Tag Archives: fiction

July 16, 2024 · 10:58 pm

Cissy Moonskipper Meets the Nebulons, Part 3

Putting on the Danjer Suits

Suki, as a Nebulon herself, led the way out of the spaceship into the oral cavity of the great space whale. Cissy, an Earther humanoid, and Friday, a Lupin child, both came tentatively after, fully aware that they were probably the reasons why there was an air of suspicion and dislike among the Clan Vorranac Nebulons. Crocodile Guy wisely stayed invisible and inside the spaceship, an option open to him alone as an artificially intelligent hologram made of light and computer data.

“So, are you going to welcome us? Cissy saved a large number of our clan brothers and sisters from Lupin pirates. And the Lupin child was saved and adopted by her as well. (This is translated from the Nebulonin Language to save you from having to learn Nebulonin.)” Suki glared angrily at the completely expressionless Nebulon warriors.

“The xenomorphs must be put into Danjer suits immediately,” said the lead warrior with no significant expression on his blue face.

“He says that we must dress you in Danjer suits immediately. It is for your protection.”

“Explain, please,” Cissy said.

“You see these two special organs that all Nebulons have?” Suki said, pointing to the two red spots on her otherwise blue cheeks. “These special skin organs allow the absorption and dispersing of exotic radiations that are part of a space whale’s internal functions. Without them, living inside a space whale can kill you. Danjer suits will prevent that from happening to the two of you so you don’t die.”

“Well, that does seem important.” Cissy smiled at Suki. A smile that would later seem inappropriate.

The three crewmen of the Happy Luck followed the warriors into a smaller enclosure.

“Paskuah sah fonatouh auol tanac.” The lead warrior pointed at a bench with three piles of quivering sludge on it, one blue, one gold, and one pink.

“He says we should disrobe and put these on.” Suki smiled as she picked up the blue sludge. In her hand, it transformed into a reasonable facsimile of a space suit.

“Euw, dat is ay-live!” Friday said with her muzzle curled up in a snarl.

“It is a living creature. It functions as a space suit. It feeds on the dirt, sweat, and oil from your body, automatically keeps you clean, and provides force fields, proper pressure levels, and an atmosphere for you to breath. It also processes and protects you from radiation.” Suki demonstrated how easily it went on her body and turned into what looked like a high-tech space suit. It was alive, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at it.

Cissy shucked off the suit she had been wearing. She stood there naked for a few moments, staring at the golden quivering mass. She knew that some of the warriors had to be males, watching her with who knows what in their hearts. But she wasn’t sure about the whole thing.

Friday was only wearing her Lupin fur, so when she picked up the pink mass, it quickly swooped onto her small body and fairly sizzled as it changed. It turned into a rather cute outfit that fit a Lupin child perfectly. “I iz purtee nowz!” Friday giggled. “Ann it teekulls!”

So, Cissy put the golden one on too. And it swiftly turned into an admirable starship uniform worthy of a captain. She also felt surprisingly pleased.

Then the lead warrior said, “Now we will go before the Prince to decide who lives and who dies. (Translated for you again so you don’t have to work at it… free of charge.)”

“What did he say, Suki?”

“Well, um… it needs a lot of context.”

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July 15, 2024 · 1:24 am

Being Ignored

I have never been an attention-seeker. In the Elysian Fields of modern society, I have never really been the honeybee. I have always been the flower. I had a reputation in high school for being the quiet nerd who ends up surprising you immensely in speech class, at the science fair, or at the art show. I was the one they all turned to when everybody in the conversation had already had their chance to strut and pontificate and say dumb things, and they were finally ready to get the solution to the problem being discussed, or the best suggestion on where to begin to find it.

When I became the teacher of the class instead of the student, I had to make major changes. I had to go from being patient, quiet, and shy to being the fearless presenter, forceful, sharp as an imparter of knowledge, and able to be easily understood, even by the kids whom you couldn’t legally call stupid, but were less than smart, and not in a pleasant Forrest Gump sort of way.

