I believe a very important part of my art training is illustrating some of the books that I love. That being said, there is probably no writer that I love more than Charles Dickens. Here I tried to capture the sweet-sad relationship between David and Little Emily when Peggotty took him to Yarmouth. I used red, yellow, and blue, the primary colors to show fullness, completeness and the lovely warmth of family love that he captured there.
In 2014 I should be able to get back the rights to my 2007 novel Aeroquest. I would very much like to re-work it and publish it again. It was a kind of original project that was not created solely by me. In the 1980’s and 1990’s I played role-playing games with boys that needed a mentor. I began with the Dungeons and Dragons game from TSR. But South Texas has a strong Baptist presence that fears imagination, especially if it involves dragons and demons. So I had to change it to a Star Wars inspired game called Traveller. With a star-spanning fictional empire and a band of dice-rolled characters, we conquered the galaxy together for about one hundred and fifty game years. I used my story-telling abilities to carry the game forward and keep the boys enthralled.
So, the characters in the book are not completely created by me. They reflect the qualities, manners, and choices of the players. Even the most important character, the teacher-hunter-explorer-hero Ged Aero, was created by someone else (although I have for the most part made him into me). The story is overly complex because it was directed by the players and the decisions they made as they tried to solve the problems the game master (me) put in front of them. I think I can fix that given time. I should never have tried to publish it when I did, but the Publish America company gave me the chance to publish for free and tempted me in ways I never should’ve fallen for. I am glad I didn’t try to do this with more important stories that I was working on at the time.
Central to the story is the space school in which Ged Aero teaches. It is on the oriental planet called Gaijin (the word in Japanese for stupid foreigner). It is a special school. Ged’s is the only class, and all the students have special abilities, mind powers, that are like Ged’s own shape-shifting ability. There are telepaths, telekinetics, kids who mentally control the heat and cold in the air, teleport, mentally change molecules, and even foretell the future.
I don’t recommend you buy the book as it is now (a strange bit of advice from a starving artist and author) but I hope to one day turn it into something much better, more entertaining, and worth reading.
The Paffooney that accompanies today’s post is a class picture of all but three of the teenage Psionic space ninjas.
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Yes, I have a daughter. She’s a lovely young girl, and far more like me than I’m willing to admit. She used to like snakes and always laughs about farting and bathroom humor. She beats up her older brothers, always has, and loves to draw unicorns, neo-pets, and warriors beheading bad guys in the bloodiest way possible. I call her “the Princess” in my writing, and she is sometimes all-girl, and sometimes all-boy. Love her, get disgusted with her, fray your last nerve, and still, she’s the apple of my eye, the gravy to my mashed potatoes, the something-good to my whatever fuzzy-warm metaphor you choose. Stevie Wonder sings “Isn’t She Lovely?” in the background music of our lives.
So, what’s it all about, having a daughter? Heck if I know. I just know that when the nurse put her in my hands the first time, and she weighed so much for a newborn that jokes were made about her future as an NFL linebacker, and she peed all over everything, she captured my heart and I would forever after be her thrall.
All three of my children like art and can draw well. Of the three, my daughter is the one who best understands “cute”. She is capable of drawing big-eyed critters that make you go “awww.” She has a color sense that meshes seamlessly with my own, loving primary colors, especially Maxfield Parrish blue. She understands my sense of humor (a feat of understanding more impressive than uncovering the secrets of nuclear physics). She is made up of the best parts and worst parts of me as well as many of the good parts of her mother. So, if I die tomorrow, or am changed into a small blue mushroom by an alien magician, she will be the one that carries on the torch of my creativity. Let’s hope that doesn’t mean that she will use that torch to burn things down.
Do you have a daughter too? If you do, I have great sympathy for you, but also great joy. She is the sunshine of my life.
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There is great beauty in the land of the imagination. I enjoy visiting places that exist only in my mind… Places like Narnia, Middle Earth, Pellucidar, Arrakis called Dune… There are more places in the realm of imagination than in all of reality. Yes, I know… crazy, crazy, crazy….
It’s true… 24 years of my life was spent in the Jungles of Junior High fighting for my life against predatory seventh graders, monkey people, lizard people, and general craziness. If my pictures are loony, and my stories are insane, it is because I have endured where no sane man should ever venture. The pink raptor, by the way… one of my best students.
No, I never actually got caught naked on Main Street wearing only a teddy bear in front of the Ben Franklin Dime Store. Thank goodness for that. But believe me, today was almost as bad as that. (Really, I just made up this picture to illustrate a bad day. It didn’t actually ever happen. I know it sounds like I am protesting too much, but… oh, well. Some of my friends know the truth.)
Today started with a near fatal accident on my morning commute. I have been having trouble on the drive in the mornings, passing out at stop lights on occasion and having to be awakened by angry car horns. I am a diabetic and I did discuss it with my doctor and my mother the forty-year RN nurse. I have been eating extra protein for breakfast to keep my blood sugar high enough. Still, I had a sudden rude awakening. I was going forty miles an hour as I was awakened by the car rumbling down the median on a divided portion of the highway. I got control of the car and veered back into my lane before I reached the light pole or the up-coming intersection. Believe me, I am going to take super serious steps to prevent that looming fatal accident. If I don’t, I will either end up dead or having to work with severely soiled underwear. No way can I afford another sick day.
