Tag Archives: drawings

December 24, 2023 · 2:06 am

Blue Holiday Time

Christmas time has come again. And my family, still attached to Jehovah’s Witnesses, avoids everything important to the world around us at this time of year. My wife and daughter, the only members of my immediate family that still live with me, took the RV to San Antonio to pick up my mother-in-law who miraculously escaped hospice care in 2023, and took her to South Padre Island to spend time with her that statistically they should never have had a chance at. So, I, also in poor health, am left at home with the dog to spend the holiday we don’t celebrate all alone. I am not bitter. I have time to draw and write stories and poetry.  And I can watch others here in Dallas enjoy a holiday that once made a big difference in my childhood every year. I can reflect on loved ones now gone and memories those loved ones once shared with me about family meals at reunions and holiday gatherings at Grandpa and Grandma’s place, cousins by the dozens with shining smiles, and live Christmas trees in stands filled with sugar water and decorated with blinking lights and bubble lights and handmade ornaments and antique glass balls of many colors, some of which were handed down all the way from Germany where once our ancestors lived and loved and celebrated Christmas.

Yes, I am not bitter. Nor really lonely, depressed, or bored. The dog and I have our ways. There are songs sung to nobody. Arthritic dances that no one sees or laughs at. I am old enough to know that there is enough love stored in my heart for several more lifetimes if need be. And if there is no one to share them with for now, that’s not my loss. 

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December 3, 2023 · 2:15 am

The Truest of Magicks

Okay, life is like this; you are born, a lot of dumb stuff happens that you are mostly not in control of, you suffer a little bit, you are happy a little bit, and then you die.   That is a pretty gloomy prospect, and most of us spend our entire lives obsessing over it, examining it with microscopes, doctoring it with needles and potions and chainsaws, trying to make it last a little longer, wailing and complaining about our sorry allotment, and wasting what little time we have.  So what secret exists that could ever make a difference?  Could ever open up our eyes… even just a tiny bit?

Zoric

The secret, as far as I can tell (and I am certainly one of the dumber and more random among you because I am cursed with insight and wisdom won through suffering and making huge mistakes), is reading the right books.

Eli Tragedy

I am not alone in this sort of thinking.  There are those who believe that if you gather the best books together into a personal library and read them, they add experiences and knowledge to your life that you would not otherwise have.  (Of course, one must acknowledge, especially if you read fiction, that most books are filled with lies and misinformation, and some, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus leaps to mind, might leave you stupider than you were when you started.)  It deepens, broadens, and intensely colors the experience of life.

Skorpio

People who read books a lot… really read them, and re-read them, and collect them, and study them, and think about and write about them… are called wizards.  Wizards are wise men.  It is what the word means.  Being one does not make you better than anyone else.  In fact, wizards are generally weaker than normal men.  It comes from all that ruining of eyes and fuddling up brains with too much thinking.  You don’t want a wizard to back you up in a fist fight.  You will certainly lose.  And you don’t want a wizard to tell you how live your life.  They are not good role models.  But if a wizard tells a story, you should listen.  Because if you really listen, and the wizard is really wise, you can expand the borders of your life, and push on nearer to immortality.

Ice Alchemist

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February 6, 2023 · 2:33 am

Wisdom from the Outsider

There is so much left to be said before my time runs out.  Wisdom, whether hard won or acquired entirely through wit, bears a certain responsibility in the possession of it.  We are duty-bound as wizards, the masters of wisdom, to pass it on.mrFuture

Now, you certainly have every right to protest that I am not wise and I have no wisdom.  You are certainly right to point out that I am a doddering old fool that sits around the house all day in the midst of his poor-health-enforced retirement doing little beyond writing silly stories and drawing pictures of mostly naked cartoon girls.  I get that.  But the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how big everything is and how little I really know about anything.

Take for instance the question of where we came from and what our purpose is?  (And the question of why I put a question mark on that when it really wasn’t a question.)

I originally believed in the God of the Christians and in the promises of Jesus… everlasting life and an eternity of sitting on a cloud with a harp and…  Okay, it didn’t take me long to see the logical holes in that line of reasoning.  So much of that is fear of death and the need to believe that I am the center of all things, the most important person in existence.  The truth is I am only a tiny part of a nearly-infinitely-large universe.  And the universe is conscious… self aware.  How do I know this?  Because I am conscious and self-aware.  I am an infinitely tiny piece of the whole… but there are untold trillions of others just like me.   Mai LingAnd when I die… when this body ceases to function, as it already has a great deal of trouble doing, the parts that make up the individual creature and thought patterns I identify as me will be scattered to the far corners of everywhere to be gathered up once again and be something new.  All of mankind passes away.  Human beings and the planet Earth will one day be no more.  But that is not what matters.  There is so much more beyond the boundaries of what my limited eyesight can behold, and what my limited mind can comprehend.   I am made of star-stuff (just ask Neal DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan), and I am a part of the universe as a whole.  I am in no hurry to die.  Life is worth fighting through the pain for… but I do not fear death.  Like birth, it is only a stop along the way in a journey that, as far as I can tell, never ends.