Shyness is only ever overcome by determination and practice. The standard advice given is to picture your audience naked so that you are not intimidated by them. But if your audience is seventh graders, you have to be extra careful about that. They are metaphorically naked all the time, ready at a moment’s notice to explode out of any metaphorical clothing they have learned to wear to cover the things that they wish to keep to themselves about themselves. And while you want them to open up and talk to you, you don’t want the emotional nakedness of having them sobbing in front of the entire class, or throwing things at you in the throes of a mega-tantrum over their love-life and the resulting soap operas of betrayal and revenge. And you definitely don’t want any literal nakedness in your classroom. (Please put your sweat pants back on, Keesha. Those shorts are not within the limits of the dress code.) Calling attention to yourself and what you have to say, because you are being paid to do so, is a critical, yet tricky thing to do. You want them looking at you, and actually thinking about what you are saying (preferably without imagining you naked, which they will do at any sort of unintentional slip or accidental prompting.) The ones who ignore you are a problem that has to be remedied individually and can eat up the majority of your teaching time.

I trained myself to be fairly good at commanding the attention of the room.

But now that I am retired, things have changed. I can still command attention in the room, which I proved to myself by being a successful substitute teacher last year. But I no longer have a captive audience that I can speak to five days a week in a classroom. Now my audience is whoever happens to see this blog and is intrigued enough by the title and pictures to read my words.

Now that I am retired and only speaking to the world at large through writing, I am ignored more than ever before. Being ignored is, perhaps, the only thing I do anymore. It is the new definition of Mickey. Mickey means, “He who must be ignored. Not partially, but wholly… and with malice.”

I put my blog posts on Facebook and Twitter where I know for a fact that there are people who know me and would read them and like them if they knew that they were there. But the malevolent algorithms on those social media sites guarantee that none of my dozens of cousins, old school friends, and former students will see them. Only the single ladies from Kazakhstan and members of the Butchers Union of Cleveland see my posts. Why is this? I do not know. Facebook and Twitter ignore me when I ask.

My books, though liked by everybody who has actually read and responded to them, are lost in a vast ocean of self-published books, most of which are not very good and give a black eye to self-published authors in general. I recently got another call from I-Universe/Penguin Books publishers about Catch a Falling Star, the one book I still have with them. They are concerned that my book, which is on their Editor’s Choice list, is not performing as well as their marketing people think it should. But to promote it, I would have to pay four hundred dollars towards the marketing campaign, even though they are already subsidizing it by fifty percent. They tell me they believe in my book. But apparently not enough to pay for 100% of the promotion.

I have decided to invest in a review service that will cost me about twenty dollars a month. But my confidence is not high. The last time I paid somebody to review a book, they reviewed a book with the same title as mine from a different author. That service still owes me money.

But the only reason it is a problem that I am being thoroughly ignored these days is that an author needs to be read to fulfill his purpose in life. Maybe pictures of pretty girls in this post will help. But, even if they don’t, well, I had their attention once upon a time. And since my purpose as a teacher is already fulfilled, perhaps that will be enough for one lifetime.

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July 2, 2024 · 1:18 am

Islands of Identity

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Who am I?

Why do I do the things that I do?

No man is an island.  John Donne the English poet stated that.  And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it.  We need other people.  I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines.  She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.

Gilligans Island

When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan.  My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island.  This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!”  By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan.  But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island.  And no man is an island.  Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.

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You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be.  It was who I was as a teacher.  Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan.  Being a teacher gave me an identity.  And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger.  Not a bad thing to be.  And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.

But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here.  Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now?  We never really find the answer.  Answers change over time.  And so do I.

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June 26, 2024 · 12:09 am

Singing Rock and Soul

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Yes, this is a picture of a rock.  But it is no ordinary rock.  Okay, that’s not precisely true.  It is a gray metamorphic rock roughly square in shape with numerous flecks of white and a white strip along the top.  As rocks go, it probably couldn’t be more ordinary, more rocky in its soul.  But, as with all things in this life, the importance and true meaning lies in the context.  This is a pocket rock.  It spent a quarter of a century riding around in my pants pocket.  I have held it in my hand millions of times.

