Tag Archives: novel writing

January 26, 2015 · 3:13 pm

Galtorr Prime

Galtorr Prime

Here is the world where Stardusters and Lizardmen is set.  It is the environmental nightmare known as the planet Galtorr Prime.  It is the world where Sizzahl was born and where young George Jetson, the Telleron cadet from Xiar’s exploration command has to find a new place to colonize.  I should explain that of the characters from this novel excerpt, George Jetson, Davalon, Brekka, Menolly, and Tanith are Telleron tadpoles, or children.  Alden and Gracie Morrell are a middle-aged farm couple from Iowas that were turned back into children in a previous adventure.  Let me share with you a Canto from this work in progress….

Canto Ten – Aboard Golden Wing Sixteen Near an Abandoned Space Station

Looking for interesting places to explore, the tadpole crew of Wing Sixteen spotted the abandoned orbital station before sensors could detect it.  The sensors were set to find life-forms, lizard men in particular, and the instruments all said that none existed on the space platform.  In fact, it was apparently devoid of all life but a few plants.

“Can you dock with that thing?” Tanith asked George Jetson.

“Of course I can.   I am programmed to be the best wing pilot you have ever seen.”

“And you are programmed to be the most modest Telleron we have ever seen too,” said Brekka.

“Or maybe the one with the biggest gonopodium and the smallest brain,” said Menolly.

George just laughed as he focused his instruments on the docking bay.

“What’s a gonopodium?” Alden asked Davalon.

“Father, you would call it a penis,” said Davalon.

“Oh.”  Alden’s forty-year-old sense of propriety turned his twelve-year-old face a bright crimson red.

“Why do you suppose there are no personnel on that station,” Tanith asked everyone in general.

“Maybe there is something wrong with it,” suggested Gracie Morrell.  “Maybe they had to abandon ship.”

“Maybe,” said Davalon, looking carefully at the sensor monitor.  “But I don’t see anything wrong with the on-board systems.  They are all operating like they work perfectly.  That station has air we can breathe, water we can drink, and no alarms are going off anywhere.  It’s as if they abandoned a perfectly good station.”

“Well,” said George Jetson, “we can find the answer by going in and taking a look around.”  He said that just as he pulled a control lever that thrust the wing forward to meet the docking ring and impacted the station so hard that everyone on board was knocked senseless.

“George!  What did you just do?” Davalon asked from his new position prostrate on the floor of the control pit.

“Um, I meant to dock with the docking port, but it appears I may have embedded the wing in the side of the space station.”

“Oh, this can’t be good,” moaned Tanith, rubbing the greenish-brown knobby bruise that now blossomed on her pretty forehead.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 25, 2015 · 7:13 pm

Sizzahl

Sizzahl2

My writing time of late has been mostly absorbed by a Sci-fi novel, Stardusters and Lizardmen, a sequel to my novel about aliens invading Iowa, Catch a Falling Star.  It is not set on Earth.  It is a post-apocalyptic story about an Earth-like world and a civilization of lizardmen that have destroyed themselves by abusing their environment, wallowing in greedy politics, and fighting biologically manipulated war.

The Tellerons, who have failed to invade Earth, accidentally end up at the lizardmen’s planet and have to find a home, though they would rather find it anywhere else in the universe if they had a choice.

If the visitors from outer space, both Telleron and Earthmen are going to survive, their best hope is the character featured in the Paffooney.  Her name is Sizzahl.  She is very unusual in many ways.   She is a little-girl genius who is the only Galtorrian lizard-person on the whole planet who doesn’t eat meat.  She also is a scientist studying ecology and genetics, hoping to bring her people back from the brink of extinction.  I like this character, and she is the reason that I have decided to follow this novel project through to the end.  I hope you like her too, even though she’s a dedicated nudist and hippie-style back-to-nature commie freak.

