Tag Archives: novel characters

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).

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?

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as art, artwork, books, characters, colored pencil, drawing, humor, nivel, novel, novel characters, paffooney, young love

May 8, 2024 · 12:20 am

Notes from the 70’s; the Master Plan

I have wanted to be a writer and cartoonist from childhood onward. I didn’t really begin in earnest until the last few years of my teaching career with retirement looming directly ahead. Now I have made the leap off the cliff. I retired a year ago. I did everything short of bankruptcy to put my accounts in order, and transformed myself into a starving artist. I have a full retirement from Texas, subject to a grandfather clause (no relation to the Santa Clause) that allows me to receive enough money to live on for the rest of my life (thanks to the trick of being a teacher back before George W. Bush and Rick Perry came along to pillage Texas education and reduce what they pay those lazy, lousy teachers for their lifetimes of service). Of course, I must try to limit my expenditures as much as possible, because… well, it is a teacher’s pension.

But my plan from the 70’s, begun in high school and carried out through college and my teaching career has allowed me to stay on track to create something massive and complex. My story ideas have been collected over time and are all based on a very simple rule… “Everything is connected.” Every story I now labor to put into prose mentions other stories and has story fishhooks in it to catch readers and pull them into something else. Most of my work is set in farm-town Iowa in the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s. I made them all a part of the 20th Century on purpose because the personalities the characters are all based on were a part of my life then. Certain elements run through all the stories. Let me explain a few.

1. Some characters appear in many stories (sometimes as a main character, and more often as a supporting character. The French boy who sings karaoke beautifully and makes his cousin’s bar business a success by entertaining people there appears in two stories that happen at about the same time. Both of those stories are still waiting to be written. Tim Kellogg appears in my stories from the time he is but a twinkle in his parents’ eyes until he becomes the leader of the infamous boys’ gang of liars called the Norwall Pirates.

2. Most of the stories are centered around members of the Norwall Pirates. They are a group of small town boys dedicated to adventure, telling lies, and seeing girls naked. Much of the magic, science fiction, fantasy elements, and just plain hallucinations in my stories are the fault of boys who tell stories and lies so well that sometimes they believe them themselves.

3. Character arcs that begin in one book will often continue in another. Sometimes I go back in time and explain something that happened much earlier. The Pirate’s club first appears in my novel Catch a Falling Star set in 1990. The origin of the club is told about in Superchicken, a novel I have blogged about, but not yet published. That story happens in 1974. Valerie Clarke is introduced in the novel PDMI Publishing LLC is currently working on, Snow Babies, which takes place in Winter of 1984. She is the leader of the Pirates in the finished, but not yet submitted novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. That story spans 1988 to 1991.

4. Much of my nuttiness was originally created in the 1970’s. Even though the stories were given a setting much later, all the illustrated Paffoonies I have dropped into this post were drawn in 1977 and 1978. I keep these cartoon character model sheets in one of my magical tomes, the Norwall Book, a loose-leaf binder full of drawings and junk carefully preserved in plastic page-protector sheets.

So, this is all the proof that my leap off that cliff into retirement will either make a very big splash or hit the rocks very hard. It will be very something. And I hope to live to see it… especially to get all of the stories I can possibly finish written and published… with a ghost of a hope that my own drawings, cartoons, and illustrations will count for something. So, now my plan is revealed. Let the enemies plan their counter-moves, and may the devil not move the water at the bottom of the cliff.

1 Comment

Filed under humor, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as big plans, books, cartoons, colored pencil, humor, novel characters, novel writing, old art, Paffoonies, pen and ink, writing, writing advice

May 5, 2024 · 12:30 am

Farming Family

I 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;

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.)

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

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney Posts

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, creative-writing, humor, novel, novel characters, novel writing, paffooney posts, Paffoonies, Valerie Clarke, writing

August 15, 2023 · 12:45 am

Conversations With the Ghost of Miss M…

Beneath the old cottonwood tree there once stood a one-room school house. My mother went to school there as a girl, a short walk from home along the Iowa country road. Misty mornings on a road between cornfields and soybean fields can often conjure up ghosts.

I took this morning walk with the dog while I was visiting my old Iowegian home, and I was writing my fictional story Magical Miss Morgan in my head, not yet having had time to sit down and write. I was reflecting on times long past and a school long gone, though Miss Morgan’s story is really about my own teaching experience. Miss Morgan is in many ways me. But I am not a female teacher. I am a goofy old man. So, why am I writing the main character as a female?

Well, the ghosts from the old school house heard that and decided to send an answer.