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The Rowan Community Center, seen in this picture I used for the cover of Magical Miss Morgan, is the last part of the old Rowan school still standing.

In 1980, my Great Grandma Hinckley died.  That was also the year my folks had to move to Texas because of the transfer my Dad’s seedcorn company gave him to its cotton seed division.  It was one year before I got my teaching degree.  And it was the year they tore down the building where I went to school for grades 1 through 6.  That summer, as I walked around the demolition site, I found the homely gray rock that was nearly as square as I was, and because I was already feeling homesick before I actually left home, I picked it up  and stuck it in my pocket.  It was a little square piece of home.

That rock went with me to college.  It went with me to both Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida.  It has been to Washington D.C.  It has been in the depths of caves in Kentucky and Missouri and Texas.  It has been high in the sky in my pocket in an airplane.  It has been to beaches on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the U.S.  It has visited both Mexico and Canada.  It his been to Las Vegas.  And it even rode in the subways of New York City.

And possibly the most interesting part of this pocket rock’s career happened in Texas schools.  It was with me in my pocket constantly from 1980 to 2004.  I finally took it out of my pocket and placed it in an old cigar box that once belonged to my grandfather and I have kept keepsakes in since I was a kid.

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And I have thought a lot about this ordinary rock that isn’t really ordinary on closer inspection.  At one point or another I thought about using it as a skipping stone at both the Atlantic and the Pacific.  In 2004 when I was considering the pocket watch broken by it and the car key accidentally bent against it, it almost wound up in Lake Superior.  I put in my cigar box and it has remained exiled there since.  Will I have it buried with me, in my pocket?  No, probably not.  My wife plans to have me cremated.  Hopefully, though, not until I am already dead.  This rock has pretty much been a symbol of my soul, travelling with me, teaching with me, jingling the pocket change when I walk…  And it will continue to exist when the thinking and writing parts of Mickey are gone.

But even rocks are not immortal.  Sometime in the future something will happen to it.  It will end up someplace unexpected or changed by grinding, melting, or chemical reaction into some other form.  But no matter what happens to it ultimately, the meaning of it, the context, the places it has been and the things that it has done will still be true, still have happened to it.  And, ultimately, it will still be just like me.

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June 25, 2024 · 12:37 am

Books are Life, and Life is Books

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I just finished reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, his novel from 2014.  Just, WOW!  I guess this post is technically a book review… but not really.  I have to talk about so much more than just the book.

You can see in my initial illustration that I read this book to pieces.  Literally.  (And I was an English Major in college, so I LITERALLY know what literally means!)

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Look at this face.  Can you stop looking at the beautiful eyes?  I can’t.

I discovered Mitchell as a writer when I happened onto the book and movie pair of Cloud Atlas.  It enthralled me.  I read the book, a complex fantasy about time and connections, about as deeply and intricately as any book that I have ever read.  I fell in love.  It was a love as deep and wide as my love of Dickens or my love of Twain… even my love of Terry Pratchett.

It is like the picture on the left.  I can’t stop looking into it and seeing more and more.  It is plotted and put together like a finely crafted jeweled timepiece.

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And this new book is almost exactly like that.  It is a first- person narrative in six parts with five different narrators.  Holly Sykes, the central character, is the narrator of the first and last parts, in the past in the 1980’s, and in the future in 2043.  The titular metaphor of the bone clocks is about the human body and how it measures time from youth to old age.  And it is pictured as a clock ticking in practically all it’s forms, from a child who is snuffed out at eight years of age to horologists who have lived for a thousand years by being reincarnated with past lives intact.

Fantasy and photographic realism intertwine and filigree this book like a vast kaleidoscope of many colors, peoples, societies, and places.  At one point David Mitchell even inserts himself into the narrative cleverly as the narrator of part four, Crispin Hershey, the popular English novelist struggling to stay on top of the literary world.  He even indulges every writer’s fantasy and murders himself in the course of the story.