Leave a comment

Filed under aliens, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , ,

January 16, 2015 · 2:28 am

Paffooney Updates #2 – Following the Plan

Val in color 2

Okay, you should begin to see now that I am actually capable of finishing a project step by step.  Take no note of the fact that I have done a number of creative and wacky things in a scheduled order that looks like I put my to-do list in the mixing bowl and beat it to pieces with a wire Whisk.  (It is tricky to type this now, because my “o” key is giving out and I have to either punch it repeatedly, chews tu intentiunally misspell werds, or use verbiage sans that particular letter.)

I have been working on my novel projects at the same time as I have been coloring this beauty.  One would assume that it was the novel When The Captain Came Calling (Thank Gawd that title has no letter “O’s” in it), but naturally, it is naught.  I have been putting way more wit and words into my Sci-fi novel, Star Dusters and Lizard People, a sequel to Catch a Falling Star.  The Telleron crew of Xiar’s base ship have reached the planet Galtorr Prime, in the Delta Pavonis star system, and they are beginning to explore and find out what a miserable world it is.

I also added about half a chapter to the Captain novel, but I am still introducing the little people and the Pirates.  I have not even gotten to the sinister cloaked figure lurking in the shadows.  (This book is actually a re-write, so I am not creating from thin air like I am with the Stardusters.)  

I also spent time drawing a portrait of Sizzahl, a new character for Stardusters.  She is a little girl who is a biogeneticist and a genius who also happens to be a lizard person.  I will show you and tell  you more about her in an upcoming post.

So, I drew this project in a step by step order that was really more of a step here, then back-track over there for a bit, then do another small step, then go over here sort of order.  I can’t help it.  I am what educators call a “non-linear” thinker… also known as right-brained, global thinker, or total creative nut-job.

So, since I am not following a straight path anyway, let me finish this post by plugging a friend’s book.   My friend Stuart R. West is a blogger and novelist from Kansas.  His humorous blog is called Twisted Tales from Tornado Alley and can be found here http://stuartrwest.blogspot.com/.  I am recommending his new book that can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com.  I haven’t read it yet, but the book is called The Secret Society of Like-Minded Individuals : Book I

I honestly think you will like it.  If you can stand or understand my writing, you will find Stuart to unnamedbe very much the same kind of wacko bird.  I have to admit though, he does scary way better than me.  He knows his way around a thriller.  (And thank Gawd his name is not Stooart.  Dang “o” key!)

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 15, 2015 · 1:20 pm

Paffooney Updates #1

Val in Progress

The work on this latest Paffooney is coming along nicely.  I confessed to mess-ups yesterday.  Today I can show you real progress without further oopsies.  The figure of Valerie Clarke is the most important part of both this illustration and my novel project.  She is the single focus-character in When The Captain Came Calling.  I usually vary the focus character from scene to scene in my fiction, because I have a pathological need to play around inside the heads of multiple characters.  This book will be the first one I’ve written to stay inside the same head through the entire novel.   The story, assuming it doesn’t totally take on a life of its own and change itself, is about how a young girl sees and evaluates the people in her life… Mom, Dad, the boy she has a crush on, the girlfriend of that boy, the goofy members of the Norwall Pirates (a 4-H softball team and liars’ club dedicated to adventure, story-telling, and being a kid while you can), weird people who live in tiny Iowa farm towns, and mysterious strangers who can somehow be invisible.  It is about friendship, love, sex, and growing up.  It is also about overly-protective parents and a world full of dark magic and mysterious dangers.  I am trying to capture that in my Paffooney, to hopefully make it into a possible cover illustration.  I intend to show you in this blog each stage in the completion of the project… the making of colored-pencil Paffoonery.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 14, 2015 · 5:55 pm

Work in Progress

Val inked up

Here is the straight poop.  (Wait a minute!  Not poop metaphors again!)  Okay, better idiomatic expression… Here is the truthful statement about work habits.  (Better!  But that was idiomatic not idiotic, right?)  Right.

