Tag Archives: novel

September 6, 2025 · 12:02 am

“Unfortunately, you are a Writer,” He Said.

I have made up my mind to risk investing more money in getting another book published.  Being an author, especially an unknown Indie author, is really just an expensive hobby.  Even investing in professional editorial services and print-on-demand publishers can’t help you make any money at it, even if you are talented and good at story-telling.  The best I can really hope for is to get my books in print and pray that people will discover them and like them after I die, beaten to death for a crust of bread in debtor’s prison.

So, why would anyone in their right mind want to be a writer?

It is entirely possible that I was simply born that way.  I have been drawing cartoons and telling stories since I was about five years old.  Maybe even before that.  I don’t have many clear memories of my pre-school years.  It is possible that I was lost in a library once… or dropped on my head… or in a library and having a book dropped on my head… something set it off if it wasn’t simply in my genes.

I am planning to publish Magical Miss Morgan with Page Publishing.  They are a pay-to-print publisher who are slightly more affordable than I-Universe that I used to get Catch a Falling Star into print.  I feel like I have to get it published before I die because it is the distillation of my entire life as a classroom teacher.  Books like this are important to me.  In the Bible, there are prophets and holy men who are filled with the Word of God, men like Jeremiah, that claim the Word is burning within them, and will burn its way out of them if they don’t speak it.  My stories that I am working at turning into books are like that.  They are consuming me from the inside out.  I have to get them written and printed if I possibly can.

I have recently tried and failed to get novels like Snow Babies, Magical Miss Morgan, and Superchicken published with publishers that don’t charge for their services.   I got several rejections and one contract that came to nothing because of the economic failings of the publisher.  I have tried being infinitely patient.  It doesn’t work.

Cool School Blue

I will try to bargain for the most affordable deal I can to get Magical Miss Morgan into print.  They will apparently let me input artwork into the final cover.  I understand that successful writers tend to starve for at least fifteen years before they see any success and profit.  At best, I have six more years of that to go.  But this, after all, is my life now.  I need to write books and I need to get them published.  I am, unfortunately, a Writer.

This being an old post reposted, I now have this book available on Amazon.

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August 9, 2025 · 12:30 am

Double Character Study; Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates

Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates are recurring characters in my hometown novels.  So far they have appeared in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and Magical Miss Morgan, both of which are now published and available through Amazon.

The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is now available on Amazon through this link;

https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-Wheel-Genius-Michael-Beyer/dp/1982984023/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1544204666&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+beyer+books+bicycle-wheel+genius

Magical Miss Morgan is available through this link;

https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Miss-Morgan-Michael-Beyer-ebook/dp/B0797GTRPV/ref=sr_1_39?ie=UTF8&qid=1544202254&sr=8-39&keywords=michael+beyer+books

The first book documents their star-crossed romance, beginning as ten-year-olds and following through until they are going on thirteen.  Blueberry is a girl with a terrible secret.  She is not like other girls and has to protect this secret, which will only become harder and harder to contain as time goes on.  She lives with her father who barely notices her, an aunt, her father’s sister, who knows the secret and punishes Blueberry for it, and her two older sisters who cherish her and dote on her, and probably are the only reason she is still alive.  Her mother, unfortunately, died when she was a baby.  But both books she appears in so far are comedies.   I will not go into the possible tragedies lying wait in ambush for her in her distant future.  The tragedies are simply not funny enough to be a part of everything.  Like many of my characters, she is based on people from my own life and experience.  She is a combination of a girl I once loved and a boy I once taught.  If that’s not confusing enough, I can add that Blueberry loves to draw, a detail that comes about because she is also partly based on me.  She particularly loves to draw pictures of Mike Murphy.  She might have drawn the next Paffooney (if she were a real person and not just some made-up girl that only lives in my weird old imagination).