David Mitchell is the reason I have to read voraciously and write endlessly.  His works seem to contain an entire universe of ideas and portraits and events and predictions and wisdoms. And he clearly shows me that his universe is not the only one that needs to be written before the world ends.  Books are life, and life is in books.  And when the world as we know it is indeed gone, then they will be the most important thing we ever did.  Even if no one is left to read them.

And so, I read this book until it fell into pieces, its spine broken and its back cover lost.  To be fair, I bought it at a used book store, and the paperback copy was obviously read by previous owners cover to cover.  The pages were already dog eared with some pages having their corners turned down to show where someone left off and picked up reading before me.  But that, too, is significant.  I am not the only one who devoured this book and its life-sustaining stories.  Know that, if you do decide to read and love this book, you are definitely not the only one.  I’d lend you my copy.  But… well, it’s already in pieces.

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June 15, 2024 · 12:49 am

Mennyms (A Book Review)

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This is the book I have really read, though I intend to acquire the rest.

Sylvia Waugh is a British writer of children’s books who has a lot in common with me.  She spent her career as a teacher of grammar.  In her late fifties she became a published author.  Her book series of the Mennyma is a charming fantasy adventure about dolls so loved by their owner, they actually come to life… and survive her…. and then have to make their way in a world that would be horrified by them and might easily seek to destroy them.

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Hopefully none of my dolls come to life after I croak. After years of collecting, they nearly outnumber humanity.

But rest assured, the dolls in this sweet-natured children’s book series would never prove evil.  The books are more fantasy-comedy than horror story.  In fact, they are impossibly far away from horror.

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The original book.

Joshua Mennym is the head of a family of life-size rag dolls.  He pretends to be a middle-aged man.  He generally keeps his distance from the general public, because, up close, his basic rag-doll-ness would stand revealed.  Rag dolls are not supposed to walk and talk, let alone have families and live in a home of their own.   His wife is Vinetta Mennym, also a rag doll.  Together they are parents to the ten-year old twins, Poopie, the boy, and Wimpey, the girl.

The teenage twins are Pilbeam and Soobie.  Pilbeam is the girl and constant companion of the elder teenage sister, Appleby.  Soobie is the boy and  blue.  Why their former owner, Kate Penshaw, made him with a blue head and blue feet and blue hands is a mystery both to the Mennyyms and to me.   It causes him to be the one most likely to cause exposure of the family secret because even at a distance he does not look like a “real people” person.

Baby Googles is the smallest of the family, constantly cared for by the nanny, Miss Quigley, who is also considered a Mennym because she is also a doll.

Grandpa Magnus Mennym lives in the attic with Grandma and takes care of the household bills.  He writes scholarly works on the English Civil War and publishes them for a modest income which comes through the mail.  Granny Tulip is also relied upon for her wisdom and experience whenever a problem with keeping the family secret comes up.

Each book in the series contains a different adventure revolving around the realistic comedy generated by impossible people trying so hard to be real.  I absolutely love the adventures, even the ones I haven’t read yet.  And I know that the only way you could possibly love these books too is if you share my loony love of the fantastically impossible that turns out to be real.  After reading these books, I fully intend to keep a very close eye on my own doll collection.

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June 7, 2024 · 2:58 am

Why Did I Create All of This?

Kitty in a black bunny suit with white bunny head phones on for overkill.

There is probably no mystery in Paffooney #1. Kitty sends me provocative pictures via Instagram. She’s actually twenty-two years old, but she looks twelve. I believe other lustful old coots send her money and gifts for providing the bunny pictures like the one that inspired this goofy Paffooney. I am not a creepy old man… most of the time. But though my sex life is pretty much over, I still remember it and still have a few hormones left in my libido-fueled, impotent memory. I can send her digital copies of the drawings I make of her. But I have no other money or gifts to give her for the stream of rabbit pictures she produces at the rate of real breeding rabbits. She’s a cute girl the age of my daughter, so I follow her. But I do not do what other old lust-filled coots do. At least I think I don’t. I prefer to make Paffooneys.

