Tag Archives: humor

January 21, 2015 · 2:08 pm

Damn Lies, White Lies, Stretchers, and Wild Hoo-Haws

Millis 2

There are limits to what people will believe.  No really, there are, I promise.  You can believe me because I’m a fiction writer, a story-teller, and I therefore tell lies all the time.  I was a teacher for thirty-one years, so I not only tell kids how wonderful they are in order to get good behavior and real learning out of them, but I have been told some of the most convoluted, inside-out, purple-in-the-face hoo-haws that are ever told anywhere in human culture throughout human history, and told them by a child with a straight face, perfectly seriously, and with little red horns holding up their crooked golden halos.  We are taught to misrepresent the truth from early childhood on.

“Do you have to go potty, sweetheart?”

“No, mommy, I jest like to dance.”

“Do you love me, Mortimer?  Or do you just want to get me alone in a car after the prom?”

“Oh, I love you, Alicia.  Really I do!”

“So are you in favor of taxing the oil companies at a fair and balanced rate, Senator, so we have more money to spend on Education and public works?”

“Why, I most certainly do, young voter.  Ignore that man with the “I Love Exxon” button trying to bash me over the head with that Tea Party campaign sign.  Let me kiss that darling little baby of yours.”

mrFuture

This post was inspired by all the lies told in the State of the Union speech last night by President O’Bama (He’s Irish and a conservative like Bill O’Reilly, isn’t he?)  Now, I am well aware of the white lies the President buttered our bread with.  The economy has actually improved, but not nearly as much as was claimed.  And not nearly enough for someone like me, a white male retired educator with significant health problems living in a Red State under Republican-Nazi governor/emperors who want to privatize education and spend my pension money on tax breaks for billionaires.  But those lies are nothing compared to the damn lies told by the Republican response lady, Ernst from Iowa.  She laid out a plan for undoing everything that’s been done to improve my life by the government since 2008.  The Affordable Care Act is to be repealed.  Tax breaks for “job creators” are going to be re-instituted.  We are going to heal the middle class by deregulating industry and predatory banks and by giving more benefits and goodies to the rich folks who will treat us better than those horrible Democratic liberals who want to turn us all into socialists.  This is coming from the Iowa Senator who won her seat by promising your average pork-eating Iowan to use her “hog-castrating skills” to motivate Democrats in congress to see things her way.  Iowans (of which I once was one of) know good fertilizer when they smell it.  It makes you want to shout, “Hoo-Haw!”  (Yes, it’s true, I once knew an old farm hand that, when he heard a ridiculously contorted lie, would shout “Hoo-Haw!” as a sort of derisive laughter to hear such a funny truth-twister.)

cudgels car

Lies are our way of life.  We lie about what we think.  We lie about what we feel.  We lie about how we view the world.  We lie about whether or not we tell lies.  Could we live a life without ever lying?  I hate to tell you this, but if I say, “yes”, then it might not be entirely truthful of me.

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January 20, 2015 · 4:40 am

The Barbie Shelf

Goofy-guy doll collector, me, will now give you a grand tour of the Barbie Shelf.  This is a place in my home that was originally created by the previous owners of the house.  It was a place in the upstairs play room apparently meant for the things that needed to be kept out of little girls’ reach.  Maybe pampers and baby wipes.  Cleaning supplies.  And possibly toys that were not to be broken immediately and had to be regulated.  I don’t know why else you would grace a playroom with a shelf up near the ceiling and above the only door into the room.  It was, however, perfect for the plastic people who were destined to take it over as their own.

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It begins above the bedroom door.  My wife has a thing about keeping her dolls mint in box.  She has more of an eye to their value as collectible investments.  The fashion Barbie nestled above the door in her box is a recreation of a 1962 doll that was reissued in 1999.  You can also see the Teacher Barbie that the Princess once de-boxed and played with.  And there you can also see the start of the Wizard of Oz collection.  There are little munchkin dolls and the Ken doll dressed as the Cowardly Lion in the picture.

