Tag Archives: novel writing

June 4, 2023 · 1:10 am

Writing in My Head

I am reposting this old post from 2015 because I am in the same situation of not being able to write 500 words today.

Okay, I am justifying and vilifying today because yesterday I didn’t write 500 words… the first time in 2015… not in my blog, not in my novels, not even counting text messages.   I had extenuating circumstances.  I went to a movie, Disney’s Inside Out which made me laugh and made me cry like any good Disney/Pixar movie always does.  Then I got a message that one of my children went into the hospital in Florida.  And I have been down and out with a bad back, so I missed the Florida trip all together… (the child is fine, by the way, thanks for asking that in your head while reading this).  But all of that stuff and nonsense is really just an excuse for a dastardly act of cowardice.  I didn’t write a full 500 words.  How dare I?   This writing thing has now become my sacred mission from God.  After all, I retired from the first sacred mission because poor health was God’s way of telling me, “MICKEY, IT IS TIME TO BE A WRITER.”  Really!  He talks to me in all capital letters just like that.

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And you have probably noticed already that I am doing stream-of-consciousness writing for today’s post, a useful form of pre-writing that is known for producing lots of garbage to go along with the gemstones-in-the-rough.  My mind is still boiling with emotional turmoil and upset and less-than-critical thinking…  The reasons for that are understandable… I am guessing. …  But I think the point is (if points are possible in this no-win game I am playing, and losing, called Old Age) that I am never really not writing.  I have two novels in rough drafting at the same time.  Both When the Captain Came Calling and Stardusters and Space Lizards are both on my task bar at this very moment.  I add new inspirations for the next canto every time a new light bulb clicks on over my little furry head.

20150216_152544 Happy Doodle
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So the ideas are already there for several pieces of writing that I simply have to sit down and knock out on the keyboard.  Potentially I have way more than a mere 500 words waiting to blossom and unfold like flowers into paragraphs of purple paisley prose.  (Since this is as close as a writer can come to showing how he actually thinks, I guess I have also answered a question that many who try to read my writing have been wondering about… I really do think in loopty-loops with streamers attached and a knot in the tail.)  Writing is not something I can ever be accused of not doing because writing and thinking are the same thing… the only difference between the 500 per day and the leventie-leven trillion in my head is your access to it in a form that is written down and edited (well, at least re-read for typos… I kinda like leaving the stuff and nonsense… and moldy bananas… in the final product because I can pass that particular form of goofiness off as humor).  (And, yes, it just helped me pass 500 for today.)

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May 19, 2023 · 1:16 am

The Joys of Editing Yourself

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I am now in the final phase of publishing The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  I am merely waiting for Amazon to object to whatever ridiculously minute formatting error I may still have going.  And I once again had to publish without benefit of a beta reader or an editor of any kind.  You learn things about yourself that you really don’t want to know.

What I have learned;

  • I can’t depend on my wife to be a beta reader and comment on my work.  She tried once and told me, “Your writing is like dog poop.  It is full of weird stuff, smells bad, and is impossible to get off your shoe once you step in it.”  To be honest, I ironed out that metaphor just a bit.  She was actually quibbling about my proofreading style and basically ignored all the content of the story.  That’s the way English teachers are about prose.
  • I can too easily fall into the habit of introducing characters on a fashion model runway.  The first time the character enters the narrative I tend to give a head to toe rundown of how they look, what they are wearing, and how they have done their hair.  I know better than that, but I still do it.
  • I… use… ellipsis… marks… toooo… much…!
  • My creative spellings tend to drive the spellchecker insane.  In this novel I had trouble over the spellings of blogwopping, interbwap, and dillywhacking.  To be fair two of those words are from the language of the Tellerons, a space-faring race of frog people who happen to ineptly invade the earth.  (Oh, and the other is a euphemism  used by young boys for something very private.  Don’t tell anybody about that one.)
  •  Time travel plots can be laboriously difficult to follow through mobius-strip-like  contortions of time, space, and history.
  • Sometimes my jokes are not funny.  Seriously… that can be a problem.
  • And my characters often act on weird impulses and do things for no rhyme or reason… or rhythm either for that matter… see what I mean about ellipsis marks?  Of course, one can always explain that that is exactly how people really are.  I myself never do that.  There is always a rhyme to be snatched from the ether in the very nick of time… randomly.
  • And at the end of the novel, when I am tying up the loose ends of the plot in a Gordian Knot, I have strings left over.  Maybe enough to knit a shirt with.  So I end up picking them up and starting another novel with them.
  • It is basically heck to be a divergent thinker.  You try to make a list of things, and by the time you get to number 9, you have forgotten what the list was about, and you even forgot to number things, so you have to go back to the first one and count.  Now what was I talking about?