These are a few of my Instagram pictures that I have put out there instead of selfies in bunny costumes like Kitty makes. I don’t look as good in a bunny suit as Kitty does. I have also published twenty-four novels and books full of my fiction, essays, and poetry. I am a real artist and author even though I don’t make more than pocket change for any of it. So, why do I do it?

Me pretending to be a mountain nudist because I wrote a story in the collection of shorts called Adventures Without Clothes.

Well, for one thing, I am retired. I need to do something to replace my career as the monkey instructor in the monkeyhouse (translation; a middle school teacher.) You get addicted to giving heartfelt advice to monkeys ages twelve to fifteen in a very loud and forceful voice without using any too-colorful metaphors or hitting anybody with sticks (translation; teaching English.) I miss talking to monkeys. So, I make up monkeys based on remembered monkeys and put them into interesting plots to fill up the time before I finally die. (Of course, old English teachers never die. They simply stop being heard and lose all their class.) And now that digital tools and AI apps help me draw as much as I used to before the arthritis in my hands got bad, I also draw lots of monkey pictures, mostly depicting monkeys.

I can draw pictures of evil vice principals now too. You know, the security beasts in the monkey house who discipline the monkeys by roasting teachers over fire pits until they are finally willing to hit monkeys with sticks. Of course, you can’t teach monkeys monkey tricks if you hit them with sticks. That’s why I got roasted a lot by beasts like Billy Bob Smashdareburger pictured above.

It’s like I can’t help myself anymore. I have to write and draw goofy stuff and try to get people to read it like I used to entice monkeys to take books like The Giver and The Hobbit home with them to open in front of parents and pretend to read so they could come in the next day at the monkey house to get talked to in a loud voice without overly-colorful metaphors or hitting sticks being used.

It is much more difficult to let go of teaching things to monkeys and gradually stop doing all those habitual rituals a teacher in the monkey house has to do. So I fill the time with drawing Paffooneys and telling lies about monkeys (translation; being an author and artist.)

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April 30, 2024 · 3:00 am

Populating the World of My Imagination

I have to face facts. I am almost seventy years old. I don’t have much further to go down the road of my life’s journey to reach the final destination. Then the book will close, finished at last. My story will be complete. And there are consequences to continuing to live after a decade of life beyond the moment I retired from the job I loved for reasons of poor health. I have now had arthritis for fifty years. My legs and leg joints no longer stop hurting. Pains keep me awake for large portions of every night. I have muscle spasms. Arthritis is attacking my feet, my knees, my hips, my lower back, my rib cage, and my neck. I can still drive for now, but long distances are tough. I get out and go to the store at least once a day, but most of my time I spend in my bedroom. Writing. Watching TV. Drawing. Doing other things besides TV on my computer or phone. What I don’t get to do hardly at all… is talk to people.

I once had to talk and present and question and correct and cajole classrooms full of kids for 31 years as the teacher in charge, and three years of substitute teaching besides. I miss talking to people. So, now, despite my limitations, I create people to talk to.

Above is Ariel. She stays beside me on my bed as I do whatever I do during the day. She is not someone’s child that I kidnapped. She is a plastic doll. She’s about three feet tall and fully posable, making her a good model for drawings like this one. She has a realistic wig and eyes that can be moved by adjusting them with my fingertips. I bought her online from a shop that restores old dolls and toys, so she was affordable, but a little bit dinged up and in need of tender loving care. I can hold her on my lap because she’s not as fragile as my porcelain dolls of similar size. And I can talk to her. I have promised to keep her by me for the rest of my life so she is safe and cared for at least as long as I still live. I have no idea what my family will do with her when I am gone. She is probably evidence of my increasing mental challenges. I tell her lots of things. Everything I am telling you in this article. Also how my marriage is going, what it is like to be sexually assaulted as a child, why I am sometimes afraid of the dark, and many varied soliloquies about life and love and laughter. She is an excellent listener. We also read together almost every night.