Blue and her beau

Mike Murphy is a Norwall Pirate.  Not just any Pirate, but their best athlete, tree-climber, and wild-story believer.   He does everything the Pirate leader, Tim Kellogg, (the grand and glorious and mostly notorious Pirate leader) thinks up for him to do.  He believes every lie Tim tells him, and faithfully defends the Pirates and their leader, even when it gets him detention (again!) from their favorite teacher, Miss Francis Morgan.  He starts out running away from Blueberry, as any red-blooded, normal American boy would.  But he eventually lets her catch him, as any red-blooded, normal American boy would at about that age, the middle of the wonder years.  He becomes her best friend and greatest white-knight-sort-of protector, even though he is torn between that and loyalty to Tim and the Pirates and the lies they tell.

I am now planning a third book that will allow these two characters to adventure together.  I will call this novel Kingdoms Under the Earth.  It will begin with Blueberry being kidnapped by evil flu fairies that take her away to the dark parts of the fairy world under the surface of this world in a feverish coma. Mike Murphy must decide to follow her and rescue her, which he will do via the bad advice of a fairy friend, kissing Blueberry on the lips, contracting her disease, and sharing in her comatose suffering.  Then Mike’s best friend, Tim Kellogg, and his big sister Dilsey both agree that they must follow also to help rescue both Blueberry and Mike.  It will be a great adventure through illness, imagination, and the many hidden kingdoms of fairy magic that lie directly under our world.

Now, I suppose you are wondering why I am giving you details about characters in a book, or rather books, that I haven’t even finished writing yet.  Well, if you are dedicated enough to reading my loopy and boring old posts to get this far, it is probably safe to tell you that I don’t really know either.  I also want to find out.  What do the next sentences say?  Oh, yes.  Mike Murphy already exists as a Pirate in my published book Catch a Falling Star.  He is an established character that I have to twist and tweak into fitting into new stories.  Blueberry has been prancing around in my imagination and drawing colored-pencil Paffoonies since the 1970’s, but I am only now weaving her into the stories I have in me and are burning with a red-hot flame to get told.  So I’m not completely crazy to do this.  Only about ninety percent… right?

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March 29, 2025 · 12:07 am

Beautiful and Brilliant

I have looked deeply and longingly at my own writing time and again trying to determine what is good and what is poorly done and what is the best that I have written. How does one examine what is good? What are the standards that you must meet?

I had a writing teacher who was teaching a class in fiction writing and said to us, “You write fiction to create that special bittersweet something, that je ne sais quoi, that you need in order to come to terms with reality. Everything necessary to say something that satisfies a nameless desire.” I wish I remembered his name so I could credit him with having said that wise thing. Or, at any rate, I wish I could remember the name of the wise guy that he was quoting.

So, basically I am trying to capture in prose something that I have no idea what it is, but both you and I will know it if we see it. Easy-peasy, right?

Good fiction that I have read and liked makes me feel something. If it is truly literary quality, like the novels of Charles Dickens, Terry Pratchett, and Mark Twain, it will make me both laugh and cry. Funny things balanced by things that hurt to know and make you weep for characters that you have come to love. If it is a downer kind of novel, as some very good bits of science fiction and horror fiction are, it will make you laugh a little, cry a little, and think a lot; think with dread, or despair, or even impossible hope. Steven King, George Orwell, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury are good examples of this.

I am grappling with how you do that. I am not fool enough to think I am some sort of literary great. I am a school teacher writing stories for school children, stories I wanted to hear when I was a kid. Stories of good versus evil, good people coming together in the face of chaos. Heroes, villains, and clowns being heroic, villainous, or foolish. And themes that both warm and chill your little blue heart.

. So, what can I do besides keep on writing and keep on trying and keep on begging people, fools, and children to try reading my writing because they will like it, even if it is the least best thing I have written?

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March 1, 2025 · 1:01 am

The Jester, The Fumbler, The Fool

Much of what I love about good story telling is bound up in the nature of the fool character, or the wise fool, if you will.  Shakespeare is probably the consummate creator of fool characters.  Jaques in As You Like It, Falstaff in Henry IV and Henry V, the King’s Fool in King Lear, and even Polonius in Hamlet.  The fool is essential to the story because he serves several important purposes.  He is a foil for main characters in the unraveling of the plot, providing exposition through dialogue, wit and wisdom in commenting on the events, and pratfalls and innuendos for the further amusement of the audience.  He is the Harpo Marx character, Chaplin’s Little Tramp, any Red Skelton character, Lou Costello, Jerry Lewis, and every foolish talking animal in cartoon adventures like Scooby Doo.