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In front of Dorothy and Glinda from Oz, you see some of the recycled Goodwill Barbies that I bought naked and abandoned, cleaned and dressed, washed and tried to brush out their hair.  One of them had some marker on her face that had to be soaked off with secret sauce to restore a more human look.  The one in the middle is a 1980’s Asian Barbie.  There is also a Cowgirl Barbie wearing an extra gun belt from a CA Lone Ranger set.

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The kids are protected by Eustace the purple pottery dragon who was fired in my mother’s kiln during the height of her doll-making hobby and painted by me.  The kids here include a tiny Tommy doll, three Skippers from the early 70’s, and Hermione from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  You can see the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in the back, and there’s also Goodwill Barbie that for some odd reason has purple hair.

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Ricky (a 1960’s boy toy for Skipper) sits with Ashley Olsen between more recycled Goodwill Barbies.  1980’s Skipper is trying to push poor roller-skate Barbie off the shelf.

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My newest My Little Pony in mutant almost human form, Rainbow Dash the Equestria girl, is the blue doll in the middle here.  Mary-Kate Olsen can be seen in the Blue dress.  All you can see of Britney Spears here are her legs and feet, probably a safety feature of this tour.  The topless ballerina Barbie is wearing a jacket, but I could not close it on her extra large Barbie mammaries.  Princess Jasmine, my daughter’s somewhat beat-up favorite begins Disney Princess Row.

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Li Shang is still mint in box, but Mulan isn’t even on the shelf any more.  Some of Mom’s dolls got played with by the Princess.  Mulan lost her hair.  There is one American Girl doll here, bought at a yard sale for 25 cents, but I found a dress to fit her at Walmart in a sale bin.  Unfortunately I can’t name her correctly yet and she is barefoot like most of the Goodwill dolls.

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Almost to the end of the shelf, you can now see Apple Jack and Twilight Sparkle, my other two mutant pony girls, discovered at an After-Christmas Sale at Toys-R-Us.  They are standing on Grandma Beyer’s home bingo set from the 1930’s, and Disney Princesses are lined up behind them.

20150112_145808At the tail end of the shelf you will see Twilight Sparkle again to take the focus off poor 1980’s nudist Skipper (I robbed her of her clothes for one of the older, more rare Skippers that are worth a bit more to collectors).  Seated between is Asian Rock n Roll Barbie (Leah actually).  You may have noticed I am careful not to over-identify any of the members of the collection.  I got taken to task on E-Bay about descriptions of which Barbie was which once.  There are people out there much more rabid about doll collecting than I.  The difference between a 1980’s Butterfly Tattoo Barbie and an Anniversary Edition Malibu Barbie can get you challenged to a duel… with rapiers… in France.  I had to talk him into balloons and blunderbusses (an idea borrowed from Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines), and I lost.  I had to settle for the price offered even though my own research suggested I was not wrong.  (Well, okay, maybe I didn’t really go through with the duel thing, but the argument was just as intense and just as silly as that.)

So that is my long-winded essay on the essentials of the Barbie Shelf.  I will be looking at it a lot for the next few years since it is in the room I am using as my bedroom.  (Not in perfect health, I needed a room that I could completely seal up at night in order to breathe better.)  I really didn’t think I could pull off 500 words about this one goofy shelf in the house, but I now realize that I have nearly reached 900.

