Tag Archives: paffooney

October 5, 2014 · 5:47 pm

Foreshortening

When something is nearer in the picture, it appears bigger than those things that appear farther away.  This is called foreshortening.  It is artists’ jargon for the kind of superhero pictures that Jack “King” Kirby always used to do on the covers of Avengers, Fantastic Four, and Captain America comic books in the 60’s and 70’s.  The hands that reach out to grab you.  The fists or the gun-barrels that rush toward you.  These are the things I must draw bigger than the anatomy or the scenery that comes behind.  So let me try that with novel ideas.

Snow Babies is being published as you read this.  Here is a one-sentence foreshortening of that novel; A blizzard so terrible that omens of death by freezing begin appearing, descends on a small Iowa farm town, and four young runaways on the Trailways bus must find shelter of more than one kind.

I have gotten Superchicken ready to be submitted to a publisher.  Here is a one-sentence foreshortening of that;  A boy moves to a small Iowa farm town where he doesn’t fit in and is treated as an outsider, but before he can feel like he truly belongs, he must learn about himself and the super powers he has always had inside him.

The first draft that I have just finished is called The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  This is the foreshortening for that;  A genius inventor has lost his wife and son to a lab accident, so he must come to terms with the dangers inherent in science as he tries to heal himself by making friends with the gifted boy who lives next door.

If you are a writer and have written a book or two, can you do a foreshortening on that story?  I would be fascinated to hear about it, even if it takes more than one sentence.monsters

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October 2, 2014 · 11:18 pm

Protagonists

Tim!
I have been thinking about who qualifies as the Protagonist in my most recent novel, The Bicycle Wheel Genius.  I have to ponder this because the title character, the inventor Orben Wallace, doesn’t actually seem to be the center of his own story.  Instead, it is the boy who lives next door that is learning about life, adventure, girls, and imagination.  In the novel, the inventor has taken a vow to never use electronic devices if he didn’t have to because it was an electromagnetic invention that went awry in his laboratory and started the house fire that killed his wife and son.  So he tries to invent things with pedal power and tries to forget the wife and son he lost.  But it happens that Tim Kellogg, the inquisitive boy next door, not only reminds him of the lost son, but he actively tries to learn about Orben and make friends with him.  Tim has a best friend, Tommy Bircher, who shares in his adventures and always stands by his side.  But Tommy’s parents are involved in an international business that moves them away from Tim.  He has to deal with the loss of his best friend.  At the same time, his new best friend, Mike Murphy, has discovered girls.  One particular girl, Blueberry Bates, is in love with him and captures his young heart.  So naturally Tim is upset, and so tries to get back at the girl who took his replacement best friend.  He has to learn to understand an appreciate the girl and her needs better.  Tim and Orben desperately need to be friends with each other, and through shared adventures, they discover that the bond between them is very powerful.  So, I have to conclude that Orben is not really the protagonist of his own story.  He is not the one who has to learn something and fundamentally change.  And Tim Kellogg begins and ends the story, just as he does in this post.

Tim1

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September 29, 2014 · 12:05 am

Little Mermaids

little mermaid2

Why do I post a Paffooney about a mermaid?  Especially the horrific tale of the Little Mermaid written by Hans Christian Andersen?  I cannot really say… unless it is about self-sacrificing love… and its redeeming value.

In the original story, the 15-year-old mermaid discovers that mermaids, though they live for 300 years, do not have a soul.  She also manages to save a handsome prince from drowning, and then falls in love with him.  She goes to the sea witch to become human and have legs.  For the switch from fins to feet, the little mermaid pays a terrible price.  The sea witch cuts out her tongue.  When she drinks the feet-making potion, it hurts as if she were being split by a knife.  And, though, she can’t talk to win the prince, she can dance.  Dancing, however, feels like walking on broken glass, constantly bleeding and hurting.  So she goes to win true love’s kiss from the prince, the only thing that can give her a human soul.  But the prince is a total jerk, refusing to believe that the mermaid is the one who saved him and marrying the princess next door instead.  The sea witch gives the mermaid one final hope.  She can kill the prince, and bathing her legs in his blood, become a mermaid again.  Though he probably deserves to die, she decides she cannot kill him, and so she dies, becoming sea foam.  Yep, a horrible story in which the heroine sacrifices herself for a love that exists only in her own heart.

