we can experience the future because we can dream outside of time. Reality is a whole, and perceiving it as a straight line from the past, through the present, into the future is only one perspective of the whole thing.
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The Girl With the Red Bird
This is a Paffooney I have had in my portfolio for many years. Is it a miracle that it looks so much like my daughter the Princess? Yes! Most definitely. I drew this before I got married, more than twenty years ago. Yet, it looks so much like the Princess that my flabber is completely gasted.
June 29, 2014 · 6:49 pm
Space Cowboys, the Kid Variety
Here are two more deadly mutant kid ninjas from Aeroquest. When the Pan Galactican Union fell to the mysterious space invaders known as the Scondians, these two mutant boys were among the flood of refugees who escaped to the Human Imperium. Gyro son of Jor is a Nebulon. That means he is a member of an inter-stellar race whose humanity is in question. His skin is blue and highly radiation resistant. On top of his Nebulon qualities, he is a Psion Trans-muter who can mentally alter molecules, sometimes even fusing simple atoms into more complex ones. He is also very inventive. He can change a simple computer into a mini-attack-bot, a computer into a video game machine, or a vehicle into video game machine… well, he’s a teenager, so virtually anything can become a video game machine. He laughs easily, even at things that aren’t funny, and doesn’t mind when others call him a Space Smurf, because he doesn’t know what that means. Billy Iowa is his best friend and fellow survivor. If Gyro’s family hadn’t rescued Billy from Scondian captivity, he would’ve remained on Pan Galactica as a laboratory test subject. Unlike many of the Pan Galactican Space Cowboys, he is not prejudiced against Nebulons. In fact, as an orphan, he looks at them more as family than as an inferior race. His Psion power is Clairvoyance, allowing him to see times and places where he is not present, even to the extent that he can accurately predict the future. He’s a better karate and kung fu student than Gyro, but as student ninjas go, all the rest of his dojo can beat the crap out of him. So, these two Space Cowboys, both boys, provide a lot of the comedy relief in the Aero Dojo. They are of course, not nearly as dangerous as the girls are, but don’t insult them never-the-less. Billy can tell you how you will die, and Gyro will make unbelievably corny jokes about it.
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Catch a Falling Star 