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January 19, 2015 · 4:50 pm

Making Memes Again

class Miss M2

Okay, I know it is a fool’s pursuit.  You try to create epigrammatic quotes, sayings, and tidbits of wisdom to post on Facebook and then you hope people will click on “like” and “share”.   You hope it goes viral.  It is a striving after wind to paraphrase Ecclesiastes.  But I do it anyway.  After all, isn’t everything a writer does striving after wind?  The chances of reaching a larger audience and touching a great many hearts are microscopically insignificant.  I have reached a point in my writing career where I am actually, finally able to reach readers.  People really do read my blog, my Facebook pages, and occasionally, my novels.  I actually do score one or two hits on the heart of a reader once in a while.  Is it worth it?  Will I ever make any money at it?  Yes… followed by probably not.  I have managed to leave a footprint on the internet, something that was not possible during all those years of writing and drawing and then storing the work away in boxes and portfolios in the bedroom closets.  If you want to see the shape of that footprint, do a Google image search on the words “Beyer Paffooney“.  The spread of pictures and links is as impressive as that of real artists and writers (and by real I mean those who are well enough known to actually make some money at it.)  Today’s Paffooney is a teacher-meme that should be syrupy cute enough to attract a like or two.  I have no illusions about being a master of this new art-form, but I have investigated and studied it just enough to make feeble novice attempts.  And so what if no one ever notices?  I am posting my heart and wit and wisdom online in ways that will make some of it last beyond the scope of my physical life.  Therein lies at least a portion of my immortality.

Here’s a link for the “Google Beyer Paffooney” thing;

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1600&bih=732&q=beyer+paffooney&oq=beyer+paffooney&gs_l=img.3…1935.7232.0.8091.15.3.0.12.12.0.64.166.3.3.0.msedr…0…1ac.1.61.img..12.3.166.C5lIUlYGDz8#imgdii=_

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January 15, 2015 · 1:20 pm

Paffooney Updates #1

Val in Progress

The work on this latest Paffooney is coming along nicely.  I confessed to mess-ups yesterday.  Today I can show you real progress without further oopsies.  The figure of Valerie Clarke is the most important part of both this illustration and my novel project.  She is the single focus-character in When The Captain Came Calling.  I usually vary the focus character from scene to scene in my fiction, because I have a pathological need to play around inside the heads of multiple characters.  This book will be the first one I’ve written to stay inside the same head through the entire novel.   The story, assuming it doesn’t totally take on a life of its own and change itself, is about how a young girl sees and evaluates the people in her life… Mom, Dad, the boy she has a crush on, the girlfriend of that boy, the goofy members of the Norwall Pirates (a 4-H softball team and liars’ club dedicated to adventure, story-telling, and being a kid while you can), weird people who live in tiny Iowa farm towns, and mysterious strangers who can somehow be invisible.  It is about friendship, love, sex, and growing up.  It is also about overly-protective parents and a world full of dark magic and mysterious dangers.  I am trying to capture that in my Paffooney, to hopefully make it into a possible cover illustration.  I intend to show you in this blog each stage in the completion of the project… the making of colored-pencil Paffoonery.

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January 14, 2015 · 5:55 pm

Work in Progress

Val inked up

Here is the straight poop.  (Wait a minute!  Not poop metaphors again!)  Okay, better idiomatic expression… Here is the truthful statement about work habits.  (Better!  But that was idiomatic not idiotic, right?)  Right.

Sometimes I mess up.  I am working slowly and steadily on the next story burning to be told, When the Captain Came Calling.  In the illustration I am working on, you can probably see the mess-ups already.  I very carefully blot my black ink pens when I am doing the pen and ink work.  Even ball point pens can blot.  I will admit I press entirely too hard on both ink pens and colored pencils.  I break a lot of colored lead and make a lot of black pens bleed.  I have arthritis in my hands and often push too hard because I am pushing back against the pain.  I can sometimes use a lighter touch with the colored pencil, the area being covered may require a more lightly penciled mark and have more paper whiteness showing through.  Black pen lines are never like that.  To get a steady, even line, I push with pressure to get things dark and full and even.  The pen that I was using had developed a leaky ball and had to be blotted with every use.  When it made the first smear, I changed to a new pen.  I cussed a little too.  (Cussing makes it better.  I learned that from Mark Twain.)  But I didn’t panic and throw the drawing out.  I can fix it up a bit when I add the color.  But the second pen I was using was a pen I switched out earlier for bleeding.  That’s how I got the second smear.  Dang me!  It almost ruined what I think is a very promising portrait of my main character Valerie Clarke.  (Valerie, whom you may remember from Snow Babies posts, is based on a girl I once had a crush on, and my own daughter, the Princess.)Mina & Val