Oh, yeah.  I edited the book all by myself.  And now it’s done.  Time to start a new novel and make all the same mistakes over again.

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April 14, 2023 · 1:46 am

Learning from Bad Writing

So, I just finished reading this book from my leftover pile of classroom reading books that represent my time as a public school reading teacher.

This is book six in the best-selling Charlie Bone series. I didn’t read the previous five books. I have a copy of book one somewhere, but this one is one I picked up for my reading fix last week.

Let me begin by saying, as an obvious Harry Potter imitation, it is a very inventive and enjoyable story.

I read the whole book even though I had difficulty with several things that I have come to recognize as glaring, reader-tripping problems.

Now, to be completely honest about my assessments, Jenny Nimmo, the author of the Charley Bone books, has an impressive resume. She has not only been an English teacher, but she worked for the BBC as well as an editor, director, and other creative endeavors. And her books, unlike mine, are best-seller enough to be picked up by Scholastic Books, a major publisher. She has undoubtedly made a lot more money with her books than I have with mine. And, I confess, I find the story entertaining.

But the story is guilty of writing sins that I am familiar with by having overcome them in my own writing.

Most noticeable is the lack of a sense of a focus character. It is done as a third-person omniscient narrative that goes in and out of different characters’ heads telling what they think and feel. It will go from Charlie Bone’s main-character-thoughts to his nemesis Dagbert Endless’s feelings to the thoughts of the dog that lives in the school and then veers into the bird that is actually Emma, one of Charlie’s female friends with special “gifts of magic” handed down from their common ancestor, the Red King. You end up, as a reader, trying to keep things separate in your awareness about too many characters with too many mental reveals to keep straight. And who all knows what about whom? In one scene a character seems to know already what another character said and did in a previous scene that the knowing character wasn’t present for and hasn’t been told about.

This focus problem is compounded by having too many characters with too little development in the current story. I get it that we are supposed to have met the characters in previous books in the series. But it has to have a more stand-alone quality about it to even work as a separate book. The writer has to keep in mind that readers won’t know everything about every character in previous books because they have either forgotten, or the author has only assumed they would know without being told.

And the scenes and chapters in this book are way too ranging and free-form. A scene that begins in the end of chapter two rambles across to the beginning of chapter three without really concluding and then morphs into another scene entirely when the narrative follows a single character from the conversation in one room into an encounter in the next room. There is a lack of chapter structure to rationalize why those words belong in that chapter rather than the next.

And numerous plot lines are just left hanging at the end of the book, seemingly forgotten rather than set up for the probable sequel. The book does not end with a sense that it is the final end of the saga.

So it is a book that both Hemingway and Dickens would’ve cringed to have written. Never-the-less, I did like this book. The old uncritical critic, you know. I would’ve neither finished reading it, nor written this essay about it if I didn’t find merit in the story. I learned things by reading it. Things to avoid, things to correct when I find them in my own stories, and things that make me go, “Hmmm… I’d like to try that myself.”

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April 6, 2023 · 1:41 am

Like Pulling Teeth from a Chicken

This is an old re-purposed post from 2016 to kill some time so that this blog doesn’t kill me.

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Life is hard here in the Kingdom of Paffoon where you labor hard at a labor of love and try to give birth to something eternal that ends up going nowhere… stacks of old writing litter my closets, and the prospects of being published grow dimmer and dimmer.  My book Snow Babies has a contract with a publisher, but, apparently they are not going to be able to publish it after all.  I am at the very least going to have to find another publisher for the rest of my books, both finished manuscripts and works in progress.