Sometimes I mess up.  I am working slowly and steadily on the next story burning to be told, When the Captain Came Calling.  In the illustration I am working on, you can probably see the mess-ups already.  I very carefully blot my black ink pens when I am doing the pen and ink work.  Even ball point pens can blot.  I will admit I press entirely too hard on both ink pens and colored pencils.  I break a lot of colored lead and make a lot of black pens bleed.  I have arthritis in my hands and often push too hard because I am pushing back against the pain.  I can sometimes use a lighter touch with the colored pencil, the area being covered may require a more lightly penciled mark and have more paper whiteness showing through.  Black pen lines are never like that.  To get a steady, even line, I push with pressure to get things dark and full and even.  The pen that I was using had developed a leaky ball and had to be blotted with every use.  When it made the first smear, I changed to a new pen.  I cussed a little too.  (Cussing makes it better.  I learned that from Mark Twain.)  But I didn’t panic and throw the drawing out.  I can fix it up a bit when I add the color.  But the second pen I was using was a pen I switched out earlier for bleeding.  That’s how I got the second smear.  Dang me!  It almost ruined what I think is a very promising portrait of my main character Valerie Clarke.  (Valerie, whom you may remember from Snow Babies posts, is based on a girl I once had a crush on, and my own daughter, the Princess.)Mina & Val

Now, ink smears are not the only thing that had to be twisted and worked around to get this project underway and at least a little bit tamed.  The title was originally a problem.  I tried to call this story The Captain Came  because of the primary antagonist and the fact that he is returning from the South Seas to the little Iowa town of Norwall.   This was a problem because Captain Dettbarn was running from a bunch of psychotic little Juju men (animated Tiki idols) who were chasing him because he made the witch doctor’s chief’s daughter pregnant.  That made the title an R-rated joke that I hadn’t intended even before I considered this story a YA novel idea.

The Juju men themselves are problem.  In this time of unintended racism, I had to work on them to make them be something other than a racial stereotype.  They were not originally made entirely of wood.  I had to eliminate cartoonist’s shortcuts in depiction that made them look like little black men or little dark brown men.  They are of an indeterminate South Seas racial stock.  Their language is mostly Tagalog (because it is a language I have tried to learn due to Filipino relatives).  Their culture is mostly movie fiction that comes from the Captain’s own liar’s brain.  Most of the information about the witch doctor and the mysterious island come from the Captain’s logbook which is a work of fiction written by a drunkard with a vivid imagination.  So I am trying to be fair to a people and race that don’t actually exist outside of the story within the story.  Whew!  I’ve got to stop explaining complicated things now before my brain melts.  Smoke is already coming out of my ears and making it hard to see here in my studio.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, illustrations, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 12, 2015 · 1:49 pm

The Prognosticator’s Spyglass

Self Portrait vxv

A while back I gave you an overview of my writing plan and called it the Magician’s Spyglass.  My magic, of course, is story-telling, and the spyglass is a metaphor for looking at the long view ahead.  But I have also recently been thinking about the purpose of my writing and where I need to go in sailing my fictional ship with pink sails.

The Lady

Here is where I’ve been, the view over the aft rail.  I have my novel Snow Babies contractually obligated with PDMI Publishing to be published (though the time in the future when it sees print seems to be drifting farther and farther forward.)  The novel Superchicken is finished, and the publisher accepted submission, but they have not yet made a decision on its possible publication.  The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is completed and being seriously edited by me.  The Magical Miss Morgan is completed, edited, and about to be submitted to the YA novel-writing contest that I last participated in with Snow Babies.  I am currently writing two new novels, Stardusters and Lizard Men, a science fiction novel about planetary destruction and renewal, as well as using the energy and creativity of youth as a natural resource.  And When the Captain Came Calling, a novel about the origins of the Norwall Pirates, that boys’ club of liars that forms the center of most of my Norwall books.  So, there is that.  I am still sailing straight ahead into stormy seas with my writing.  But I am not wearing an eye-patch over both eyes.  I am looking at the rough seas and squalling storm clouds dead ahead.