Miss Mennenga was my third grade and fourth grade teacher from the Rowan school. The building I attended her classes in has been gone for thirty years. Miss M herself has long since passed to the other side. So when she appeared at the corner… Yes, I know… I have said countless times that I don’t believe in ghosts, but she had the same flower-patterned dress, the glasses, the large, magnified brown eyes that could look into your soul and see all your secrets, yet love you enough to not tell them to anyone else. Suddenly, I knew where the character of Miss Morgan had actually come from. I also realized why I was drawn to teaching in the first place. Teachers teach you more than just long division, lessons about the circulatory systems of frogs, and the Battle of Gettysburg… They shape your soul.

“You remember getting in trouble for doing jokes in class when you were supposed to be studying your spelling words?”

“Yes, Miss M, but I didn’t make any noise.. they were pantomime jokes that I stole from watching Red Skelton on TV.”

“But you pulled your heart out of your chest and made it beat in your hand. You had to know that was going to make the boys smirk and the girls giggle.”

“I did. But making them happy was part of the reason God put me there.”

“But not during spelling. I was trying to teach math to fourth graders. You interrupted.”

“You made that point. I still remember vividly. You let me read the story to the class out loud afterwords. You said I needed to use my talent for entertaining to help others learn, not distract them from learning.”

“I was very proud of the way you learned that lesson.”

“I tried very hard as a teacher to never miss a teachable moment like that. It was part of the reason that God put you there.”

“And I did love to hear you read aloud to the class. You were always such an expressive reader, Michael. Do you remember what book it was?”

“It was Ribsy, by Beverly Cleary. How could I have forgotten that until now? You made me love reading out loud so much that I always did it in my own classes, at every opportunity.”

I remembered the smile above all else as the lingering image faded from my view through the eyes of memory. She had a warm and loving smile. I can only hope my goofy grin didn’t scare too many kids throughout my career.

I needed a post for 1000 Voices that was about reconnecting with someone. I could’ve used any number of real life examples from everything that has happened to me since poor health forced me to retire from teaching I could’ve written any number of things that would not make me feel all sad and goopy about retiring and would not make me cry at my keyboard again like I am doing now… like I did all through that silly novel I wrote… even during the funny parts. But I had to choose this. A debt had to be paid. I love you, Miss M… and I had to pay it forward.

Leave a comment

Filed under 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as compassion, ghosts, goofiness, humor, novel characters, novel writing, photo Paffooney, retirement, teaching

August 13, 2015 · 5:04 pm

A Low-Fat Essay With One Third Fewer Calories

Yesterday I posted a political satire in which I accused Rand Paul and Chris Christie of being the reincarnation of Laurel and Hardy. I may have also suggested that Republican Presidential candidates are mostly possessed by the spirits of old comedy teams who share the bully and the idiot style of comedy made famous by Stan and Ollie. That post had about 380 calories from empty carbohydrates and the saturated fat was off the charts. If I am to provide a healthy diet of low-quality purple paisley prose to those who ready my pretentiously faux-literary blog, then I need to alternate in some high-fiber, low calorie fare. After all, this is a place where people come to sample my ideas and my so-called humor. Any and all fat that they get from here goes straight to their head. It can clog the arteries of the thinking organ. So, let me offer something light and fibrous today.

Yesterday I finished the first-pass edit of my novel Snow Babies. I also got it sent to my editor at PDMI, Jessie Cornwell. Her edits caused serious pain and minor bleeding, but that is merely an indicator that she is very professional and does the job well. And on occasion, she makes me laugh. She identified and corrected my creepy fascination with the word “penis” and cut it out of my novel. I am sure you can imagine how painful something like that can be. But I deserved it. A writer has to be aware that there are quirks in his thinking that interfere with communicating ideas to the reader. And the nutritional value of the ideas and thinking in a book are not only what makes it worth reading, but worth writing in the first place.

It is a little odd to be working on a novel about a blizzard in Iowa in deep December when it is August in Texas and we are undergoing 100-degree plus weather during the yearly heat wave and drought. It is hard to imagine deadly cold and Christmas-wish thinking when you have to sit naked by the air conditioner and you still sweat out gallons. (Notice I did not use the word “penis” even once in this paragraph, Jessie.) (Oops! Okay, don’t count the parenthetic expression, please.)

But I love these characters.

Valerie Clarke, the main character, is an eleven-year-old girl trying to make her way in a cold world after the death of her father. She finds and latches onto a mysterious old hobo who goes by the name Catbird. The man wears a coat which is a crazy quilt of colorful patches. He carries around a dog-eared copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and quotes from it as if it is his Bible. She gives him a place to stay, with her and her grieving mother in the nick of time before the blizzard hits her little Iowa town. Valerie is based in part on my own daughter.

A bus gets stranded in the rural farming community and the bus contains four boys who are not only passengers, but runaway orphans escaping from the Illinois foster care system. The youngest boy is crippled.