Now, ink smears are not the only thing that had to be twisted and worked around to get this project underway and at least a little bit tamed.  The title was originally a problem.  I tried to call this story The Captain Came  because of the primary antagonist and the fact that he is returning from the South Seas to the little Iowa town of Norwall.   This was a problem because Captain Dettbarn was running from a bunch of psychotic little Juju men (animated Tiki idols) who were chasing him because he made the witch doctor’s chief’s daughter pregnant.  That made the title an R-rated joke that I hadn’t intended even before I considered this story a YA novel idea.

The Juju men themselves are problem.  In this time of unintended racism, I had to work on them to make them be something other than a racial stereotype.  They were not originally made entirely of wood.  I had to eliminate cartoonist’s shortcuts in depiction that made them look like little black men or little dark brown men.  They are of an indeterminate South Seas racial stock.  Their language is mostly Tagalog (because it is a language I have tried to learn due to Filipino relatives).  Their culture is mostly movie fiction that comes from the Captain’s own liar’s brain.  Most of the information about the witch doctor and the mysterious island come from the Captain’s logbook which is a work of fiction written by a drunkard with a vivid imagination.  So I am trying to be fair to a people and race that don’t actually exist outside of the story within the story.  Whew!  I’ve got to stop explaining complicated things now before my brain melts.  Smoke is already coming out of my ears and making it hard to see here in my studio.

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January 13, 2015 · 1:09 pm

Krazy Kat

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I told you before about a cartoonist from ancient ‘Toon Times named Fontaine Fox.  He was a master, and I acknowledge him as one of my greatest inspirations.  But he was not the original master mentor for my teenage ‘Toon Training.  That honor goes to the inestimable George Herriman.  He was the Krazy Kartoonist who died more than a decade before I was born, yet, through his Kreation, Krazy Kat, did more to warp my artistic bent into Krazy Kartooniana Mania than anybody else.  I discovered him first.  I found him through Komic books and the Kard Katalog at the local library.  I own a copy of the book I pictured first in this post.  It is the first Kartoon book I ever bought.  I couldn’t post a picture of my actual book here because I have read it so often in the past forty years that the Kover has Kome off.  It is now more of folder of loose pages than a book.

Herriman KK 1920-12-05 (2)

Krazy Kat is a newspaper Komic strip that ran all around the world from 1913 to 1944.  Comics Journal would rate Krazy Kat as the greatest work of Komic art of the 20th Century.  Art critics hailed it as serious art, and it fits snugly into the surrealist movement of Salvador Dali and others.  It has been cited as a major influence on the work of other artists such as Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware.

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The centerpiece of the strip is a love triangle.  Krazy Kat the Kharacter is a feline who may be female or may be male but is definitely deeply in love with Ignatz Mouse.  The Krazed rodent hopped up on seriously stinky fromage (cheese to us non-French speakers), is Konstantly throwing bricks at Krazy’s head… obviously out of serious disdain, however, Krazy sees it as a confession of love.  Offisa Pup, the police watchdog, wants to jail the malevolent mouse for battery and protect the precious Kat, whom he obviously loves with an unrequited love.  Explanations are superfluous in the weird world of Krazy Kat.  How can I explain the charm, the humor, the good-natured violence of a strip such as this?  There are echoes of it in Tom and Jerry animated cartoons, but nothing like it really exists anywhere else.  Krazy has her own unique language, a language that you naturally learn to interpret as you read the strip.  Ignatz exhibits psychotic frustrations that he takes out on the world around him in our name, that we might experience hubris at his expense.  And what’s with that mysterious sack of “Tiger Tea” that Krazy carries about and keeps a Klosely guarded “sekrit”?