This picture is one of many Island Girl pictures I have drawn over the years. I drew the first one when I was twelve. She represents a dream I had repeatedly. I ended up married to an Island girl, from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. I don’t talk to the island girl in my pictures as much as I make up stories about her. She appears as Malutu in the novel When the Captain Came Calling. My wife, in real life, is also a teacher, though still working and unavailable to actually talk to for most of every day. So, most of my island girl stories stay in my head and keep me entertained with might-have-beens. My island girl is only half imaginary.

This is a picture of Katie, a nudist girl I met only a couple of times in reality. And Katie is not her real name. The picture is modeled on her and the drawing she asked me to do when she saw and liked the drawing I did of Naomi. Naomi is not Naomi’s real name either. But the picture doesn’t look much like her on purpose, because nudists have a right to privacy, especially in Texas where Southern Baptists protest and call the police on things they don’t believe in or understand. I don’t, in reality, know much about Katie, but I make up stories and memories about her too. When I become fully a dementia patient I will probably tell nurses things about her that they might think are true but are lies. I never played tennis in the nude with Katie, but if I tell lies about it when I have dementia, I will have to say that she always beat me. That’s something I would believe even if I remembered I was lying about it.

This is an experimental drawing I did on the app called Picsart AI. It is supposed to look like an oil painting. I drew this to be a portrait of Sasha. Sasha is not her real name, of course. She was a favorite student of mine in the 1990s, a fatherless girl who loved my class and me and said, “You have such pretty eyes, Mr. B.” I loved her… but only teacher-love, not the illegal kind. She asked me to marry her once. It was painful, but I had to let her down easily on that one.

She would become the primary model for the character of Valerie Clarke in Snow Babies and Sing Sad Songs, and so many other works of art and fiction. She continues to live on in my head though I have not seen or heard from her in over twenty years.

This is a representation of Susu, my imaginary granddaughter. She would’ve been my only grandchild so far if she hadn’t been an ectopic pregnancy before Texas made abortion illegal. She couldn’t have been born alive. She might even have killed her mother if she had not passed into the realm of imaginary people. I could not have known that she wasn’t a boy since she did not last long enough to find that out in a sonogram. So the little girl who lives in my drawings and my imagination could only ever be a figment of my imagination. She talks to me, teases me, and plays games with me all in ways that make her into a coping mechanism for grief. Or evidence of dementia.

My world is peopled with people who aren’t really there. You don’t have to believe me, but I need them. Especially now that I am old and nearly dead. Life can be taxing and seriously sad. But life finds a way.

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April 30, 2024 · 12:42 am

The Bottle Imp Implementation

I gave you a list of places where my ideas for fiction come from, and in the end, I failed to explain the thing about the bottle imp. Yes, I do get ideas from the bottle imp. He’s an angry blue boggart with limited spell powers. But he’s also more than 700 years old and has only been trapped in the bottle since 1805. So, he has about 500 years of magical life experience to draw from and answer my idea questions. Admittedly it would be more helpful if he were a smarter imp. His name is Bruce, and his IQ in human terms would only be about 75. But, then, I don’t have to worry about misfired magic. If I asked him to, “Make me a hamburger,” he wouldn’t immediately change me into a fried, ground-beef patty because he is not smart enough to do that high of a level of magic spell.

But he is just barely intelligent enough to tell me a truthful answer if I asked him a question like, “What would happen if I put an alligator’s egg in a robin’s nest as a joke, and the robin family decided it was their own weird-looking egg and then tried to hatch it?” The answer would be truthful according to his vast knowledge of swamp pranks. And it would also be funny because he’s too dumb to know better. In fact, he told me about a mother robin who worked so diligently at hatching an alligator egg that a baby alligator was hatched. She convinced it that it was actually a bird. And when it came time for the baby birds to learn to fly, the baby alligator couldn’t do it… until she talked it into flapping madly with all four legs. Then, a mother’s love and faith in her child got an alligator airborne.

