It is generally true that any kind of artist, whether they make portraits, or paintings, or novels, or poems, or photos of landscapes, or photos of cats, is making a self-portrait more than anything else. It is true that no matter what form an artwork takes, you see it from the perspective of the artist. You are shown what they see. You are led to think their thoughts. Characters in books are usually telling at least in part, the author’s life story. That’s why I use so many real people that I once knew to model the people in my stories and drawings upon. You must write about what you know, and your own self is what you know best. This Paffooney of young Milt Morgan is a picture of me. It actually looks like what I once looked like. Milt as a novel character thinks and acts as I once did. Anyone that knew me fifty years ago will tell you how much this looks like me. Of course the number of folks who knew me back then continues to seriously dwindle.
Tag Archives: humor
A Bit of Him, a Bit of Them, Plus a Lot of Me
Filed under Uncategorized
Holiday Scenes
Having been a Jehovah’s Witness for a good part of the last twenty years, I am not in the habit of thinking holiday celebration. But they have moved on without me. I am a bah-humbug door-knocker no longer. So, I guess it’s time to recall how much this time of year used to mean to me. I searched my writing. So far the only holiday scene I have written is from Snow Babies. The characters in this scene are all severely snowed in and the electricity is out. They have decided to pass the time by putting up the Christmas tree without lights. The blizzard rages. It is an intense time where survival is not guaranteed. Hence, the need to remember the season.
Excerpt from Snow Babies.
Canto Seventy-Three – A Red, Green, and White Christmas Tree Block
The thing about the artificial Christmas tree, although it was plastic and solid forest green in a very unnatural way, was that it did look pretty good when you put all the right pegs into all the right slots and got it standing up by itself all full and fluffed out and green. It looked like a real tree… maybe… a little bit.
Denny handed a frosted red ball up to Valerie. Because she commanded the heights from the stepstool, she got to place each precious glass or plastic ornament. The Clarkes had a full string of bubble lights, but since the electricity was still out, Val didn’t see any reason to place the thing. The red ball went on the spot near the center front where Valerie had hung it the two years previous. The only difference was… well, the difference was… yes, the difference was… that Tommy Bons, all attitude and dirty blue jacket was standing in the spot where… you know, the spot where… the spot where someone needed to stand to catch Valerie if she overbalanced and fell towards the tree. The place where last year… her father stood.
Pidney was watching with some concern. “Why are there tears in your eyes, Val?” he asked stupidly.
“Well, I… no reason.”
Tommy caught her flitting glance with his steady blue gaze. He looked deeply into her eyes. Then, she saw what she never expected to see. Tears stood in his eyes too. Without saying or hearing a word about it, he understood. He knew. She could see it in his eyes. He knew what it was. He hadn’t just lost his father. Both of them. At once. In a car crash. Like Ponyboy in the Outsiders. Jeez she loved that book.
“You gonna put up the Santa thingy?” Pidney asked.
Mary Philips pulled the Santa thingy out of the box. It was made of Styrofoam balls, red felt, white cotton fluff, and black button eyes. And when she turned it over, on the bottom, it said, “to pretty little Princess, from Daddy Kyle.” The tears came like rain. Valerie crumpled into Tommy’s arms, weeping desperately.
“I… I don’t understand,” said Pidney. “I thought putting up a Christmas tree was a happy thing.”
Valerie had both arms wrapped around Tommy, squeezing the juice out of him, and crying like her heart was breaking. No… not breaking… broken. Shattered into little shards of glass, and scattered like snowflakes on a December morning.
Wordlessly Mary showed Pid what was written in black felt-tip marker on the bottom of the Santa thingy.
“Oh,” said Pid. “He made that himself, didn’t he?”
Valerie couldn’t answer. She sobbed like she could barely breathe.
Dennis limped up to Pidney and stood beside the big dumb oaf. He reached his small hand out to Mary, and she put the Santa thingy in it.
“This is really neat,” he said. “It’s like the ones my grandma made for me with Styrofoam and knitted all the clothes for and stuff. I wish I still had those.”