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I honestly hope you will give Krazy Kat a thorough “look-see”.  Because if you like Kartoons at all… and it doesn’t have to be the Krazy Kooky love of a seriously overdosed addict like me… you will fall desperately in love with this one.   It is a world of its own, a superbly superfluous abstract anachronism.  It is a surrealist’s dream of fun with puns and tons of buns… or something like that.  Simply put… read it and don’t like it… I dare you!

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January 12, 2015 · 1:49 pm

The Prognosticator’s Spyglass

Self Portrait vxv

A while back I gave you an overview of my writing plan and called it the Magician’s Spyglass.  My magic, of course, is story-telling, and the spyglass is a metaphor for looking at the long view ahead.  But I have also recently been thinking about the purpose of my writing and where I need to go in sailing my fictional ship with pink sails.

The Lady

Here is where I’ve been, the view over the aft rail.  I have my novel Snow Babies contractually obligated with PDMI Publishing to be published (though the time in the future when it sees print seems to be drifting farther and farther forward.)  The novel Superchicken is finished, and the publisher accepted submission, but they have not yet made a decision on its possible publication.  The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is completed and being seriously edited by me.  The Magical Miss Morgan is completed, edited, and about to be submitted to the YA novel-writing contest that I last participated in with Snow Babies.  I am currently writing two new novels, Stardusters and Lizard Men, a science fiction novel about planetary destruction and renewal, as well as using the energy and creativity of youth as a natural resource.  And When the Captain Came Calling, a novel about the origins of the Norwall Pirates, that boys’ club of liars that forms the center of most of my Norwall books.  So, there is that.  I am still sailing straight ahead into stormy seas with my writing.  But I am not wearing an eye-patch over both eyes.  I am looking at the rough seas and squalling storm clouds dead ahead.

So, as Prognosticator, I must gage the winds, evaluate the white-caps, and take a sounding or two.  I have these problems to overcome.  I am limited in funding because of poor health, mounting medical expenses, a large tax burden, and a steady retirement income that may be threatened by a Texas Republican trend to cut everything out of public schools, even teacher pensions.  This State will never ask billionaires and oilmen to foot their fair share of the bills.  They would much rather take away education money because, after all, you need to keep the masses stupid if you are going to continue to farm them like hogs and cattle for every dollar you can squeeze out of them.  Stupid people vote Republican, and so are the cherished commodity that Texan Empires are built upon.

The environment is changing for the worse.  With COPD and severe allergies brought on by the exposure to farm chemicals in my teen years, I have trouble breathing fresh Texas air (made up of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, butane, and other by-products of fracking and refining).  I also have experienced seven Dallas-area earthquakes in the last two years that directly result from fracking in the oil shale beneath our feet.  Soon our drinking water should be flammable, judging by the Pennsylvania experience.  Global warming has given us record heat-waves and drought in the last decade, though all the officials in this State are insisting it is all in my head.  I was imagining the heat two summers ago when we had 99 days of temperatures over 100 in a row.  So there is the reason my Stardusters novel is about environmental Armageddon.

The likelihood that I am ever going to make more money writing and drawing than I spend on the endeavor is increasingly small as the publishing industry continues to change and continues to benefit the booksellers like Amazon more and individual content creators less.  I will need to write a post or two on that before one of my six incurable diseases kills me.

I must continue to write about artists and writers that influence and engage me.  That is lifeblood to me, a commodity that I may soon be short of;  I need to write about how I create the stories that I am writing.  I also need to chronicle the life I have lived as a teacher and an educator, because the valuable lessons I have learned as a teacher and a mentor to the young will all be lost if I do not do everything I can to pass them on.  That is the primary reason that my teacher-story, The Magical Miss Morgan, now exists.  These are all things that I am now predicting I must write about.  The water is churning and navigation is becoming more difficult… so onward we sail until I can shout, “Land Ho!”