Blue and Mike in color (435x640)

I do intend to follow through and get published, though.  I can no longer teach, but I feel a powerful force pushing me towards the sheer precipice of authordom.  One way or another I am going to make it over the edge and plummet to the bottom of that cliff.  I am compelled by the need to tell stories, and I have a captive audience every school day no longer.

I used to tell my classes that doing impossible things was like trying to pull chicken teeth with pliers.  You know, impossible things like getting a book published or teaching a mostly Spanish-speaking student how to read in English…  every-day-sort-of impossible things.

“But, Mr. B, chickens don’t have teeth,” some bright-eyed student would say after realizing that “chicken” was the English word for “pollo”.

“Exactly!” I would say.  “That’s what makes it so challenging!”

And now I must put on my chicken-catching socks, find my tooth-pulling pliers, and get ready to make more novels happen.  After a brief bout of consternation and depression, I actually feel a bit better about the whole fiasco.  There are other publishers, and publishers seem to like my writing, even if they can’t publish it.  And I have waited two years to get Snow Babies published, all apparently for nothing.  It is time to stop wasting time.  And maybe to stop repeating repetitions too.

I would like to here note that I now have 21 books published, all but one of which is self-published on Amazon and fully under my control. My other book, the award-winning novel from I-Universe, Catch a Falling Star, continues to be little-purchased and less read, though I discovered they pay all my royalties to my wife’s bank account. That was unexpected. Chicken teeth where they can’t be reached by me.

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September 3, 2022 · 1:10 am

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (by Thomas Hardy)

9781411433267_p0_v1_s260x420I decided I wanted to be a novelist because of Charles Dickens.  I loved the way he told a story with vivid characters, rising and falling crises, and story arcs that arrive at a happily-ever-after, or a how-sad-but-sweet-the-world-is ultimate goal.  Sometimes he reached both destinations with the same story, like in David Copperfield or The Old Curiosity Shop.  I have wanted to write like that since I read The Old Curiosity Shop in 9th Grade.

Thomas Hardy has a lot in common with Chuck.  I mean, more than just being old Victorian coots.  Hardy knows the Wessex countryside, Blackmoor and Casterbridge with the depth and understanding that Dickens bestows on London.  Hardy can delineate a character as clearly and as keenly as Dickens, as shown by Diggory Venn, the Reddleman in Return of the Native, or Tess Durbyfield in the novel I am reading at the moment.  These characters present us with an archetypal image and weave a story around it that speaks to themes with soul-shaking depth.  Whereas Dickens will amuse and make us laugh at the antics of the Artful Dodger or Mr. Dick or Jerry Cruncher from a Tale of Two Cities, Hardy makes us feel the ache and the sadness of love wrecked by conflict with the corrupt and selfish modern world.  Today I read a gem of a scene with the three milkmaids, Izz, Retty, and Marian looking longingly out the window at the young gentleman Angel Clare.  Each wants the young man to notice her and fall in love with her.  Sad-faced Izz is a dark-haired and brooding personality.  Round-faced Marian is more jolly and happy-go-lucky.  Young Retty is entirely bound up by shyness and the uncertainty of youth.  Yet each admits to her crush and secret hopes.  Tess, meanwhile, overhears all of it, all the time knowing that Angel is falling in love with her.  And worse yet, she has sworn to herself never to let another man fall in love with her because of the shameful way Alec D’Urberville took advantage of her, a quaint old phrase that in our time would mean date rape.  There is such bittersweet nectar to be had in the characterizations and plots of these old Victorian novels.  They are more than a hundred years old, and thus, not easy to read, but worth every grain of effort you sprinkle upon it.  I am determined now to finish rereading Tess of the Durbervilles, and further determined to learn from it, even if it kills me.