So, I am for the moment only posting something light that you really don’t have to work too hard to consume. The main idea is simply that I have finished another step in the process of publishing my long-delayed novel. And hopefully this post isn’t needlessly fattening, like many of my posts are.

3 Comments

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as humor, novel characters, novel writing, Paffoonies, PDMI Publishing, Snow Babies, working with editors

August 10, 2015 · 2:13 pm

Timeline – Finale

So how do I end this little trilogy of timeline terror? I have to fit in the remaining novel projects that are related or at least partially done. And the unrelated ones too. I have way more in the Mickian bag of tricks than I will ever have the magic-using years to actually use. The thing about wizards is that, by the time they have accumulated all the knowledge, wisdom, and arcana that it takes to do the wizardry, they are already old and near to death. How much time is left for the actual magic? I have been living this weekend in fear of imminent stroke. But I believe the random brain pain has actually turned out to be sinus problems. So here are the projects that finish the timeline and are the projects least likely to get written and published.

Connected to Catch a Falling Star is its sequel, Stardusters and Space Lizards. This is a novel I have most recently been trying to finish. I am in the home stretch at 40,000 words. It is the story of the failed Earth invaders continuing their journey to another planet, an even worse place than Earth. Galtorr Prime is the planet of the humanoid lizard people. Their world is on the very brink of extinction by global warming, toxic politics, and war. The remnants of the Telleron aliens who tried to invade Earth and their Earther-human friends not only have to make a colony for themselves here, but have to save the planet itself as well. It is a cautionary-type science fiction tale in the same comedy-young-adult-novel genre as Catch a Falling Star. It also happens in the early 1990’s (intended to mean the time on Earth which is not relevant in any case).

The next novel is Monstro, a ghost story in which the Norwall Pirates have to take on the Lonely Ones, the spirit-echoes of the crazy people of the past in a haunted farm house that awakens to feed on the living. The story is more than half written, but is looking at a near total rewrite to make it conform better with comedy young adult fiction. It is set in the mid 1990’s, around 1995.

None of my Hometown Novels will go beyond the 20th Century. Monstro is ostensibly the last of the novels.

I am a science fiction writer as well, though. The first book I ever published, Aeroquest, is set more than three thousand years in the future, at a time when the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy (where Earth has its street address) is largely colonized and thoroughly inhabited. As the novel now stands (a sorry mishmash that no decent publisher would’ve ever printed) it is in need of a total re-write and make-over. It is a novel that I humorously say is about teachers in space… though I do realize that “humorously” has to be qualified as a big bald-faced lie.

So this is run-down in time order of all the stuff I want to do as an author. How much gets done in reality is anyone’s best guess. Who knows? I may live another twenty years and finish at least one novel every year.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, novel plans, Paffooney

Tagged as Aeroquest, artwork, goofiness, humor, novel characters, novel writing, Paffoonies, timeline

August 8, 2015 · 3:13 pm

Timeline

Editing my novel Snow Babies has led me to realize that I need to align the events and character progressions in all the related Home-Town Novels. So here is a feeble attempt to make sense of the wealth of crap that this whole project has generated.

The first novel in the series is called Superchicken.

This story is about a boy who comes to live in the small town of Norwall, Iowa and struggles to make friends and fit in with a close-knit and inter-related group of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. It contains the origin story of the Norwall Pirates, a boys’ gang and liars’ club who cause most of the chaos in the story. It is intended to be an Iowa-River version of Tom Sawyer, a picaresque novel where the main character uses his natural instincts to try and gain the recognition of the world that he exists and has worth as a person.

The second novel is not completed yet. It is a story called The Baby Werewolf. It is about the Norwall Pirates pursuing an encounter with a very unusual child shut away in the attic of an aging house by the harried adults in his life.

All of these stories are humor novels written for a Young Adult genre audience. This one, however, also introduces elements of the horror genre.

Three more unwritten novels exist between this set of Norwall stories and the next set which introduce a whole new group of Pirates. Of the original Pirate stories there is an encounter with immortal beings who are somehow more than human and include a villain who is secretly an un-dead Chinese wizard looking to kill and consume another immortal who has taken refuge in Norwall. This novel does not yet have a name. The working title is The Forever Boy. Another novel involving the Pirates is called Sweet Pickles. It takes up the story of a girl nicknamed Pickles who is desperate to be loved and joins the junior high football team to impress boys. The novel includes the sexual awakening of more than one member of the Pirates, and though it is half-written, it may never see publication. I am not a pornographic writer, but the issues of this book have become so explicit, that it would have to be gutted and rewritten completely to be acceptable to my chosen genre. A more likely story is Under Blue Glass, the story of the Pirates handling their teens and high school and the excitingly horrible prospects of leaving home.