So, after the good news about still not being dead, I was called into the vice principal’s office.
“Did they tell you that you were going to be having a new writing class?” he said out of the blue beyond.
“No.”
“You can teach a writing class, can’t you?”
Well, of course I can. I have done it a million times before. It is just that I never had to do it suddenly in the middle of a grading period before. So what is going on here? “Um, yes, I can,” I answered with the utter stupidity of the totally blind-sided.
“Good. We will be replacing your third period class today.”
Oh, good. Thank you so much. Why am I being singled out for this kind of treatment? Well, I am eligible to retire. They want me to retire. And my department is not only made up of gray-haired old fogies like me, but is being blamed for low test scores. (Of course, no one seems to notice that the scores I am routinely blamed for are second language speakers of English who have been mainstreamed in regular English classes. Why am I to blame for failures of kids who are not directly in my classes? Oh, that’s right… ESL teachers take the blame for ESL students whether we’re allowed to teach them or not.) Okay, bring it on! No way I’m gonna let kids fail, even if they are heaping it on to drive me out.
My blood sugar went too low again before the end of the day. All three of my own personal kids are failing at least one class. I am getting older by the minute. When I stop and think about it, it would be better to be a kid again, caught naked in front of the Five and Ten. (You might want to check out my previous post “Because Naked is Funny” to find out why.) It would be, all-in-all, a much better time. (And it didn’t really happen. Well… not like the Paffooney, anyway!
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This is me learning colored-pencil technique in the 1970’s. Does it show promise? Have I improved? Or gotten worse? Fear not, I don’t expect you to answer the questions. Just help me figure out… Is the house about to fall down? Why are the kid’s feet in the goldfish pond? And what sort of silly little fairy is that, anyway?
Okay, I know it’s creepy. I know it is only a little bit funny. But I like to think it’s good colored pencil work, and it does seem to stand up well over time even though it was created back in 1980. I wrote this hoping to break into the cartoonist world in the 1980’s. I only managed to get rejection letters and form letters back then. Big dreams and no real breaks. But if you are goofy long enough and cartoon up a storm with enough lightning and hailstones in it, somebody will invent the internet (Thanks, AL Gore) and digital photography and WordPress Blogging so I can share it all with you.
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When I was 12, my favorite novel was Rudyard Kipling’s First Jungle Book. I loved it. From page one to the last sentence of the story about the White Seal. I owned a paperback copy that I still have 45 years later. I bought it from the school book order form, Scholastic, I think. I used my allowance money, earned at a nickel a week. Along with the chapter books I had read previously, The Swiss Family Robinson, the White Stag, and Treasure Island, it guided my view of life. Every grove and forest in Iowa became the jungle in the summer of 1968. The windswept fields of corn and soy beans easily transformed into tropical seas. I imagined pirates, natives, and buried treasures everywhere. When I found a piece of a brass candlestick with the necessary curved part, which became the cursed Ahnk from The Jungle Book. Midnight, Grandma Aldrich’s blue-eyed black cat, became my Bagheera. I traveled with an invisible Baloo. You know, it was only a year or so before that when I saw the Disney movie. So, of course, dancing and singing was a part of being a jungle boy.
In the book, unlike the movie, Mowgli was naked in the jungle. He didn’t wear clothes until the first time he submitted himself to the man village. He took them off again when he escaped. I had to try that too. I went to the BinghamPark woods down by the Iowa River. I found a tree where I could put my clothes, and I took everything off. I figured roaming the woods like Mowgli would be great. Boy, I was a stupid child. Problem number one struck with my first naked step in the forest. Dang! There must not be any twigs or nettles in Mowgli’s jungle. I tried hopping from place to place, but in minutes I was wearing at least my socks and shoes. Hanging branches and brambles were a problem, too. They clutched at me, striping me with welts and scrapes. Certain parts you just don’t want pricked by a bramble bush. It was like God suddenly planted those pointed things everywhere. Okay, shoes and socks and shorts. Well, then I began to get cold. Iowa is never very warm even in the height of summer. I had already defeated the whole naked in the forest thing when I put my shorts back on, so, what the heck! It just didn’t work like I thought.
I still believed that the ways of the jungle were an essential part of my young life. I read and reread what the Jungle Book says about the “Law of the Jungle”. I tried to make sense of it as a credo to live by. Of course, at twelve we are always among the wisest and all-knowing of God’s creatures. We can make sense of the world in our own weird little way, and no one will ever be able to sway us from the philosophy we live by, no matter how silly it is. I still think about my “Jungle Book Period” as an important part of my young life. There are things about young Mowgli and Jim Hawkins and the Robinsons that formed a significant part of my character. I would one day make use of those determined and resourceful qualities to stay alive in the classroom jungles of South Texas. I tried to make others see it. I shared Kipling and Stevenson with kids and hoped that I could make them learn, as I did, how to be that little boy facing and succeeding against the dangerous jungle around him.
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This is an old 1980 Paffooney. I had no particular reason for creating it. I just did it on a whim. It is very Disney inspired and simply silly.
Catch a Falling Star 