Tag Archives: novel writing

August 10, 2015 · 2:13 pm

Timeline – Finale

MickeyX22

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.

Galtorr Primexvx

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.

Aeroquest baby ninjas

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.

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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.

superchick_novelThis 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.

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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.

anita n supe_nThree 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.

Voodoo Val cover

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.

tree time banner

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.

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August 5, 2015 · 1:46 pm

Mickey’s Blue Summer

The SuckerOkay, this is not going like I had hoped.  Medical bills are overwhelming.  Impacted molars are going to cost my family over three thousand dollars when we still can’t afford bills of bigger than 50.  And I got word today that I did not win in the Chanticleer Book Reviews novel-writing contest.  I was beaten out for the prize by Elisabeth Hamill’s book Song Magick.

I am bummed out.  It is not that I expected to win that contest, but Magical Miss Morgan is a better book than Snow Babies, and that one at least made the list of finalists.  I seem to be getting further away from the goal.  If I placed, or got a prize in that contest, I would at least get the attention of literary agents and big publishers.  Perhaps it is God’s wish that I remain an unknown novelist who makes no money at writing.  It is consistent with His divine sense of humor.  The angels get a good laugh whenever I fall on my figurative face for wishing too hard for money and success.  God wants people to be happy being poor.  Right?  That’s what Republican politicians in Texas keep saying.

But if I keep playing the same sweet-sad songs and singing in the lonely darkness… at least I can make a melody or two that lifts the souls of my fellow dwellers in the dark.

MaxP

But, wait a minute… something is not right here!  Why are the winners the same ones they told me about a couple of months ago?  Ms. Hamill’s book is also listed on this… 2014 list?  Did I jump the gun?  Look at this list for me; Dante Rossetti Awards

Am I wrong, or does that say these are the 2014 winners?  There’s the due date by which I sent in my novel for the NEXT COMPETITION in 2015!  That means I won’t actually hear about my novel until next summer!  Hang dang it!  Both bad news and good news in one fell swoop. So, I am not out of the running yet.  Perhaps there is time to do more and be more and write more after all!

Francois spotlight

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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 Val at the barn

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.

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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.

7snowbabiesAI hope you don’t feel hopelessly mooned by that, because there are worse things that Snow Babies can do than that.

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August 2, 2015 · 2:28 pm

Being Old Enough to Know Better…

I am the man from the Setting Sun,

Come to the future to deliver the past.

What does that even mean, that silly little two-line poem I wrote twenty years ago?  Am I not old enough to know better than to create a snippet loaded with goofy contradictions?  Apparently not.  But I am old enough to deliver the past.  I have been around long enough that I remember when President Kennedy was assassinated.  I saw Neil Armstrong take that “small step for man” on the surface of the moon.  I have learned a number of lessons from the past.  And as a writer, I can deliver those lessons in the form of stories.  I was born in a different century.  I have been around for more than half of one… approaching two thirds.  I have collected all kinds of wonderful things in my goofy old brain.  And make no doubt about it, with six incurable diseases and being a cancer survivor since 1983, my Sun is about the set.  So, I have a mission, to open the eyes of people who are too foolish to avoid listening to what I have to say, or to read what I have written.

I saw The Sound of Music starring Julie Andrews in the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa in 1965 when I was not yet ten years old.  I heard the song My Favorite Things for the very first time on the old black and white Motorola TV set in the clip I posted at the start of this post.  Kukla, Fran, and Ollie was a puppet show I never missed on Saturdays if I could help it.  In a world before video games and computers and even color TV, kids still had priorities.  And my world was definitely a world of imagination.

Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Moose

Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Moose

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, and then as Daniel Boone

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, and then as Daniel Boone

Paul Winchell with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff

Paul Winchell with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff

So, what kind of knucklehead must I be to think younger folks would want to know about any of this stuff from the time of dinosaurs and black-and-white TV?  I write books that are basically genre-breakers and about way too many different things to make sense to adults.  As a result, I classify myself as a Young Adult novelist, a writer for children… but not the beginning reader kind, or the early chapter-book kind… the kind like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Light in the Forest, or Dicey’s Song.  I write books about what it was like to be a kid in the past… the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s… last century.  And I have some knowledge and expertise in this area because I was one of those teachers during that time period that got to know the kids in my classes.  I made the horrifying mistake of actually talking to kids, asking them about their lives, and listening to their answers.  I talked about all manner of things with all manner of kids… brilliant things and stupid things… with dumb kids, smart kids, smelly kids, charming kids, and the kids everybody else hated.  You know… I did all the stupid mistakes that teachers who have no earthly idea how to do discipline would do, and got those kids to learn to behave at least halfway like human beings by being somebody they trusted and respected and… on rare occasions… believed.  Right now I am working on Snow Babies.  It is set in 1984.  And I hope to be good enough of a Sunset Man to be able to deliver it to the future.

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July 30, 2015 · 3:25 pm

Updating Futzbatter and Foohbah Recipes

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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.

Galtorr Primexvx

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.

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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.

20150706_143002

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.

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July 18, 2015 · 3:53 pm

My Own Minions

You know by now, if you have been reading my posts and not just looking at the pictures, that I am a doll… er, action figure… er, toy collector with a raging case of hoarding disorder.  So, after finishing the My Little Pony/ Equestria Girl collection, I went on to work on a Monster High collection.  I still need at least Draculaura to complete that set.  But I stumbled into Minions.  I couldn’t resist.  “Oh toot jour, Pappagaina!” Stuart said from the shelf.  So I had to buy him.

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You know how dangerous it is to have Minions.  Just look in the background at what happened to the Red Baron when I bought Stuart.  Minions can have a bad effect, as well as a funny effect, on the outcome of an evil genius’ evil plots for doing evil-ness.  So I started thinking of the dangers.  The Minions only cost $8.85 apiece… but of the three main movie Minions, Stuart, Kevin, and Bob… there were already at least three different versions of each.  Besides the “bored silly” set, there was a pirate set and a beachwear set.  And what if they start issuing all the other minions?  You know, Dave and Charlie and all the boys?   I could be financially doomed by my need to collect.

And what am I investing in?  Here is a close-up of Stuart after taking him out of his mint-in-box to play with him, posing in the cardboard castle atop Mount Blue Blankie where I have built my secret evil genius’ lair.  Please don’t tell any would-be heroes or rival despicable villains that my lair is located in my bedroom.

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And it turns out that Stuart is fully pose-able.   That is going to be even harder to resist.  Let me prove he is pose-able.

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And after I made the horrific mistake of buying fully pose-able Stuart, I discovered he was not my only Minion.  I also found out today that my novel Snow Babies has been assigned to an editor finally.  Jessie Cornwell of PDMI LLC was assigned to edit my novel back on June 28th.  Of course, I didn’t know about it until today because the email informing me went straight to the spam folder in typical Minion fashion.  So now I feel fully ready to face the evil world and try to steal the moon, while actually accomplishing something completely different that I don’t expect.   That’s what having Minions means.

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July 10, 2015 · 3:36 pm

Bits and Pieces

Having written 1000 words again for no apparently good reason yesterday, I figure I am entitled to a shorter, pithier, sissier, saucier, sillier post today (the kind where I use long strings of adjectives in order to fill up the paper… a trick learned from little darlings in English class that figured I would be happy with a page full of words, and that it didn’t matter if it made the least bit of sense).  Writing is, after all, piecing together the puzzle that is my noisy noodle, full of imaginings, weird images, and all sorts of listy-type things that I could list here to fill up more space if I weren’t so danged lazy today.  I found a good article about being a writer while my noodle was simmering and trying to cook up today’s post.  It gives insight into the tumultuous brain-scape that I am struggling with at the moment because I am (sadly) a writer.

Here’s the article from AuthorsPublish

I am trying to noodle out a cartoon that I am trying to compose from a rough draft that has more holes in it than Swiss cheese has bad smells.  I suppose you could call that cartoonoodling (but would never actually call it that because you’re not as dippy as I am).  The drawings of that composition come first.  So, here, at least, they are!