Valerie slowed the tears for a moment and looked at Dennis. He was a really cute little boy when you looked past the crooked little legs and the thin frame. And he had such a darling and gentle manner about him. He made you want to hug him until all the juice came out of him too. She loosened her death-grip on Tommy.
“He bought a stupid little crafts book,” said Valerie. “He was gonna give it to me along with the cabbage patch doll he bought. Then he decided to make that silly little Santa man from one of the craft patterns in the book. He did it all by himself, and gave it to me as a surprise gift. He did all of it. He did it all by himself.” It was the first time she had told that story to anyone. It was the first time she’d even remembered about something he gave her since… Well, it was a silly thing, but she did love it. “Can I have that?” she asked Denny.
“Sure,” he put it in her hands with a puckish smile.
“I think it goes near the top this year. Not in place of the angel, but right near her, to keep her company.”
Valerie got back up onto the stepstool and placed the Santa thingy near the top at just to the left of center. She looked at it and began to smile.
“Yep,” said Tommy, “the tree looks pretty stupid without lights, but that looks just about right to put it there.”
Valerie laughed at him.
Pidney moved over beside Mary and put an arm around her shoulders. “Sorry,” he whispered. “I’m really not as dumb as that, you know.”
“Yes you are,” whispered Mary, “but we love you anyway.”
Valerie heard that, and laughed all the harder. This Christmas tree thing was going to continue to hurt. And Pid was pretty dumb sometimes. But Mary was right. It had to be said. Valerie loved him anyway.
Filed under Uncategorized
The Goal is Set
I have now set a goal for the novel I am writing. I will enter it in the manuscript category of the Dante Rossetti Novel Writing Contest from Chanticleer Book Reviews and Media (http://chantireviews.com/services/#!/Young-Adult-Novels-Writing-Contest/p/21521206/category=5193080). The deadline is April 30th, 2015. I am in the middle of the novel at present, and will have it done by that date. This will be the second time I have entered this contest. Can I do better than being a finalist in 2013 with Snow Babies? I have hopes. I believe my work is good.
Filed under Uncategorized
Sentimental Movies
Wow! Such a movie! It is a movie about the movies. A historical fiction about movie history. It tells a bittersweet fable of the 1950’s, when the Un-American Activities Committee was conducting its witch-hunts in Hollywood. And it’s about a postwar town that is still suffering from heavy losses among their young men. And about a case of amnesia and mistaken identity. It is hard to explain, so go watch the dang movie!
I borrowed this image of the movie’s movie theater from a blogger, prasenjitchaudhuri.wordpress.com, whose review will probably make more sense than mine does. But that theater marquee is the one icon from the movie that I first fell in love with.
As I said, this is a movie about the movies and a love of the movies. It weaves in through the story of 50’s communist witch hunts a tale about a somewhat spineless young man who bumps his head, loses his memory, and is adopted by a whole town as a missing war hero come back from the dead. It hits every Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart cliche in the books. Just like It’s a Wonderful Life it makes me laugh so hard I have a wheezing fit, followed a couple of scenes later by something that makes me want to cry so hard that I will drown out all the weeping females in the audience with half-stifled basso sobs. Any movie that I walk out of embarrassed that my face is tear-streaked, is a movie that made me feel so profoundly good about life and love and laughter, that I want to see it again and again. There are so many movie-references in the film that I need to watch it two or three times just for that. For gosh sakes, the idol head from Raiders of the Lost Ark makes a cameo appearance in the movie within the movie, Sand Pirates of the Sahara.
So, basically, I watched this movie for the first time on DVD at home in bed, still recovering from scary new heart condition #2, and had a chance to laugh and cry and enjoy this movie without any fear of being laughed at for how I responded to it. And, so what did I do about it? Why naturally, I got on WordPress and exposed my secret shame to you. That makes about as much sense as everybody in that little town grabbing an amnesiac out of the river and making him into their beloved son. What a great movie! Wow!