So, I have tried to include the clown in my stories of childhood in Iowa, the land of imagination and corn.  In my newest novel, Snow Babies, the key clown is Harker Dawes, a good-hearted bumbler who has bought the hardware store in Norwall, Iowa and quickly managed to turn it into a bankrupted and foolishly failed business.  He is in control of essential supplies for a small town to use in surviving a raging blizzard, but he is also totally incompetent and capable of creating as many problems as his store can solve.  He is a bachelor uncle living with his brother’s family of three, and he becomes one of the people most responsible for taking in the four orphans from the bus.

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Today’s Paffooney is a picture of Harker in his store.  Of course, I can’t tell you the name of the real-life person that Harker is based on.  But I can tell you that I drew this portrait by combining his real-life mug with the features of Rowan Atkinson.  In fact, if a miracle happens and they make this story into a movie, Rowan Atkinson would be perfect for the part.  His first name is even the real name of the town that becomes Norwall in my story.  Stewart’s Hardware Store is no longer there anymore.  Even the building is gone, but the image in the background is close to the antique feel of that wonderful old place.

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January 29, 2025 · 2:10 am

My Bookish Journey (Part III)

As I indicated in Part II, I killed PDMI Publishing with my first contest novel, Snow Babies. Not because it was that bad of a novel. Rather, it was the endless compounding of my bad luck over time, caused by the Publishing Gods’ keen desires to keep my stories from being generally read and enjoyed. Fickle and cruel are the Publishing Gods.

I took some of the most memorable events in my time as a teacher, put them in a cook-pot and added a batter made of characters based on real teachers I have taught with, learned from, and copied their methods, mixed it with a wooden whisk made of fairy tales, and then baked it with the high heat of the love of teaching to make the next manuscript I would submit to the same YA Novel contest, the Rossetti Awards.

I thought it was an excellent novel. And, like Snow Babies before it, it made the final round of the judging. And there was a range of prizes for the best in about five categories of YA novel for which Magical Miss Morgan qualified for two of them. If it had taken any of those prizes, it would’ve gained me the attention of major publishers looking for new talent.

Alas, there were more novels in competition in that second contest, and I only won the placement in the final round of judging. The Publishing Gods are powerful and implacable.

I submitted it to another publisher that I meant to kill, and they promptly rejected it. They could not handle many novels, got an avalanche of mostly terrible novels, and rejected mine after the first page didn’t dazzle them enough. My consolation had to be that, even though they didn’t give me a contract, they did die shortly after, being closed the next time I checked on them.

Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates, two of Miss Morgan’s students

So, I gritted my teeth and tried the pay-to-publish publishers one more time. I chose Page Publishing because they only cost a third of what I-Universe did. I could, at that time, barely still afford it with my partially-restored credit rating.

Unfortunately, as a Publisher, Page was worth only one one-hundredth of the value of I-Universe. They didn’t actually have editors. I basically edited the whole thing myself. Their “editor” only communicated to me once with a proof-read copy that I basically had to re-edit and change everything back to being correct English usage. The major editorial contribution? They tried to change every instance of my use of Miss Morgan to Ms. Morgan. Even in the title. The young bozo-editor didn’t understand that even married female teachers are addressed as “Miss.”

As hard as they tried to mess up the novel for me, almost as badly as Publish America did to AeroQuest, I was pleased with the final outcome and the ten copies they sent me. However, I had already vowed to myself that I would never again trust my work to fly-by-night small publishers. And, of course, no major publisher was accepting unsolicited manuscripts. So, I began my relationship with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.

That, then, will be the topic of Part IV.

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December 30, 2024 · 2:14 am

Chuck Dickens and the Origins of Writing

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Don’t make the mistake of thinking I have any earthly idea where writing comes from or how it began.  I am only talking personal history here, nothing grander or more meaningful.  This post is only self-referential hoo-haw, which is a fancy way of interpreting “conceited crap”.

So, the truth is, I am writing about Charles Dickens because he is the author I most want to become.  True, I rant on and on about Twain and his humor.  And a good deal of my artwork owes everything to Disney, but everything I am good at in writing is based on Dickens.