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February 2, 2023 · 2:48 am

Rabbit People

castle carrot

On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in.  (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.)  And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people.  Rabbits are people too.  So, I have been walking among the rabbit people.  Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people.  They are not trying to profit off you.  They are not trying to get everything they can off you.  They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.

Mr. R Rabbit

I often see myself as a rabbit person.  In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students.  If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”

“Oh, no, thank you sir.”

“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight.  You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”

“Oh, no sir,” they say.  “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”

And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody.  Teaching is like that.  You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.

Millis

And so life goes on like that.  Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.

I have  recently run a free-book promotion on The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis.   During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident.  He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person.  He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.

So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit.  That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you.  You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul.  (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup.  Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)

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April 4, 2022 · 3:42 pm

Spacey Stories

Buster 3

I am usually considered a Sci-fi and Fantasy author when anybody tries to categorize me.  I learned to write during the 70’s when Tolkien and Michael Moorcock and Frank Herbert were growing bigger, and Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov were gods.  Of course, I also have the YA-thing hanging around my neck like a bell.  I learned to tell stories being a dungeon master for middle-school and high-school boys back in the eighties.  And because it was Texas with a deeply-held and violently-enforced religious fear of anything with demons in it, I was forced to change my role-playing games from sword and sorcery to science-fiction.  I played endless Saturday-afternoon Traveller games that could span parsecs and light-years in a single afternoon.  And I was one of those game-masters who used humor to build a campaign and keep the players engaged and interested.  We had epic space battles and conquered large swaths of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy.  When I began turning my Traveller games into fiction, I used the personalities of the boys who played the game with me for characters in the stories.  I often used the same plots (applying considerable polish to portions of plot where… well, you know… teenage boys, not remarkably G-rated.)  I created things that made me and some of the players laugh, and even feel sad… with deep, cathartic effects, as if we had experienced those things in real life.  (The deaths of favorite characters and tragic failures of galaxy-saving plans come quickly to mind.)

DSCN4409

I enjoy practically everything Sci-Fi, from Flash Gordon, to Buck Rodgers,  to Star Trek and Star Wars…  I loved Mechwarrior books and comic-book Sci-Fi like Adam Strange, Hawkworld, and Guardians of the Galaxy (the old ones that came before Groot and Rocket Raccoon).  I let it warp and weave my imagination and the imaginary worlds that blossomed from it.
And the ideas continued to morph and change and become stories that I really had to tell.

Phoenix1My first published novel, Aeroquest is a compilation of old Traveller adventures.  I published it well before it was ready for market and used a cheap-o publisher that wasn’t worth the free price-tag,  They gave me no editorial help and apparently didn’t even read the novel.  I will not defame them by name here, but if they sound to you like Publish America… well, there might be a reason.

I love stories about time travel and sci-fi gadgets…  trans-mats and starships and meson cannons and sentient plants… oh, my!

And now that I have revealed that I have such a massive nerd-head that I really ought to own Comicon by now, I hope you will not suddenly turn me off and read my blog no more.  I can’t help it.  I was born that way… and any child doomed to be born in the 50’s and a child in the space-race 60’s was bound to have George-Lucas levels of Sci-Fi nerdism.

4th Dimension BizzyandHarmony DSCN4725

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February 12, 2022 · 2:57 pm

Wisdom from the Outsider

There is so much left to be said before my time runs out.  Wisdom, whether hard won or acquired entirely through wit, bears a certain responsibility in the possession of it.  We are duty-bound as wizards, the masters of wisdom, to pass it on.mrFuture

Now, you certainly have every right to protest that I am not wise and I have no wisdom.  You are certainly right to point out that I am a doddering old fool that sits around the house all day in the midst of his poor-health-enforced retirement doing little beyond writing silly stories and drawing pictures of mostly naked cartoon girls.  I get that.  But the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how big everything is and how little I really know about anything.

Take for instance the question of where we came from and what our purpose is?  (And the question of why I put a question mark on that when it really wasn’t a question.)