Filed under Uncategorized
A Bildungsroman von Michael Beyer
Okay, I know it’s in German. Being from a German-American family from Iowa in a mostly Germanic/Scandinavian little Midwestern town, everything I write is in German, even though it’s written in English. So let me explain my square-headed German logic here. Here is a quote from Wikipedia to define it; “In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman (German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːn]; German: “novel of formation/education/culture”), novel of formation, novel of education, or coming-of-age story (though it may also be known as a subset of the coming-of-age story) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age), and in which, therefore, character change is extremely important.” I wrote one of these previously. My episodic tale of a young boy who is the new kid in the small Iowa town and through experience learns to become one of the gang, is called Superchicken. 
It is an example of the coming-of-age tale that closely follows the pattern. Edward Campbell has to learn the hard way that being mature both physically and emotionally is really hard work, and you can fall short of your goal without even meaning to. But his opposition to his parents’ rules and sense of propriety eventually leads to acceptance.
Miss Morgan, however, follows a slightly skewed version of the pattern. In the novel, Francis Morgan is a good teacher and mature woman at the very start. She has convictions about teaching and how to handle students that she is willing to fight for. And society around her seems to want to break her of her habits and convictions. Principals and school boards can bring enormous pressure on a teacher, and they generally don’t want to hear you’ve been teaching magic in the classroom. She is going to learn lessons the hard way, whether she wants to or not. But it is entirely possible that she will not change, not give in to society’s demands. I don’t think, however, that it means that she won’t mature and change in some very important ways.
I am working on this novel, The Magical Miss Morgan, this month. It fills me up and then exhausts me. It uses up most of my hard-won wisdom from my years as a teacher, and I am hoping it will turn out to be the best thing I have ever written.
Filed under Uncategorized
My Imagination has Wings
I am certainly not bragging. I have a too-vivid imagination, and sometimes lose track of what is real and what is fantasy. In my current novel-in-progress, I just wrote about kids believing they have used fairy magic to turn a favorite teacher into a swan. (I told you I would work that German Schwan thing into my book.) So here is a brief Canto to show you how that went.
Canto Twenty-Six – In Miss Schwanneke’s Music Class
Miss Swan was busy in the gym, so it was no surprise to Blueberry and the other Norwall kids in her first period class that she was running late. Blueberry decided to use the time to work on the goal of making students believe in fairies. She was armed with a folder filled with colored pencil drawings of fairies. She had carefully crafted them from the descriptions Garriss had given her during those long nights when she was too excited to sleep anyway. Working on the fairy project helped take her mind off the terrible conflict brewing with Tim Kellogg. He had been so mean since his best friend, Tommy Bircher, had moved to Chicago. She was sure the only reason he was being that way was because she was so deeply in love with Mike Murphy, and Mike was Tim’s replacement best friend.
“Those are neat pictures, Blue,” said Bobby Niland, a Norwall farm kid.
“Thanks. Share them around. It will help people believe in fairies.”
“Aw, you Pirates have such weird ideas. Nobody is gonna believe in dumb old fairies!”
“Bobby, you are a Pirate, and you’ve seen Garriss, the fire wisp. How can you not believe in fairies?”
“You guys get me all worked up, talking to the empty air, and I start to see things that aren’t really there. Tim just made up the little fire guy. You know he is always making up all kinds of elaborate lies, and making us believe them.”
“Well, yeah, but…”
“Hey! I like this one with the pretty naked lady with the white wings!” Bobby showed the drawing to its creator.
“Garriss says that one is a storybook named Odette. She’s an immortal fairy princess because of the tale of the Swan Princess.”
“Huh?”
“The story of a princess cursed to turn into a swan by day, and can only be a woman at night.”
“Oh, that’s a neat story. Too bad it isn’t true. I’d like to see a naked lady turn into a swan.”
“Well… Garriss did teach me Odette’s spell. He claims it can turn somebody into a swan.”
“Oh, neat! Who can we change?”
“But, Bobby, you don’t believe in the fairy stuff. You just said so.”
“Yeah, well… How about Miss Swan? Her name makes her perfect for the spell!”
It was obvious that Bobby was hot to see Miss Swan naked. He was secretly in love with her, but he drooled over her so openly that everyone from Norwall who really knew him, knew that secret too.
“You know her name is actually Schwanneke, right? Swan is just a nickname.”
“Ah, come on. You said you want me to believe.”
“Well, I don’t want to hurt Miss Swan or anything. She’s a nice teacher.”
