Tag Archives: fiction

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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April 14, 2024 · 2:30 am

The Writing Imperative

I am a writer because I write.

I write because I have to.

I have to because somebody has to control the words.

People are made of words.  Their identity, their inner self, their reason for existence… all made of words.  The very thoughts in their heads are… words.

If I want to control the words I am made of, then I must be the writer who writes his own story.

I don’t want anyone else to write the words that essentially become me.  Do you?

Purple words

Of course, authors create characters.  Even autobiographers create characters.  Carl Sandburg could no more make his words into Lincoln than a bird can make its tweets into a cat.   Sandburg can, however, help us to understand Lincoln as Carl Sandburg understands the words that are Lincoln.

Lincoln probably did not have the words for “bikini girls” in his head when he wrote those words in the second quote.  But somebody thought that the picture would help us understand the words.  By all accounts, Lincoln was not a particularly happy man leading a particularly happy life.  But he showed us the meaning of his words when he stood firm against the strong winds of harsh words and bad ideas in a terrible time.  And he was as happy about it as he made up his mind to be.

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I, too, have not lived a particularly happy life.  But I was always the “teacher with a sense of humor” in the classroom, and students loved me for it.  Funny people are often not happy people.  But they make themselves out of funny words because laughter heals pain, and jokes are effective medicine.  And so I choose to write comedy novels.  Novels that are funny even though they are about hard things like freezing to death, losing loved ones, being humiliated, being molested, and fear of death.  Magical purple words can bring light to any darkness.  I am the words I choose to write in my own story.  The words not only reveal me, they make me who I am.  And it is up to me to write those words.  Other people might wish to do it for me.  But they really can’t.  The words are for me alone to write.

Green words

And so it is imperative that I write my words in the form of my novels, my essays, and this goofy blog post.  I am writing myself to life, even if no one ever reads my writing.

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April 8, 2024 · 1:59 am

Valerie Clarke Stories

Of all the lead characters in stories I have created, I think Valerie Clarke is the most important. She is really the first creation I ever crafted that seemed to step off the pages and come to life. I have already lost count of the number of times she has appeared in one of my stories, both the published ones and the ones still being written. She is a character who has loved and lost.

This story is an example of that;

The second book I am going to offer a link to is more like an origin story. It is not the first story I published with Valerie in it, but it is the story where Val is the youngest I have yet to portray her.

This is a better illustration of her than the first Paffooney attached to this post. Val has blue eyes. Sasha, the real-life former student I based the character on, is the one who had brown eyes.

Snow Babies is the book that I consider my masterwork, the best thing I have ever written. There are several main characters in this sprawling story, but Valerie is probably the most important among them. It is a group survival story about a killer blizzard in a small Iowa town.

I don’t expect you to read all of these books. But I certainly won’t mind if you do. You will see how the character grows and develops in these three stories. The chronological order is, first, The Captain Came Calling. Second is Snow Babies. And Sing Sad Songs is third.

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March 28, 2024 · 1:00 am

New Directions, New Ideas

Up until now I have been doing little but writing stories and working on getting a lot of them into a published form. Admittedly a self-published form. For the most part, I am the only reader who knows how good my writing is. Well, there’s an editor from I-Universe who thinks I am as good as many authors on the best-seller lists. Not better than… as good as. And the editorial and marketing staff at PDMI Publishing (a publisher now out of business for over eight years) know how good my novel Snow Babies is. And a lot of nudists here, in England, in France, and in Germany know how good Recipes for Gingerbread Children is. But my reputation is tiny and the splash I have made is limited to puddles.

If the literary agent I have been talking to actually gets my book Catch a Falling Star republished by a major publishing house, things will change for the better. However, the current marketplace still puts most of the burden on the authors to promote and make their books succeed. The only difference would be having an agent on my side instead of me doing it all with no one on my side.

Most of the best writing I have done includes strongly realized female characters. Particularly Valerie Clarke, the female protagonist of Snow Babies. Good writing builds on previous writing. I may have already written the best things I am capable of writing. But as I continue to write, I can deepen characters that already have been established. And I can add new ones. For example, the character depicted in the Paffooneys of this post is Charlotte Robbins. She is a complex young lady with an anger management problem. She is also Valerie Clarke’s hated rival, one who beats her out for head cheerleader, but only because Valerie quits cheerleading in her senior year. She is destined to become Valerie’s best friend somehow in the course of my manuscript He Rose on a Golden Wing.

Of course, none of that happens if one of my health problems croaks me before my 70th birthday. I don’t mean to end on a downward note when everything has been looking up. But there it is, in spite of myself.

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March 27, 2024 · 2:01 am

Recent Runes in Published Form

After a year-long post-Covid publishing drought, I am back in the page-making storyteller business once again. This post is about recent publication accomplishments, evidencing some pride in a comeback.

The poetry book is finished and will be published within a month (knock on wood, barring sudden unexpected death, prison time, or Armaggedon battles.) I have never thought of myself as a poet. But now I seriously think of myself as one of the worst poets in the history of the world.

This book was my only appearance on a best-seller list anywhere at any time as it made the number one spot on Amazon’s hottest-selling newly published books on two separate days in its first week of publication. It is about nudism and naturism, so it is the nudist community on X, formerly Twitter, that I have to thank for its achievement.

This book, the 4th in the AeroQuest series was published just this month, and it has already sold two copies and a whole bunch of KENP pages read. It has been a couple of years since book 3 of this series, so some readers have been waiting for it for a while.

This book, published during the pandemic has also been getting attention from readers, making it the most popular title on my author’s page.

And this book, a fairytale, is the most ignored book I have recently published. I think it is an excellent comedy adventure that even has some illustrations with nude fairies in them. But nothing is ever truly sure-fire.

I am now hoping that the interest in my books will begin to really pick up. I am talking to an agent for the first time about my book, Catch a Falling Star. I could actually be going places this time.

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