So, as Prognosticator, I must gage the winds, evaluate the white-caps, and take a sounding or two.  I have these problems to overcome.  I am limited in funding because of poor health, mounting medical expenses, a large tax burden, and a steady retirement income that may be threatened by a Texas Republican trend to cut everything out of public schools, even teacher pensions.  This State will never ask billionaires and oilmen to foot their fair share of the bills.  They would much rather take away education money because, after all, you need to keep the masses stupid if you are going to continue to farm them like hogs and cattle for every dollar you can squeeze out of them.  Stupid people vote Republican, and so are the cherished commodity that Texan Empires are built upon.

The environment is changing for the worse.  With COPD and severe allergies brought on by the exposure to farm chemicals in my teen years, I have trouble breathing fresh Texas air (made up of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, butane, and other by-products of fracking and refining).  I also have experienced seven Dallas-area earthquakes in the last two years that directly result from fracking in the oil shale beneath our feet.  Soon our drinking water should be flammable, judging by the Pennsylvania experience.  Global warming has given us record heat-waves and drought in the last decade, though all the officials in this State are insisting it is all in my head.  I was imagining the heat two summers ago when we had 99 days of temperatures over 100 in a row.  So there is the reason my Stardusters novel is about environmental Armageddon.

The likelihood that I am ever going to make more money writing and drawing than I spend on the endeavor is increasingly small as the publishing industry continues to change and continues to benefit the booksellers like Amazon more and individual content creators less.  I will need to write a post or two on that before one of my six incurable diseases kills me.

I must continue to write about artists and writers that influence and engage me.  That is lifeblood to me, a commodity that I may soon be short of;  I need to write about how I create the stories that I am writing.  I also need to chronicle the life I have lived as a teacher and an educator, because the valuable lessons I have learned as a teacher and a mentor to the young will all be lost if I do not do everything I can to pass them on.  That is the primary reason that my teacher-story, The Magical Miss Morgan, now exists.  These are all things that I am now predicting I must write about.  The water is churning and navigation is becoming more difficult… so onward we sail until I can shout, “Land Ho!”

2 Comments

Filed under Paffooney, the road ahead

Tagged as , , , , ,

January 11, 2015 · 2:40 am

Faeries

Donner n Silkie

In my book The Magical Miss Morgan, the teacher, Miss Francis Morgan, has to deal not only with a crisis in her personal teaching world, but a crisis brewing in the magical fairy kingdom of Tellosia.  The fairies have come seeking Francis’ aid because she, as a teacher, has direct access to children and can affect what they believe in.  You see, the fairies suffer from a general lack of belief in fairies, something that has been plaguing them more and more as the modern world makes it more and more difficult for children to actually believe.  Soon they will wink out of existence for lack of believers.  Francis’ younger brother, Milt, is a wizard.  He knows some fairies personally, and he has told them that Francis can help them.  So, because Milt revealed her to them, the Erlking, leader of the fairies of Tellosia, has sent three chosen representatives to plead for her help.

The leader of the trio is Donner.  He is the dragonfly-winged pixie who is a leader of the wasp-riders.  At three full inches in height, he is one of the biggest and most leader-ish of the fairies, the reason he was chosen to head the mission.  He speaks very much in the old style and has a hard time getting his ideas across to a creative teacher-type from the 1990’s.

Silkie, the Storybook, is a beautiful fairy who, because she is a Storybook fairy, is immortal.  She has been immortal since Hans Christian Andersen used her adventures that she had related to him to create the story of Little Tiny or Thumbelina in 1835.  Any time a fairy is immortalized by a human author, that fairy becomes a Storybook and is destined to live forever.  She is very old and very wise, but also very human-looking and very-very small.