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June 10, 2022 · 5:06 pm

Terry Pratchett, the Grand Wizard of Discworld

image borrowed from TVtropes.com

image borrowed from TVtropes.com

I firmly believe that I would never have succeeded as a teacher and never gotten my resolve wrapped around the whole nonsense package of being a published author if I hadn’t picked up a copy of Mort, the first Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett that I ever encountered.  I started reading the book as a veteran dungeon-master at D&D role-playing games and also as a novice teacher having a world of difficulty trying to swim up the waterfalls of Texas education fast enough to avoid the jagged rocks of failure at the bottom.  I was drinking ice tea when I started reading it.  More of that iced tea shot out my nose while reading and laughing than went down my gullet.  I almost put myself in the hospital with goofy guffaws over Death’s apprentice and his comic adventures on a flat world riding through space and time on the backs of four gigantic elephants standing on the back of a gigantic-er turtle swimming through the stars.  Now, I know you have no earthly idea what this paragraph even means, unless you read Terry Pratchett.  And believe me, if you don’t, you have to start.  If you don’t die laughing, you will have discovered what may well be the best humorist to ever put quill pen to scroll and write.  And if you do die laughing, well, there are worse ways to go, believe me.

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Discworld novels are fantasy-satire that make fun of Tolkien and Conan the Barbarian (written by Robert E. Howard, not the barbarian himself) and the whole world of elves and dwarves and heroes and dragons and such.  You don’t even have to love fantasy to like this stuff.  It skewers fantasy with spears of ridiculousness (a fourth level spell from the Dungeons of Comedic Magic for those fellow dungeon masters out there who obsessively keep track of such things).  The humor bleeds over into the realms of high finance, education, theater, English and American politics, and the world as we know it (but failed to see from this angle before… a stand-on-your-head-and-balance-over-a-pit-of-man-eating-goldfish sort of angle).

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Terry Pratchett’s many wonderful books helped me to love what is ugly, because ugly is funny, and if you love something funny for long enough, you understand that there is a place in the world even for goblins and trolls and ogres.  Believe me, that was a critical lesson for a teacher of seventh graders to learn.  I became quite fond of a number of twelve and thirteen year old goblins and trolls because I was able see through the funny parts of their inherent ugliness to the hidden beauty that lies within (yes, I know that sounds like I am still talking about yesterday’s post, but that’s because I am… I never stop blithering about that sort of blather when it comes to the value hidden inside kids).

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I have made it a personal goal to read every book ever written by Terry Pratchett.  And that goal is now within reach because even though he is an incredibly prolific writer, he has passed on within the last year.  He now only has one novel left that hasn’t reached bookstores.  Soon I will only need to read a dozen more of his books to finish his entire catalog of published works.  And I am confident I will learn more lessons about life and love and laughter by reading what is left, and re-reading some of the books in my treasured Terry Pratchett paperback collection.  Talk about your dog-eared tomes of magical mirth-making lore!  I know I will never be the writer he was.  But I can imitate and praise him and maybe extend the wonderful work that he did in life.  This word-wizard is definitely worth any amount of work to acquire and internalize.  Don’t take my convoluted word for it.  Try it yourself.

borrowed from artistsUK.com

borrowed from artistsUK.com

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April 4, 2022 · 3:42 pm

Spacey Stories

Buster 3

I am usually considered a Sci-fi and Fantasy author when anybody tries to categorize me.  I learned to write during the 70’s when Tolkien and Michael Moorcock and Frank Herbert were growing bigger, and Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov were gods.  Of course, I also have the YA-thing hanging around my neck like a bell.  I learned to tell stories being a dungeon master for middle-school and high-school boys back in the eighties.  And because it was Texas with a deeply-held and violently-enforced religious fear of anything with demons in it, I was forced to change my role-playing games from sword and sorcery to science-fiction.  I played endless Saturday-afternoon Traveller games that could span parsecs and light-years in a single afternoon.  And I was one of those game-masters who used humor to build a campaign and keep the players engaged and interested.  We had epic space battles and conquered large swaths of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy.  When I began turning my Traveller games into fiction, I used the personalities of the boys who played the game with me for characters in the stories.  I often used the same plots (applying considerable polish to portions of plot where… well, you know… teenage boys, not remarkably G-rated.)  I created things that made me and some of the players laugh, and even feel sad… with deep, cathartic effects, as if we had experienced those things in real life.  (The deaths of favorite characters and tragic failures of galaxy-saving plans come quickly to mind.)

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I enjoy practically everything Sci-Fi, from Flash Gordon, to Buck Rodgers,  to Star Trek and Star Wars…  I loved Mechwarrior books and comic-book Sci-Fi like Adam Strange, Hawkworld, and Guardians of the Galaxy (the old ones that came before Groot and Rocket Raccoon).  I let it warp and weave my imagination and the imaginary worlds that blossomed from it.
And the ideas continued to morph and change and become stories that I really had to tell.