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January 11, 2015 · 2:40 am

Faeries

Donner n Silkie

In my book The Magical Miss Morgan, the teacher, Miss Francis Morgan, has to deal not only with a crisis in her personal teaching world, but a crisis brewing in the magical fairy kingdom of Tellosia.  The fairies have come seeking Francis’ aid because she, as a teacher, has direct access to children and can affect what they believe in.  You see, the fairies suffer from a general lack of belief in fairies, something that has been plaguing them more and more as the modern world makes it more and more difficult for children to actually believe.  Soon they will wink out of existence for lack of believers.  Francis’ younger brother, Milt, is a wizard.  He knows some fairies personally, and he has told them that Francis can help them.  So, because Milt revealed her to them, the Erlking, leader of the fairies of Tellosia, has sent three chosen representatives to plead for her help.

The leader of the trio is Donner.  He is the dragonfly-winged pixie who is a leader of the wasp-riders.  At three full inches in height, he is one of the biggest and most leader-ish of the fairies, the reason he was chosen to head the mission.  He speaks very much in the old style and has a hard time getting his ideas across to a creative teacher-type from the 1990’s.

Silkie, the Storybook, is a beautiful fairy who, because she is a Storybook fairy, is immortal.  She has been immortal since Hans Christian Andersen used her adventures that she had related to him to create the story of Little Tiny or Thumbelina in 1835.  Any time a fairy is immortalized by a human author, that fairy becomes a Storybook and is destined to live forever.  She is very old and very wise, but also very human-looking and very-very small.

Garriss, the third fairy, is a wisp.  Wisps are elemental beings made of fire, water, stone, or air.  They are rumored to be incredibly stupid, because their little brains are composed entirely of one element.  Garriss is a fire wisp.  He has a temper because his brain is made of fire.  Torchy, also pictured, is also rather stupid and foolish.  But fire wisps prove to have a very warm heart.

So, if you can stand fairy tales at all, I hope you will clap your hands and believe in the fairies in my book.  I intend to submit it to the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ YA Novel Contest in April of 2015.  The hand clapping should definitely help… unless James M. Barrie lied to us in his book Peter Pan.

Garriss n Torchy

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January 9, 2015 · 5:30 pm

Humor Me (Humor? Me?)

I am wondering now if it is appropriate to call what I do in my writing and my cartooning humor.  I tell stories.  As a school teacher in both junior high and high school, I told stories in class and made kids laugh.  (Okay, I admit, kids that age mixed with hormones, experiments with sex and alcohol, and under-developed frontal lobes in their brains will laugh at practically anything.  I know a teacher who crosses her eyes when talking to kids about their mistakes, and she has them rolling on the floor with giggle-fits.  This is now my fourth longest parenthetic expression, also known as an aside.  They would probably laugh about that.)  But is it fair to call that humor?

Mark Twain

I write stories filled with feel-good crap.  I’m as likely to make you cry as I am to make you laugh.  (At least, that is my intention.  You may laugh at things I intend to make the reader sad, and be sad or nauseated by the things I think are funny.)  How does that fit with the definition of humor on the internet?  I get a big kick out of some humor blogs I found on WordPress.   http://https://irtfyblog.wordpress.com/  I Refuse to Follow Your Blog is a master complainer.  He disses and crabs and totally kicks butt about a number of things.  (Though I must admit I used his list of un-funny humor blogs to follow a few more that give me chuckles… What can I say?  I’m a contrarian at times.  How can you teach seventh graders and not be?)  http://https://buffalotompeabodyblog.wordpress.com/  Buffalo Tom Peabody not only rocks my rib-cage with his wonderful photo-shopped self-cat-portraits, he makes a really guffaw-inducing set of videos on YouTube.  http://http://bensbitterblog.com/  Ben’s Bitter Blog is blithely bitter and better at bitter than any bitter blogger blogging bitterly that I have ever found.  Ben blogs bitter better than other bitter bloggers who blog with bitter butter… (All right!  I know.  Alliteration by itself isn’t funny.  It took me tons of tempestuous years teaching to learn that.)  http://http://dougdoeslife.com/  Doug Does Life  does a blog with a monkey that you have to see to believe.  They all make me laugh and they all seem to know better than I how to do the humor shtick.  So how dare I call what I write humor?