Garriss, the third fairy, is a wisp.  Wisps are elemental beings made of fire, water, stone, or air.  They are rumored to be incredibly stupid, because their little brains are composed entirely of one element.  Garriss is a fire wisp.  He has a temper because his brain is made of fire.  Torchy, also pictured, is also rather stupid and foolish.  But fire wisps prove to have a very warm heart.

So, if you can stand fairy tales at all, I hope you will clap your hands and believe in the fairies in my book.  I intend to submit it to the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ YA Novel Contest in April of 2015.  The hand clapping should definitely help… unless James M. Barrie lied to us in his book Peter Pan.

Garriss n Torchy

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, fairies, humor, novel, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , ,

January 6, 2015 · 7:52 pm

Fire Wisps

Garriss n Torchy

In the novel I just recently finished, The Magical Miss Morgan, there are several different kinds of fairies.  The fairies in the book may or may not really be there.  They are a part of the magic the teacher, who is the main character, uses to be a superior teacher.  She engages the imaginations of her students and they love her for it.  Still, an important part of the plot revolves around a small group of fairies intent on a quest meant to save their fairy kingdom called Tellosia from a take-over attempt by evil fairies.  One of the main character fairies is the fire wisp, Garriss, seen here with his little brother Torchy.  Fire wisps are fairies made of elemental magic, so they can be fire, water, wind, and stone.  They are made of the element they represent, and so, with a brain made of fire they are not terribly smart.  They do, however, have very warm hearts, which Garriss proves to Miss Morgan, to Blueberry Bates, and to all the school children who dare to believe in fairies and fairy magic.  Garriss is totally contained by fire magic, and therefore doesn’t set the teacher’s desk on fire when he walks on it.  In fact, the only way he can burn anything is through the cone of fire spell written on his hands.  And even then, since he is not very bright (in a mental capacity), he has to be allowed to use it by his fairy friends, Silkie, the Storybook fairy, and Donner the Pixie.

This Paffooney is the first one I drew of any of the fairy characters in Miss Morgan’s story, but it is not the last.  I intend to draw more of them in the coming days.

5 Comments

Filed under artwork, fairies, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 1, 2015 · 4:19 pm

Stupid People

20150101_120254

It is generally considered an insult to call someone “stupid”.

Okay, I get that.  I am not without feelings on the subject.   Stupid people have feelings just like I do.  But if I have to live with “nerd”, “geekazoid”, “brainiac”, and “four-eyes”, I am thinking they don’t have to be more sensitive than I am.

Truthfully, life as a mentally gifted person of no color is a bit of trial even if people don’t generally understand that.    I have an I.Q. in the range of 155, (calculated from my ACT and SAT scores using standard statistical analysis, give or take 5% for margin of error due to the nature of the calculation… am I scaring you yet?)  I had trouble fitting in with my peers as a child.  I related better to older people rather than my appropriate age group, and until my best friend, a preacher’s kid, moved to town when I was nine, I really had no friends and was routinely picked on and preyed upon by other kids.  It was so bad that I was making C’s and D’s in school primarily because I didn’t want to be identified as smart.  Once the eye doctor hung black horn-rimmed glasses on my face, my fate as a socially doomed uber-nerd was sealed.  And my friend Mark, who would grow up to become an actuary with mathematical gifts, moved away when I was a freshman in high school.  I had to help stupid people with homework and class work… I was required to endure threats, bribes, and tearful pleas to help athletes cheat on tests.  Bullies made me tie their shoes and endure endless jokes about the size of my private parts.  Life was terrible until I decided to go out for high school football.  I was small and thin and probably doomed as I made the team, but I had a secret weapon.  I understood almost instinctually that angles, trajectories, and leverage can make the difference over sheer muscle power.  During one football drill where we had to pick up and carry our partner for five yards, I was matched with the big offensive tight end, George Merlock, who outweighed me by almost a hundred pounds and was literally Incredible Hulk-like in football pads.  I simply used my shoulder on the proper spot under his armpit and lifted with my legs.  I picked him up and carried him for twenty yards when some of the other players who were bigger and stronger than me couldn’t even lift him.  After that moment, I was never bullied again.  For one thing, I impressed George so much that he would’ve killed them for even looking at me cross-eyed.  Life got better.  A cheerleader asked me out on a date (though I said no because I thought they were still making fun of me… which I later learned I was mistaken about and I had accidentally hurt her feelings).