Phoenix1My first published novel, Aeroquest is a compilation of old Traveller adventures.  I published it well before it was ready for market and used a cheap-o publisher that wasn’t worth the free price-tag,  They gave me no editorial help and apparently didn’t even read the novel.  I will not defame them by name here, but if they sound to you like Publish America… well, there might be a reason.

I love stories about time travel and sci-fi gadgets…  trans-mats and starships and meson cannons and sentient plants… oh, my!

And now that I have revealed that I have such a massive nerd-head that I really ought to own Comicon by now, I hope you will not suddenly turn me off and read my blog no more.  I can’t help it.  I was born that way… and any child doomed to be born in the 50’s and a child in the space-race 60’s was bound to have George-Lucas levels of Sci-Fi nerdism.

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January 2, 2022 · 6:11 pm

Picture Tricks

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I have discovered things about being an artist by blogging.  I have discovered things by learning from other artists.  I have also discovered things by trial and error.  I have also discovered things by random acts of God.  So let me share some of the ill-gotten picture secrets that I have added to my vast bag of useless incunabula-juice squeezed out with my arcane-secret juicer and internet blogger good luck.

#1.  Save everything arty… as you see above, I have three different pictures of my Catch a Falling Star character Dorin Dobbs, all made from the same pen and ink line drawing.  All the color is digital paint from my computer’s own paint program.  Simple and cheap to do.  Save functions multiply the pretty.

#2.  Splice stuff together and make new stuff…  I have the cheapest possible photo-shop program, but using its entire $7 value every time I paste with it, I am able to create new art out of old.

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New art out of old;

Val at the barn Val B2 tree time banner

#3.  Weave things together to create unity…  My art is not for its own sake.  I am not Picasso or Van Gogh.  My art is very much tied to the stories I tell as a writer of Young Adult novels.  (Snow Babies is awaiting its turn with the editors of PDMI LLC Publishers.)

#4.  Promote the art and writing of others…  I have spent a ridiculous amount of internet time stalking artists like Loish and sharing their work on my blog.  Writers too.  I do my little book reports in order to connect the reading and the literary influences I have completed (or stolen from) and show where much of my own style and je nais se quois comes from.  If the artist or writer is still living and notices what I have done, they will often return the favor (hopefully, if they don’t find my work to be an offense against the gods of art).  If they can’t return the favor (because they are quite dead or thoroughly disgusted by me), I have at least associated my work with theirs in the minds of my readers,

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#5.  It’s all about digital photography…  In order to share my colored-pencil menagerie of live Paffoonies on the internet, I have to get better at photography.  I have taken far more photos of drawings in the last two years than I have drawn drawings.  That has not been a life-long way of things.  I love color, and poor photography skills turn out various shades of gray.  Sunlight?  Incandescent?  Fluorescent?   I haven’t discovered that secret yet, but it will never be uncovered if I don;t keep trying.

#5. Find connections that help pull your work together in one big, messy bundle…  Facebook, WordPress, and Deviant-Art are all better forums if you can connect them.  I did this by labeling everything Mickey with a meaningless made-up word that no one else in their right mind would use.   The word is Paffooney.

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A picture search on Google using the words “Beyer Paffooney” gives you an almost complete gallery of my artwork and nonsense.  Googling the word itself yields a link to a plethora of my old blogs.  Do you not know what plethora means?  Try it and you will learn that very good word.

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October 16, 2019 · 4:03 pm

Creating Another Cover

As I continue working on my work-in-progress, I get ideas for how I am going to make a cover for it. I have kicked around ideas and even tried executing a few of them. And when I say that, it doesn’t mean I literally kicked anything or shot anything in the head. I did drawings and thought seriously about how to put them together.

Remember this one? I drew this because my current novel has two people in it that claim they are actually dragons in human disguises.

One of those people is the girl Fiona Long, who goes by Fi most of the time. She is an aggressive red-headed girl who makes the boys cringe on occasion. She tells them her real name is Firefang, and she’s a red dragon wearing a human meat-disguise. Of course, the boys in Norwall, Iowa immediately believe her, because dragons are so common in Iowa.