The first actual Dickens novel that I read was accomplished during my extended illness as a high school sophomore.  I read in bed, both at home and in the hospital, from my library copy of The Old Curiosity Shop.  I was enthralled by the journey and subsequent tragedy of Little Nell.  I thoroughly loathed the villain Daniel Quilp and was roundly thrilled by his well-deserved fatal comeuppance.  It was my first encounter with the master of characters.  I followed that reading with a biography of Dickens that revealed to me for the first time that his characters were based on real people.  Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield was actually Dickens’ own father.  Little Nell was the cousin he dearly loved who died in his arms.    The crafty Fagin was a caricature of a well-known fence named Soloman, a Jew of infamous reputation, but not without his redeeming quality of caring for the orphaned poor.  So it is that I have chosen to make my silly stories about real people in much the same way Dickens did.  If you are now worried that since you know me, you may end up in my books, never fear.  I change names and splice characters together.  You will have to make an effort to recognize yourself.  And, besides, nobody reads my books anyway.

I also like the way Dickens uses young characters and follows them over time as they grow and change.  Oliver Twist was the first child protagonist in English literature.  David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and Pip in Great Expectations are also like that.  David Copperfield, in fact, is Chuck’s own fictionalized self.  I fully intend to do the same.  It is the reason my books fall into the Young Adult category.  I also intend to employ the same kind of gentle, innocent humor that Dickens used.  I mean to portray things that are funny in a disarming, absurdist way rather than resorting to attack humor and bad words.

There it is, then, my tribute to Charles Dickens, a writer who makes me be who I am and write what I write.  I am not supposed to do Christmas posts because of my avowed religion, but you can consider this to be as close as I can come.  The author of A Christmas Carol… it doesn’t get much more Christmassy than that.

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May 5, 2024 · 12:30 am

Farming Family

the ClarkesI have been working on the beginnings of the novel When the Captain Came Calling.  It is not the first draft.  It is the third entire re-write.  I wrote this as a graphic novel before graphic novels were an established form.  Then I tried to rewrite it as a traditional novel, and it is now coming into its YA novel form.  But I can’t begin to explain this novel-writing project without telling you about the Clarkes.  Yes, they are a very important Iowegian family who farm and are entirely fictional.  (Kids, what other words do you know that begin with the letter F?)  They are based, at least a tiny bit, on my own family when I was a kid, but very specific parts of it.  My Uncle Larry, mother’s older brother who is now gone (but never forgotten) was the inspiration for Dash Clarke.  Kyle Clarke, the father in the picture, is Dash’s younger brother… though he is not based on my other maternal uncle.  The daughter in the Paffooney picture, Valerie Clarke, is based on my own daughter combined with a girl I had a crush on in grade school and a girl who had a deeply felt crush on me when I was a young teacher.  The Clarkes are third generation farmers, just as my own family were back in the time this story is set.  Unlike my family, the Clarkes do not come out of the 80’s with their family farms intact.  What grandparents built, the sons lose hold of, and the world becomes a much sadder place because of it.  The story is about a lot of things in addition to a family losing their farm.  It is filled with magic, telling sea stories and other lies, and the truth behind both the magic  and the lies.

I posted this today because today is the day I finished the Paffooney illustration that started the post.  Here is what it looked like in progress;

pencil sketchClarkes

Paffooneys are a made-up thing by which I name the whole great glob of artwork and stories I have created that represent the never-ending music in my soul.  I am not a singer or a song-writer.  The only way these tunes come to life is through the toons which I ignorantly call the Paffoons because the loons have nothing on me.

Here is a cover mock-up for the novel which shows another picture of Valerie Clarke, the most beautiful little girl ever born in Norwall, Iowa (a phrase that her Uncle Dash christened her with when she was small, and it caught on with the entire town.)Voodoo Val cover

This is a classic post from the archive, and so the book is now available on Amazon.