There was general restless talking in the classroom. No one was trying to sing any of the pieces they had been learning in class. And no one was paying attention to Bobby and Blue. Blue pulled out the white feather.
“What’s that?” asked Bobby. “Is that part of the spell?”
“It’s the focus item. You have to give it to her and say, Möchten Sie einen Schwan zu werden?”
“What’s that? Pig Latin?”
“German, I think,” Blue answered. “The fairies seem to use German more than other languages.”
“Cool.”
Bobby made Blueberry teach him the words again and again until he could say them correctly. In the meantime, Miss Swan came in with something of a cold. She was sniffling and sneezing. Bobby, excited beyond measure, ran up to her, holding out the white feather.
“Möchten Sie einen Schwan zu werden?” he chanted.
“What?” Miss Schwanneke, the vocal music teacher, took the feather. She suddenly looked ill, as if a cold wind had blown in and frozen her very soul. She put a hand over her mouth and ran out of the room.
Everyone began asking each other what was happening, and of course, nobody knew. But two Norwall kids, Bobby Niland and Blueberry Bates, stood staring at each other with white faces. Thirty minutes of rampant speculation, rumors of the teacher’s death in the bathroom, and the eventual arrival in the classroom of a substitute had Bobby looking whiter than a ghost. Blue didn’t feel very well herself.
“Well, class, the period is almost shot,” said Mrs. Thompson the all-purpose substitute teacher. “We will just kinda sit here and wait for the bell. Sit down and be good for a few minutes more. At about that time, they began to hear a ticking sound at the window. Meghan Baumgartner was the first to see it.
“Miss, miss! There’s a big white bird pecking at the window wanting to get in out of the snow!”
Blueberry and Bobby looked at the same moment. It was a huge, white… swan.
Bobby’s pants were immediately soaked, and he, too ran out of the room.
*****
Filed under artwork, colored pencil, drawing, humor, irony, Pegasus, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Write Until Your Hair Catches on Fire!
I was trying to write a post and my computer had to have a brain fart and blow it to pieces. It began because the mouse pad froze and I had to try to do everything by key commands while trying to save what I wrote. That’s gone, however. In its place is a cryptic question in German that asks if you want to be a swan. How did that happen? More than one wrong key got pressed. As I write this, two people have already liked the computer brain-fart post. Let’s see how this will get fixed.
I intended to write a post on my attempt to finish my novel in November, the novel The Magical Miss Morgan. I was inspired to do that because my niece, Stephanie Bisinger, is currently involved in the NaNoWriMo project to write 50,000 words in November and complete a rough draft of a novel. The contest is really intended for creative young student types, and my niece is doing well. I, however, am probably not going to make the goal. I have increased my daily output, written faster, deeper, and more creatively than I have in a long time. I have my neurons firing so fast and so hard that my brain is heating up, hence the danger that my hair will suddenly burst into flame. Writing is a dangerous business. And yet, on my birthday, November 17th, 2014, I am only at 17,021 words. I am quickly running out of month and I am not even at the halfway point. That’s what happens when you get old. Your writing bones get all creaky and slow. I have sped up the novel, though. I made a major breakthrough. Having decided to use the “Do you want to be a swan?” thing from the computer brain-fart, I now have a major plot point that I didn’t have before. And I promoted a minor character to a place in the major action of the middle of the book. That was an excellent idea, really, because the character is a favorite of mine, made from a real cousin when he was younger mixed with a real former student. In the book, he is convinced that the major fantasy element of the story is not real, but when he is confronted with evidence right before his eyes, he wets his pants and runs away. Perfect… at least for potty humor. 
Filed under Uncategorized
Space Pirates
I enjoy science fiction almost as much as I enjoy humor in both my reading activities and my writing. My goal has been, since reading Douglas Adams’ wonderful trilogy, or quadrilogy, or possibly quintology of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to write such an opus. That is the real reason my first published novel, Aeroquest, exists. Sorry about that. First novels are often a bizarre over-reaching, trying to do too much, shooting in too wide an arc, and getting totally lost in the tangle of plot, character, and purple paisley prose that characterizes a novelist’s obsession with his own inner eye.