I originally believed in the God of the Christians and in the promises of Jesus… everlasting life and an eternity of sitting on a cloud with a harp and…  Okay, it didn’t take me long to see the logical holes in that line of reasoning.  So much of that is fear of death and the need to believe that I am the center of all things, the most important person in existence.  The truth is I am only a tiny part of a nearly-infinitely-large universe.  And the universe is conscious… self aware.  How do I know this?  Because I am conscious and self-aware.  I am an infinitely tiny piece of the whole… but there are untold trillions of others just like me.   Mai LingAnd when I die… when this body ceases to function, as it already has a great deal of trouble doing, the parts that make up the individual creature and thought patterns I identify as me will be scattered to the far corners of everywhere to be gathered up once again and be something new.  All of mankind passes away.  Human beings and the planet Earth will one day be no more.  But that is not what matters.  There is so much more beyond the boundaries of what my limited eyesight can behold, and what my limited mind can comprehend.   I am made of star-stuff (just ask Neal DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan), and I am a part of the universe as a whole.  I am in no hurry to die.  Life is worth fighting through the pain for… but I do not fear death.  Like birth, it is only a stop along the way in a journey that, as far as I can tell, never ends.

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January 22, 2022 · 5:37 pm

Rabbit People

castle carrot

On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in.  (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.)  And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people.  Rabbits are people too.  So, I have been walking among the rabbit people.  Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people.  They are not trying to profit off you.  They are not trying to get everything they can off you.  They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.

Mr. R Rabbit

I often see myself as a rabbit person.  In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students.  If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”

“Oh, no, thank you sir.”

“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight.  You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”

“Oh, no sir,” they say.  “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”

And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody.  Teaching is like that.  You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.

Millis

And so life goes on like that.  Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.

I have  recently run a free-book promotion on The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis.   During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident.  He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person.  He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.

So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit.  That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you.  You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul.  (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup.  Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)

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January 2, 2022 · 6:11 pm

Picture Tricks

dorin 001 dorin 002 dorin 003

I have discovered things about being an artist by blogging.  I have discovered things by learning from other artists.  I have also discovered things by trial and error.  I have also discovered things by random acts of God.  So let me share some of the ill-gotten picture secrets that I have added to my vast bag of useless incunabula-juice squeezed out with my arcane-secret juicer and internet blogger good luck.

#1.  Save everything arty… as you see above, I have three different pictures of my Catch a Falling Star character Dorin Dobbs, all made from the same pen and ink line drawing.  All the color is digital paint from my computer’s own paint program.  Simple and cheap to do.  Save functions multiply the pretty.

#2.  Splice stuff together and make new stuff…  I have the cheapest possible photo-shop program, but using its entire $7 value every time I paste with it, I am able to create new art out of old.

DSCN4422

New art out of old;

Val at the barn Val B2 tree time banner

#3.  Weave things together to create unity…  My art is not for its own sake.  I am not Picasso or Van Gogh.  My art is very much tied to the stories I tell as a writer of Young Adult novels.  (Snow Babies is awaiting its turn with the editors of PDMI LLC Publishers.)

#4.  Promote the art and writing of others…  I have spent a ridiculous amount of internet time stalking artists like Loish and sharing their work on my blog.  Writers too.  I do my little book reports in order to connect the reading and the literary influences I have completed (or stolen from) and show where much of my own style and je nais se quois comes from.  If the artist or writer is still living and notices what I have done, they will often return the favor (hopefully, if they don’t find my work to be an offense against the gods of art).  If they can’t return the favor (because they are quite dead or thoroughly disgusted by me), I have at least associated my work with theirs in the minds of my readers,

c18296b715d6f4bb5326967c0aee012c-d7a6fao

#5.  It’s all about digital photography…  In order to share my colored-pencil menagerie of live Paffoonies on the internet, I have to get better at photography.  I have taken far more photos of drawings in the last two years than I have drawn drawings.  That has not been a life-long way of things.  I love color, and poor photography skills turn out various shades of gray.  Sunlight?  Incandescent?  Fluorescent?   I haven’t discovered that secret yet, but it will never be uncovered if I don;t keep trying.

#5. Find connections that help pull your work together in one big, messy bundle…  Facebook, WordPress, and Deviant-Art are all better forums if you can connect them.  I did this by labeling everything Mickey with a meaningless made-up word that no one else in their right mind would use.   The word is Paffooney.

goopafoo

A picture search on Google using the words “Beyer Paffooney” gives you an almost complete gallery of my artwork and nonsense.  Googling the word itself yields a link to a plethora of my old blogs.  Do you not know what plethora means?  Try it and you will learn that very good word.