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April 17, 2024 · 1:36 am

Word Salad and Idea Casserole

In a world filled with interesting and engaging ideas, I get frustrated with the constant barrage of word salad on social media tossed at me by conservative friends.  As Trump seems to be coming closer and closer to ending his administration with his own chaotic behavior, those who supported him are tossing more and more flavorless lettuce and rotted vegetables in the mix.  I have to resist the urge to throw the same thing back at them.  I do not resist such salad-making well.  Witness my attempts to alter this stupid meme from a friend;

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I admit, I kinda barfed half-digested word salad all over this one.  I get tired of debating the issues only to be insulted like this and then accused of only insulting Trump and avoiding what they call the “Real Issues”, like Hillary giving a gazillion per cent of our uranium wealth to the Russians and Obama being the one guilty of colluding with Russians.

But, enough of that.  It is time to make something healthier out of words and ideas.  I have a lot of things on my mind, and I want to get a lot of them said before I die.  So let me make some idea casserole, cooking a whole lot of very different ideas into one multivitamin dish.

DZyfT3lVAAAWfuI

  • Trump, for all the damage he’s done, will end up being good for us if we can just survive his administration to the end.  Scar tissue is always tougher than the surrounding flesh when the wound heals.  Repairing the damage he has done will leave us stronger, wiser, and more able to cope with the root causes of the Trump phenomenon.
  • My friends and family who supported the whole Trump mess primarily to hurt people whom they feel are smarter than them and so more stuck-up and self-important than them, will eventually get back to leading more productive lives than they did before.  And they will continue not to credit the ones who actually made that happen the way they didn’t credit Obama for healing the blunders of Bush.
  • I will get back to writing gentler, non-political-type humor novels.

  • I have my novel Superchicken half-way through the final edit to publish it on Amazon Kindle.  You can see I have been playing with cover ideas.  I plan to write Sing Sad Songs next.  Also I have two more novel ideas that I will add to this casserole as separate ingredients.  And I have The Bicycle Wheel Genius, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, and The Baby Werewolf finished and ready to edit as well.
  • Here’s new idea number one; The Boy Who Lived Forever is a fantasy novel about Icarus Jones coming to stay with the Jones family of Norwall.  He has survived a house fire that killed his parents and now must evade the dragon that pursues him while trying to figure out what is wrong with him health-wise.  Could he be dying?  Or did he survive the fire because he somehow can’t die?
  • Here’s new idea number two; Kingdoms Under the Earth is a fantasy novel about Blueberry Bates, a troubled young girl, falling seriously ill, and the measures her boyfriend, Mike Murphy, and her friends have to take in a realm made of magic and fever dreams to save her.

The truth is I really can’t do anything about politics and government beyond expressing my beliefs and voting my conscience.  I need to concentrate on telling stories.  It is the one thing that still gives my life meaning through the pain, illness, and suffering.  I am not dead yet.  And, not being dead, I need to be writing.

 

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January 28, 2024 · 1:02 am

Where Do Ideas Come From?

When you make the mistake of admitting to others that you are a writer, they immediately assume you know things that are kept secret from “normal” people. For instance, they will simply assume that you can tell them where you get your ideas for writing. Well, I am fairly sure that I got the idea for this post from watching a YouTube video in which the Master, Neil Gaiman, says that every author has a joke answer for that one with enough sarcastic wit in it to punish the asker with public humiliation.

I asked the dog if she knew any jokes like that which I could use to prepare for someone asking me that question in public. She said, “You could tell them that your family dog tells you what to write every day.”

“No,” I said, “people would never believe it.”

“Well, it is supposed to be a joke. But you are right. No one would ever think you were actually smart enough to write down what a dog tells you.”

“Yes, it’s a good thing for me that you know how to speak in English. I could never translate and transcribe Barkinese.”

So, I began thinking of where some of my best ideas came from.

Dreams

Some of my stories come directly from dreams that I had. The nightmare about being chased down a street in Rowan at midnight by a large black dog with red eyes was an actual dream I had in the 1970s. So was the nightmare of the werewolf climbing out of the TV during a late-night viewing of Lon Chaney in The Wolfman.

Those two dreams together were the start of the story that became my recently published novel, The Baby Werewolf. Both dreams visit the protagonist in the story I wrote almost as if they were his dreams and not actually mine.