After the Charlie Hebdo incident, (which you may have noticed has seriously bruised my cartoony little heart)  I have to take humor and comedy in a whole new, more serious light.  Ralph Bakshi, a master cartoonist whom I adore, says that if your cartoons don’t piss somebody off and make some enemies, then you’re doing it wrong, and you have to stop calling yourself a cartoonist.  He says you are just an illustrator… in my case a children’s illustrator.  Do I need to be insulted by that?  Am I not a humorist?  Am I not funny?  I will tag this lunatic post as humor even though it’s not funny… well, not funny funny… just funny odd.  Will I get in trouble with the cartoon gods for doing it?  (Wait a minute… cartoon gods?  Are they gonna zap me with a cartoon fun-bolt or hit me in the face with a pie or something?  If they send terrorists, it may elevate my status.)  So I am asking a whole lot of questions and not answering them myself like usual.  After all, who decides if this is humor?  Not I.

Mickeynose

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January 7, 2015 · 2:02 pm

Dreams Really Do Come True

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Last night a tornado dream, the one I posted about on January 4th, came true.  We had five earthquakes in Carrollton, Texas.  Of course, none of the epicenters were in Carrollton.  They were a few miles away in Irving, Texas.  But tornado dreams always precede some sort of disaster, usually a personal tragedy.  I realized during the final pair of shakes around 8:15 last nigh that the dream truly was about the earthquakes.  Remember, we were looking out the south windows of the farm house, my mother and I, at the funnel cloud, and the south windows are located right next to the storm cellar.  The storm cellar is safety. It has symbolized safety in my mind since the night we spent in the basement in Rowan, Iowa when the tornado ripped the shingles off the roof of our house.  We were safe that night, and we were safe last night because none of the earthquakes were worse than a 3.6 on the Richter Scale.  Earthquakes that are that mild do little or no damage.  My mother was in the tornado dream because she heard about the earthquakes on the news she was watching up in Iowa (at the same farm place where the dream was set),and she emailed me about the earthquakes to make certain my family and I were safe.   So it was another dream of future events, and it did come true… at least in my goofy little mind.

Dreams come true in more than one way.  I finished the initial edit of my contest novel, The Magical Miss Morgan.  I now believe firmly that it is the best novel I have yet written.  It is short.  At 44,500 words it is barely more than the minimum acceptable word-count for the contest.  It is simple.  The main plot is about Francis Morgan having her notions of what constitutes good teaching tested by a parent, a school board member, and an angry principal.  The first subplot is about a group of fairies who recruit Francis to help them save the fairy kingdom of Tellosia from a lack of the vital belief in fairies necessary to overcome evil.  The second subplot is about one of her favorite students undergoing an attack on her belief in herself from another student.  Main plot and two subplots are almost too few for me and my fevered, fertile comic imagination.  I can’t seem to juggle (usually) without twenty balls in the air at once.  But the simplicity of this novel is one of its main charms, and a quality I am hoping may help win the writing contest.  I know from my experiences with the novel Snow Babies that I am not far from reaching the top in a writing contest.

Leap of Faith

The dream may also have signaled an important milestone in my continuing health problems.  I ruled out the things that are most likely to kill me in my recent cardiologist quest.  I do not have heart problems after all.  I only have six incurable diseases, and am still a cancer survivor (the growth removed from the back of my head was infected, but not cancerous.  I only have diabetes, arthritis, hypertension, COPD, psoriasis, and an enlarged prostate.  Nothing is bad enough by itself to be unmanageable and deadly).  So I am probably going to be alive for a few more years and able to draw and write more.  I was forced to retire from teaching by health problems, but now that I am managing my debt with help from a lawyer and do not have the stress from a job, I actually have fewer sick days, more money to spend, and enough time to do the artistic work that I have always wanted to do.

So I close with the Disney song in my head… “A dream is a wish your heart makes… and dreams really do come true.”

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