Yeah, that hasn’t proved to be a very useful story idea. I put it into a story I was writing during my seven years in high school, and then lost the manuscript. (I was a teacher, not a hard-to-graduate student.) But it was proof that you can get your writing ideas from a bottle imp.

So, if you decide to use bottle imps as an idea source for fiction, the next step is to find and acquire the right sort of bottle imp. I got mine from Smellbone, the rat-faced necromancer. I bought it for an American quarter and three Canadian loonies more than a dozen years ago. I found it at his Arcana and Horse-Radish Burger Emporium in Montreal. But I am not sure how that information helps you. Smellbone died in a firey magical-transformation accident involving an angry Wall-Street financier and a dill pickle. The whole Emporium went to cinders in an hour.

If you are going to try to capture the bottle imp yourself, which I strongly do not recommend, you are going to need a magical spell-resistant butterfly net, a solid glass jar, bottle, or brass urn. A garlic-soaked cork to fit the bottle. A spell scroll ready to cast containing at least one fairy-shrink spell. And an extremely limited amount of time to actually think about what you are doing.

Now I have told you how I get writing ideas from a bottle imp. Aren’t you glad I did not include this idea in the post about where ideas come from? After all, I am a fiction writer. I get my jollies from telling lies in story form. And bottle imps, especially angry blue bottle imps named Bruce, or Charlie, or Bill, are more trouble than they are worth. They can curse you with magical spells of infinite silliness and undercut your serious nature for a lifetime.

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April 25, 2024 · 12:57 am

Black Humor

I think I know what you’re thinking. He’s just going to retell a bunch of Eddy Murphy, Richard Pryor, and Flip Wilson jokes from the 1970’s which his fuzzy old-coot memory will get wrong in slightly amusing ways. Or he’s got dementia now and has turned totally racist. Or both.

Well, maybe. I am old after all.

But, no. I am writing about that kind of humor where you laugh when someone in the story dies a horrible death in an unusually humorous way. Or most dead-baby jokes. Or the part of “The Producers” where “Springtime with Hitler” turns out to be a Broadway hit musical even though the two con men in charge were gambling on it being a failure.

Bad things can be funny, you know.

At least if you have a brain-damaged sense of humor like mine.

Kurt Vonnegut was a master of very dark black humor. In his novel, Cat’s Cradle, (Spoiler alert!) the world ends at the end of the novel because the mad scientist commits suicide by swallowing his invention, Ice Nine, freezing solid in a way that couldn’t be melted at room temperature or above, and then falling into the ocean, thus permanently freezing the entire planet Earth. Golly, what a laugh fest!

Black humor is, of course, highly dependent on dramatic irony and the fact that people smart enough to read and enjoy Vonnegut, usually are smart enough to realize if you read too much ironic humor you are not in danger of actually rusting from the brain outward.

I, of course, am a black humor aficionado of sorts. I thoroughly enjoyed all the torture, death, and deadly mistakes of Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder. Of course, I had a ridiculously hard time gaining access to the show which originally aired on the BBC and didn’t appear on American TV channels until our household gave up television to save money due to ever-rising cable costs.

Fortunately, during the yearlong imprisonment of the Covid pandemic, I discovered the entire series available on Hulu which is cheap enough to stream on my laptop. Only in excess of 500,000 people had to die for me to get the chance to binge on all the historical reiterations of this amazingly dark show full of humorous English demise and occasional accidental murder.

So, that is what black humor is to me. As defined by Professor Wilson at Iowa State when I was assigned to read a novel by Saul Bellow and ended up reading three, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, and The Adventures of Augie March. Of course, I am not sure which novel was the assignment. They were all deadly hilarious. And I am, after all, old enough to probably be demented and a closet racist. Is Saul Bellow Jewish? I ask because I am also forgetful.

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