So what does that whole long-winded whiffle-story of my misspent youth have to do with stupid people?  Well, I am one.  (Doesn’t the cheerleader thing prove that?)  Smart people can be stupid more often than your average ordinary Joe.   A character like Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory is funny because his intelligence and his social abilities are so wildly mismatched that he often makes totally stupid geekazoid mistakes.

Harker

But there are also stupid people who are actually not smart.  Writing humor has taught me to draw upon the experiences of people I have known who were less than knowledgeable.  People with lower than normal I.Q.’s.  Life has taught me to value and even love people like that.  In my novel Snow Babies, at least one of the clown characters is a stupid person.   Harker Dawes is an inept businessman in the process of destroying a successful business that he bought from one of the town’s most beloved and respected elders.  He immobilizes himself with super glue.   He gets nailed to a poster board with a nail gun.  Accidents and near-fatal pratfalls are his trademark.  And yet, he is a sympathetic and loveable character.  He is generous to a fault.  He has a simple, good heart.  Practically everything he does is a mistake, and yet, people grow fond of him and help him out because they appreciate his innate goodness and value as a person.

So, I really think calling someone stupid can be a sort of compliment.  Forrest Gump calls himself stupid, but that character from Winston Groom’s novels and the award-winning movie of the same name is really a very wise and lovely man, though he is not smart.  I have to say that I really no longer resent being called stupid, because no matter how smart I actually am, stupid is sort of a compliment.  (But how about climate-change deniers, Texas politicians, and anybody who believes what they say on Fox News, you say?  They are not stupid.  That is willful ignorance.  It may take a whole other post to make that difference clear.)

1 Comment

Filed under characters, clowns, colored pencil, drawing, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

December 28, 2014 · 5:56 pm

The Next Little Project

All right, the time has come to figure out what to write next.  I have another thirty-plus-year-old writing project that would make an absolutely, terrifically horrible novel that I want to try to tame.  I have a cartoonized version created back when I was young and stupid… in about 1981, before the invention of the graphic novel.  It is in full color.  It was done before I learned how to draw.  It is a book that will now go under the ridiculously alliterated title The Captain Came Calling.

20141228_145810

The novel is set, like all of my hometown stories, in Norwall, Iowa… The fictionalized version of Rowan, the town I actually grew up in.  It isn’t quite as dorky in real life as it appears in my cutsified illustration, but it is approaching it at glacial speeds.

The town’s portrayal will have to change as I attempt to update and clarify characters.

20141228_160522

The people have to be switched about.  Phyllis Murphy has to become Mary Murphy.   The Pirates will have to switch from the 90’s Pirates to the 80’s Pirates, as the main character, Mary Phillips has to create a new Pirates’ Club that didn’t exist when I first wrote this bilge.  I have to update and increase the plot, adding the back-story  through the inclusion of the Captain’s Logbook… How else can I get mermaids and the voodoo priest into the story otherwise?

I also have to be a little bit more politically correct about the portrayal of the tiki-idol-men.  South Seas’ Magic can’t be racist or misogynist.  And then there’s the whole thing about Captain Dettbarn’s less-than-Iowegian morals that has to be dealt with.  He’s basically a clown character, not a villain.

20141228_145906

20141228_155356

And the Captain is cursed with invisibility.   That is no small thing to pull off in work of fantasy fiction in a Young Adult style.  It has to be believable enough to make the audience accept it, even if it is a comedy caper of the lowest sort.20141228_145924

3 Comments

Filed under cartoons, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,