The next set of Pirate novels cover the 1980’s. The Captain Came Calling is about the reformation of the Pirates with Mary Philips, the story-teller’s little sister, taking on the daunting task of leading the Pirates through a new decade. South Pacific island magic brings the cursed Captain Noah Dettbarn to a farm town about as far away in all of North America as you can get from any ocean. The captain is cursed with invisibility and has to get to the bottom of a terrible family secret to cure it. Meanwhile, another terrible secret is destroying the family of Valerie Clarke, the main character of the novel.

Snow Babies is actually the second novel of this group, although it is the second novel being published. I will talk more about it as the process goes along and it actually reaches a state of publication.

After that comes a group of unwritten novels that are nebulously plotted out. I am thinking I probably need to declare halftime on this post at 600 words and do the second half of this timeline tomorrow.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as colored pencil, cover mock-ups, editing novels, humor, making progress, novel characters, novel writing, Paffoonies

August 3, 2015 · 2:03 pm

Working on Snow Babies

I really don’t have to put very much into this blog since most of my 500 words are already taken up with novel editing. So I will just put in a few comments on this novel that has consumed me since 2012. It is called Snow Babies

because it is basically about lost children and a blizzard that threatens to take them away completely. Now, there are fantasy creatures in the story, child-like ghost-things that come in the teeth of the blizzard to take away the souls of those who die in the cold. But the title actually refers more to the child characters in the story, Valerie Clarke (as seen above) and the four runaways from the Trailways bus. It is a story of survival during a blizzard, and survival when you have lost the ones you love. It is also a story of quilts… patchwork quilts… of many colors and varieties all stitched together seemingly at random. Because that is what life is like. Random stuff. Stitched together…to make something beautiful that can save your life in the cold.

This novel was submitted in manuscript form to the Chanticleer Book Reviews novel writing contest for Young Adult fiction. The contest is called the Dante Rosetti Awards as seen in this logo. The book didn’t win, but of the many manuscripts submitted it made it all the way through to the final cut and was a finalist in the contest.

I am currently working with editor Jessie Cornwell of PDMI Publishing to get the book ready for print. I hope to have it published soon. Clay Gilbert, Managing Editor of PDMI LLC recently did a profile on me because of my upcoming book. Here is the link for that;

Portals and Pathways by Clay Gilbert

Let me leave you with a look at the frost spirits from my novel.

I hope you don’t feel hopelessly mooned by that, because there are worse things that Snow Babies can do than that.

1 Comment

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, Snow Babies

Tagged as humor, novel characters, novel writing, Paffoonies, publishing, revision, Snow Babies

July 30, 2015 · 3:25 pm

Updating Futzbatter and Foohbah Recipes

Having already written well over a thousand words today on a different writing project, I don’t really have to worry about length on this one. But it is intended to be a scrapbook piece anyway. Thing #1 is the completion of a mini-collection. I now have all three of the main Minions from the new Minions movie. From left to right are Kevin, Stuart, and Bob posing for their picture with their fully pose-able arms in the middle of Cardboard Castle. There are still many many many Minions left to collect, but the first three are the most important bit… I think.

I have now reached the climax of the plot in my Sci-fi novel Stardusters and Space Lizards. I am at that moment in the story when characters, even the most important main characters, may die. I know, in fact, because of the ending that already exists that some of the main characters will die. I am not entirely certain that I know which ones yet. The three I have portrayed here are (left to right again because I am an English speaker/reader and horribly addicted to the same-old same-old) George Jetson, Davalon, and Sizzahl the Lizard Girl. At least one of them has to die for the plot to work out. But which one? I am deeply in love with all three.

My experimental flower wagon has been producing blossoms, but only one at a time. Each one blooms, I take a picture of it, and then the hot Texas sun burns the poor thing to blazes, and I have to wait for the next one to appear.

And finally, I think I need to define the two Mock-Iowegian words in my title today. Mock-Iowegian (as I am sure you are bright enough to already realize) is a made-up language spoken by Iowan farm folks in Mickian fiction where the object is to capture their eccentricities and mock them ferociously because I love them. Futzbatter… noun, meaning things that are fudged or made up on the spur of the moment and mixed together into the overall plan (or impending disaster… depending on the situation). Foohbah… noun, meaning something you tell a fool and expect him to believe, as in a honking-big-fish story, and nobody else will contradict for fear the fool the speaker is trying pull a foohbah on is the hearer, and they don’t want to let on that the foohbah-teller laying the big, fat, hairy foohbah on the group is talking about them, and they are only feebly trying to stop him.

So, there you have it… almost 500 words in spite of myself.

Leave a comment

Filed under doll collecting, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as action figures, aliens, doll collecting, flowers, goofiness, humor, Minions, Mock-Iowegian, novel characters, novel writing, paffooney, photo Paffooney, updates