So, I took these two image-ideas and slapped them together.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the story happens in 1976, the Bi-Centennial year, and the story climax happens during the 4th of July celebration.

I wasn’t really happy with how this first one looked, so I tried a second shot at putting them together in a slightly different manner.

Of course, the novel is not yet done. It is maybe only half done. So, for that reason, the cover does not have to be done also. And it does bother me a little that the title is The Boy… Forever, and yet, I have a picture of a girl and a dragon on the cover. Maybe Icarus needs to be in the picture too. Icarus Jones is the boy from the title. So, I need to work on that, and maybe redo the whole cover. We shall see. And that will make a possible future blog post too.

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October 15, 2019 · 2:01 pm

AeroQuest 2… Canto 39

Canto 39 – Slinking Out of Paradise

Gaijin is one of the most beautiful worlds in human space according to those humans who have visited enough of them to compare.  Its lush, tropical-sea environment is pleasant always and fully climate-controlled by old Sylvani technology.  It has far fewer cold places than an Earth-like world such as Talos III or Martin Faulkner’s Dream.  It has more resources than an ocean-world like Dancer or Design where no land masses are present.  And its greatest features are the people themselves.  They are disciplined by the Bushido code, and beautified by the natural Sylvani grace.  It was no surprise, then, that Vince Niell and the crew of the Megadeath did not want to leave.

“I have to go to at least three other worlds,” argued Xavier Tkriashav.  “I have important missions to complete.  You have the only available spaceship on the planet.”

“Dude, like, we don’t got no orders from Ged boss-man,” said Vince Niell.  “This ship is his.”

“Ged is very busy now.  I am his friend and agent.  I tell you, I have important things to do for Ged Aero!”

“And we tell you, Psion Dude, that we don’t go to space for nobody but Ged Aero.”

Xavier smiled.  “Can you call him and ask?”

“Dude, we have commo units on board.  Did he take a walkie-talkie or a commo dot?”

“No.”

“Then ain’t no way we’re gonna move from this spot.”

Tkriashav looked at the stubborn rock-and-roll starship pilot.  He saw only two angry reflections of himself looking back from Vince’s mirrored sunglasses.  The hippie freak had started wearing a pair of red Moko-bird feathers in his hair as if he were some kind of Native American from ancient Earth.

“I am going to go and disturb Ged now, and get him to write a note to let me use this starship while he is training to be Gaijin’s new White Spider.”

“Sounds good to me, Daddy-o.”

Fuming, the turbaned Psion stalked back into the city, making his way swiftly through crowded streets to the Palace of One Thousand Years.

Ged was on the practice field with Junior, teaching martial arts.

“You were impressive in the arena,” Tkriashav said when Ged acknowledged his presence.  “Tell me, how is it you already know the martial arts they teach here?”

“It’s not something I’m proud of, but I absorbed it by eating the flesh of the man they called the Black Spider.  I inherited the ability to alter myself into the patterns of his finely trained muscles.  Muscle memory is the key to absorbing the skill.  Just like the instincts I’ve absorbed from animals I’ve eaten.”

“Did you actually eat one of those invisible cat things?”

“It was during an episode of survival training on the planet Samothrace when I was young.  I guess I had my powers even then, though I didn’t know it until the last few years.”

“It’s that kind of knowledge I need you to pass on to other Psions, Ged.  Do you mind if I use your starship to round up a couple of students for you?”

“I would be honored to serve,” said Ged with a bow.  “Teaching seems to come naturally too, though I don’t ever remember eating a teacher.”

Xavier laughed.  “I need a note for your crew, Ged.  They don’t want to leave this place.  They won’t take my word.”

“No problem.  Will you revisit Don’t Go Here?”

“Yes.  After completing the missions I have in mind.”

“Check on Tara for me.  Tell her I miss her.  And tell Ham about what’s happened here.  I want him to come here and learn about this place too.”

“I would be happy to.  You like it here, don’t you?”

“How could I help it?  I’m not a monster here.  I’m a hero to these people.  But I have to say, I don’t understand the praise any more than I understood the fear.” The message was quickly written, and within the hour, the Megadeath roared out of Gaijinese orbit, headed directly into trouble.

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