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April 18, 2015 · 3:05 pm

Spacey Stories

Buster 3

I am usually considered a Sci-fi and Fantasy author when anybody tries to categorize me.  I learned to write during the 70’s when Tolkien and Michael Moorcock and Frank Herbert were growing bigger, and Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov were gods.  Of course, I also have the YA-thing hanging around my neck like a bell.  I learned to tell stories being a dungeon master for middle-school and high-school boys back in the eighties.  And because it was Texas with a deeply-held and violently-enforced religious fear of anything with demons in it, I was forced to change my role-playing games from sword and sorcery to science-fiction.  I played endless Saturday-afternoon Traveller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_%28role-playing_game%29) games that could span parsecs and light-years in a single afternoon.  And I was one of those game-masters who used humor to build a campaign and keep the players engaged and interested.  We had epic space battles and conquered large swaths of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy.  When I began turning my Traveller games into fiction, I used the personalities of the boys who played the game with me for characters in the stories.  I often used the same plots (applying considerable polish to portions of plot where… well, you know… teenage boys, not remarkably G-rated.)  I created things that made me and some of the players laugh, and even feel sad… with deep, cathartic effects, as if we had experienced those things in real life.  (The deaths of favorite characters and tragic failures of galaxy-saving plans come quickly to mind.)

DSCN4409

I enjoy practically everything Sci-Fi, from Flash Gordon, to Buck Rodgers,  to Star Trek and Star Wars…  I loved Mechwarrior books and comic-book Sci-Fi like Adam Strange, Hawkworld, and Guardians of the Galaxy (the old ones that came before Groot and Rocket Raccoon).  I let it warp and weave my imagination and the imaginary worlds that blossomed from it.
And the ideas continued to morph and change and become stories that I really had to tell.

Phoenix1My first published novel, Aeroquest is a compilation of old Traveller adventures.  I published it well before it was ready for market and used a cheap-o publisher that wasn’t worth the free price-tag,  They gave me no editorial help and apparently didn’t even read the novel.  I will not defame them by name here, but if they sound to you like Publish America… well, there might be a reason.

I love stories about time travel and sci-fi gadgets…  trans-mats and starships and meson cannons and sentient plants… oh, my!

And now that I have revealed that I have such a massive nerd-head that I really ought to own Comicon by now, I hope you will not suddenly turn me off and read my blog no more.  I can’t help it.  I was born that way… and any child doomed to be born in the 50’s and a child in the space-race 60’s was bound to have George-Lucas levels of Sci-Fi nerdism.

4th Dimension BizzyandHarmony DSCN4725

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March 28, 2015 · 3:20 pm

Picture Tricks

dorin 001 dorin 002 dorin 003

I have discovered things about being an artist by blogging.  I have discovered things by learning from other artists.  I have also discovered things by trial and error.  I have also discovered things by random acts of God.  So let me share some of the ill-gotten picture secrets that I have added to my vast bag of useless incunabula-juice squeezed out with my arcane-secret juicer and internet blogger good luck.

#1.  Save everything arty… as you see above, I have three different pictures of my Catch a Falling Star character Dorin Dobbs, all made from the same pen and ink line drawing.  All the color is digital paint from my computer’s own paint program.  Simple and cheap to do.  Save functions multiply the pretty.

#2.  Splice stuff together and make new stuff…  I have the cheapest possible photo-shop program, but using its entire $7 value every time I paste with it, I am able to create new art out of old.

DSCN4422

New art out of old;

Val at the barn Val B2 tree time banner

#3.  Weave things together to create unity…  My art is not for its own sake.  I am not Picasso or Van Gogh.  My art is very much tied to the stories I tell as a writer of Young Adult novels.  (Snow Babies is awaiting its turn with the editors of PDMI LLC Publishers.)

#4.  Promote the art and writing of others…  I have spent a ridiculous amount of internet time stalking artists like Loish and sharing their work on my blog.  Writers too.  I do my little book reports in order to connect the reading and the literary influences I have completed (or stolen from) and show where much of my own style and je nais se quois comes from.  If the artist or writer is still living and notices what I have done, they will often return the favor (hopefully, if they don’t find my work to be an offense against the gods of art).  If they can’t return the favor (because they are quite dead or thoroughly disgusted by me), I have at least associated my work with theirs in the minds of my readers,

c18296b715d6f4bb5326967c0aee012c-d7a6fao

#5.  It’s all about digital photography…  In order to share my colored-pencil menagerie of live Paffoonies on the internet, I have to get better at photography.  I have taken far more photos of drawings in the last two years than I have drawn drawings.  That has not been a life-long way of things.  I love color, and poor photography skills turn out various shades of gray.  Sunlight?  Incandescent?  Fluorescent?   I haven’t discovered that secret yet, but it will never be uncovered if I don;t keep trying.

#5. Find connections that help pull your work together in one big, messy bundle…  Facebook, WordPress, and Deviant-Art are all better forums if you can connect them.  I did this by labeling everything Mickey with a meaningless made-up word that no one else in their right mind would use.   The word is Paffooney.

goopafoo

A picture search on Google using the words “Beyer Paffooney” gives you an almost complete gallery of my artwork and nonsense.  Googling the word itself yields a link to a plethora of my old blogs.  Do you not know what plethora means?  Try it and you will learn that very good word.

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