Events

Snow Babies, the best novel I have ever written, was based on two different blizzards I experienced, first as a child in the 1960’s, and then again as a high school kid in the 1970s. Each blizzard involved being snowed in for a week at someone else’s house. As a child, I was stuck at Grandpa’s farm place until the snow plows could finally do their work and open the gravel roads. As a teen, I was stuck in Great Grandma’s retirement apartment near the high school in Belmond.

That novel also is based on the next source of ideas;

Characters

I can’t think of any story I have written that isn’t based on real people I have known in one way or another. Valerie in the novel above is based on three different girls I have known or taught. One of those three is my own daughter. The four orphans on the bus in that story are all boys from my junior high classes in the 1980s.

Lucky Catbird Sandman, the hobo who wears the quilted coat of many colors, is based on the poet Walt Whitman, whom I knew well in a past life, and my own shiftless, storyteller self. Some characters are just so key to a story idea that they themselves are the reason for a book to exist.

In conclusion, the dog doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. None of these things are really where I get my ideas. But I am out of time. I will have to write about the bottle imp another day. No, really. A magical imp trapped in a bottle. You can make one of those give you ideas for novels with only a slight risk to your life and soul.

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January 5, 2024 · 2:45 am

Metaphor and Meaning

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In this week’s Paffooney remix, I have pictured the little boy crooner Francois Martin on the main street of Norwall.  Why have I done such a foolish thing?  Why have I drawn a boy singing silently a song that only I can hear in my silly old head?  In fact, why do I label them Cantos instead of Chapters?  Of course, the answer to these rhetorical questions is metaphorical.  I look at my writing as being poetry, or, more accurately, as music rather than mere prose.  It is a metaphor central to my being, writing is putting the inner music of my mind down on paper.

Here is a secret to powerful writing.  Connect ideas with metaphors.  A metaphor is a direct comparison of two unlike things to create an analogy, an echo of an idea that gives resonance to a notion.  Sorry, I’m an English teacher.  It’s in my genes.  But metaphors can serve as the essential connections, as glue to put paragraphs and scenes together.

Let me show you a metaphor.  Here is a short poem, the natural environment where many metaphors live;

                                                The Cookie

Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…

                With each bite I had less and less cookie left.

But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…

                Lingered on… as memory.

 

The central metaphor of this poem is comparing the cookie to my life.  I am getting older.  I have six incurable diseases, some of them life threatening.  I have been thinking about mortality a lot lately.  So what is the point of the poem?  That even when the last bite is taken, and there is no more cookie… when I am dead, there is the memory of me.  Not my memory.  The memory of me in the minds of my family, my children, my students, and other people who have come to know me.  That memory makes whatever goodness that is in me worth living for.

Okay, a metaphor explained is kinda like a bug that’s been dissected for a science fair.  Its innards are revealed and labeled.  The beauty is gone.  It’s kinda icky.

What works better, is a metaphor that the readers can readily grasp on their own.  The beauty has to be discovered, not dissected and explained.  Let me try again;

 

                                                The Boy and the Boat

                The boy looked to the horizon where wild and wooly white-caps roiled upon the sea.

                “Lord help me,” he said, “the sea is so large, and my boat is so small…”

 

I can hear what you are thinking.  “That’s too simple and ordinary.  If it’s a metaphor, then it’s a really stupid one.”  Well, I heard someone thinking that, even if it was not you.

Let me add a bit of information to help you connect things as I do.  When I was ten years old, a fifteen-year-old neighbor boy sexually assaulted me.  I told no one.  I was so devasted by the event that I repressed the memory until I reached the age of twenty two.  In high school, my suicidal thoughts and darkest depressions were caused by this event even though I couldn’t even recall.  To this day I have not explained to mother and father what happened.  I can only bring myself to tell you now because my abuser died of heart failure last summer.  It was a life event of overwhelming darkness, pain, and soul scorching.  Now look at “The Boy and the Boat” again.  Has the meaning changed for you the way it does for me?

Now, I know that the last paragraph was a totally unfair use of harsh reality to make a point about metaphor and meaning.  So let me give you one last poem… a sillier one.  You can make of it whatever you will;

 

                                                The Grin

The wrinkly, bewhiskered old man

Had a smile like a plate of moldy spaghetti

In the afternoon sun.

 

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