20150710_143309 20150710_143339_000I know you can’t possibly know what sort of sense to make out of these because I haven’t put the words and dialogue balloons into these pen and ink and red drawings.  (Remember, Clown Noire is a new cartoon genre I am trying to develop like black-and-white Film Noire movies, only in black-white-and-red pen-and-ink cartoons.)  So, foolishness aside, these are only raw work-in-progress Paffoonies.  Or maybe not foolishness aside, since foolishness tends to be the whole point.

I am also trying to advance through the struggles of two novels at once.  I am still trying to progress through the middle of Stardusters and Space Lizards, where I have to bring the totally evil villain, Senator Tedhkruhz the lizard-man (no relation to the real life Senator I am obviously trying to make fun of), together with his well-deserved comeuppance.   I know how the novel ends, but not how the middle-middle and the later-middle connect to that end.  Senator Tedhkruzh

And I am trying to finish the beginning of the novel When the Captain Came Calling.  I have to come up with a way for the evil mermaid that sinks the Captain’s ship to reach that condition of being righteously indignant about the wrong done to her enough for her to use her fishy mermaid powers to swamp and wreck the ship.

Voodoo Val cover

But rather than bore you with the details of my inner swordfights with the weapons master of the Pirate crew that runs my brain when I’m writing, I will leave it here… after all, I promised I was going to write less words today, and I am already at 494.

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June 23, 2015 · 3:26 pm

Writing in My Head

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.

girl n bird

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
swallowtail

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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June 12, 2015 · 3:30 pm

Sent to My Room and Sulking

Well, my family is packed up in the RV and headed to Florida, looking for beaches and fun, and going to see my eldest son graduate from his Marine MOS schooling.  I would’ve gone too, but my lungs have been very naughty and I can’t get that far away from doctors that my pirate health insurance will actually pay for.  So, I am stuck in my room.  It sucks (in the sense of a vacuum cleaner, because as a former middle school teacher, I am not allowed to even think about a less G-rated meaning; my teacher brain would blow a bad-word filter-gasket).  My family members, of course, are concerned about leaving me here alone, but I don’t want one of my six incurable diseases to be victorious over any of them.  It is enough that COPD can ruin my life, and it does not need to impact them.  Besides, I have the consolation of staying in my room with the carefully conditioned and filtered air and playing with my toys, like the old days when I was a kid (the really old, old days!) and got to stay home with Captain Kangaroo and my toys to play all day, even though I felt like regurgitated dodo-bird food… and I have a lot more toys now than I had then.

My Red Bedroom Studio

You can plainly see in the picture of my bedroom studio that I have stuffed animals all over (left over from my 2007-2008 online store days when I sold repaired and reconditioned stuffed animals from Goodwill), plenty of dolls… erm, action figures, a cardboard castle, a DVD player, laptop computer, books galore, and lots and lots of drawing paper.  I am prepared to be home-bound and left out of things.  I can draw and write stories and blog and draw some more.  And I will, too.  Besides sulking about having to miss out on the fun the rest of the family is having, something I am not only good at and thoroughly practiced at, but very efficient at producing words and ideas at the same time I am hurting, or woozing, or gasping for air, I intend to advance at least two of the three novels I am working on rough drafts for at this time.  I am working on When the Captain Came Calling, and Star-Dusters and Lizard-Men.  The first is about learning to see through lies, an invisible man who comes back to Iowa from a cursed voyage in the South Seas, and how a family deals with unthinkable loss.  The second is a star-faring science fiction tale of a planet dying of both pollution and corporate abuse that can be saved if the species of intelligent lizard-men living there are actually worthy of being saved.  So while I sulk and pout and feel sorry for myself, I have plenty to do.  And I will continue to make light of the situation even after it kills me.  Death won’t know what he did wrong to get hold of an ornery old Iowegian-Texas transplant like me who will laugh in his face until the old Bonehead is properly and resolutely perplexed.

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