Swashbuckling space-pirate teenagers are the students in my teachers-in-outer-space epic, Aeroquest. It gives you an idea about how silly the entire project really is.
My novel is a total mishmash of things from Star Wars, the Marx Brothers movies, Star Trek, Dune by Frank Herbert, old Flash Gordon serials, Indiana Jones, Tarzan, and several things like Nebulons (the little blue alien people) that I made up from my own Saturday-afternoon childhood daydreams. Parts of it are actually funny, I think, like the part about flying out of jungle danger by levitating with an anti-gravity bustier one of the characters wears because of her overly-generous up-front endowment. But parts of it are incomprehensible and sad. And not sad in a good way.
But I am seriously planning to rewrite the awful thing and get it published with a better publisher. I have worked a little bit on doing a graphic novel of the thing. I have my doubts, though, that I have enough drawings left in my arthritic old fingers to accomplish that part of the daydream. The world needs space pirates, especially now when an evil empire of the wealthy elite has taken over our world and threatens to crush us economically under its heel. Pirates rise up to take what they like from forces that outnumber them. They do the Robin Hood thing, taking from the rich and giving to the poor… er, or possibly keeping it for themselves. I mean, if they are the poor, then that’s okay, right? So, I have shared a Paffooney of some of the student pirates from my totally awful first novel, talked up the daydreams and fool’s hopes in my ill-fated novel Aeroquest, and acknowledged that you should never, ever pay the bloated price the cheap-o publisher with no editors on staff charges for the whole mess. Wait til I get it rewritten. It will probably be even more horrible.
Filed under Uncategorized
The Inner Clown
Sometimes it is entirely necessary to acknowledge the fool and the helpless, hopeless clown that lives inside us all. Okay, I hear what you are thinking. Not you. There is no clown inside of you… only me. That is one of a myriad of mistakes that makes me acknowledge that I am far short of perfection. I am not a know-it-all. I am a know-it-sometimes who too often tries to bluster his way through like he isn’t completely unsure of himself and terrified that other people will see what he truly is and laugh him out of business. I am a pratfall, butt-of-the-joke, snicker-at-snidely sort of buffoon who never gets it right and deserves every guffaw thrown at him. Clowns are often all blue, squishy, and sad on the inside. That is often the only thing that makes us funny. Do you know what brought on this wave of self pity? Of course you do. No man ever went through a day of stumble-muffs and misquotes, goof-ups and stubbed toes like I did without feeling at least a little bit that way. Oh? Not you, again? I hear you. It must be nice to never make mistakes. 
I have my car registered with the wrong registration sticker. When I tried to get the State inspection done, I found out my car is now supposed to be the old van my wife destroyed in a car accident last spring. My bank’s bill-pay service has twice sent money to the electric company which somehow lost the electronic check. I can’t even handle idiot-proof details any more. My son who was home on leave went back to the Marine Corps early this morning. I took him to the airport and had to bring all his deodorant spray, shampoo, and toothpaste back home with me because soap on an airplane equals terrorist. Apparently that should’ve all gone into the bags we checked, because that stuff only explodes in the carry-on bags, never the baggage compartment. I am called out for my many writing mistakes, even the ones I made on purpose trying to be funny, and my self-editor let me down on several occasions in the past week. So I am depressed. At life I am, at best, a .125 hitter, barely making more than one hit in every ten at-bats. I am a rodeo clown trying to play in a basketball game, and the bulls are all Michael Jordan. (How’s that for a mangled metaphor?) 
But it isn’t all the blues that I am singing. Good things have happened too. Life continues in my unlikely body afflicted with six incurable diseases, and I am a cancer survivor since 1983. The golf-ball sized growth the surgeon removed from the back of my head last week was benign, no sign of cancer. My son was home on leave. Every day is it’s own miracle. And I have gotten some writing done. So what if every editor and every reader doesn’t fall in love with every single word? The story goes on for at least another day.
Filed under Uncategorized
More Playing With Black and White Backgrounds
Here is the result of taking a section of my big black and white background and inserting a bit of color. New pictures out of old ones. Can I cheat at the art thing or what?
Filed under Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 