And the story doesn’t end there.  In the 1952 Danny Kaye movie Hans Christian Andersen, it is suggested that he wrote the story of the Little Mermaid as a ballet to send a message of his self-sacrificing love to the ballerina he loved but had no idea of his love.  Now, we know the movie doesn’t even try to be biographically accurate, but the real Andersen, a self-proclaimed asexual being, had many deep affairs of the heart that were not only non-sexual, but decidedly unrequited.  He had loves both female and male who could not love him in return.  No one ever gave the old bachelor the kind of love he desired, and yet, in his self-sacrificing way he poured his love into some of the most lovely fairytales ever written.

Disney had the audacity to change the little mermaid into a story with a happy ending.  This, of course, was the Disney way.  Although Walt Disney was dead and had no knowledge of the animated film, he would’ve approved.  Wish-upon-a-star magic of happy-ever-aftering is pretty important to the Disney legacy as a whole.  The lovely cartoon musical saved the Disney empire from decline and dissolution.  I am aware that the business plan of evil corporate manipulator Michael Eisner also has to be given credit, but I prefer to believe that everything can only come to a happy ending by mixing in the essential ingredient of unconditional love.

Why, then, did I do a Little Mermaid Paffooney?  Was it so I could draw a naked young girl?  I hope not.  I hope it is because I believe that the only purpose of art is to portray the uncloaked love that exists at the center of all experience.

Edmund_Dulac_-_The_Mermaid_-_The_Prince

The Little Mermaid by Edmund DuLac

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September 27, 2014 · 12:09 am

Doofy Dog Doings

I noted before that I have so far used an alarming number of dog-poop jokes in my creative writing projects.  (All right, two instances may not really be alarming, but it does indicate that I am thinking about dog poop way too much.)  I guess the reason for it is that I have a dog, and she is not a genius dog.  She is smarter than I can cope with, but she only beats me at chess once out of every thirty games.  She inspired today’s Paffooney, so let me show you the picture before I tell you everything that is wrong with my little dog.

Dingledum dog

Okay, my dog looks nothing like this.  She is a Cardigan Corgi, a dog bred to chase and kill barn rats, or to protect the baby’s crib when the adults are not in the room.  She is highly possessive, and she considers me her property.  So, here’s where the dog poop comes in.  I have to walk her twice a day, and I have to take a Walmart bag with me to pick up the poop in the park (even though it is obvious that no one else in our neighborhood does it despite the posted law).  And it turns out that this is not enough to keep her from pooping in the house.  The little poop factory can make as many as five times in one day.  And even worse, she will poop in punishment if we commit the crime of leaving her alone to go somewhere.  We get back from the dollar movie and she has pooped on the dining room carpet, or in front of my bedroom door, somewhere where she knows I will see it and get mad.  She doesn’t care if she gets punished in return.  She is satisfied if she made her point.  So I am drowning in dog poop on a daily basis.  It’s no wonder it’s on my mind and I end up writing about it.  God help me, of all the things to have on your mind, I have dog poop on mine!

If you are wondering about the rat in the picture, there is a rat part to my doggy nightmare.  We live near a city park where there are lots of storm drains and rain gutters for rats to inhabit.  And there are throngs of rats.  When we kept the dog in the yard on a chain, the rats would come by daily to laugh at her before coming into the house and gnawing rat holes into the walls and ceilings and eat the glues out of the spines of many of my books.  So rats are a part of the reason she now gets to live in the house.  My wife goes ballistic from seeing or hearing rats.  But I think they still laugh at her as they come in anyway. It’s just that they stay quieter with her around and my wife doesn’t see or hear them.  So, it would be problem solved if only the poop problem would go away.

Here’s her actual portrait.  Sorry if it is too scary for children and the faint of heart.

Jade Monster1

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September 24, 2014 · 1:21 am

Bad Character

As I lay here ill with another in an endless series of viral infections, I am reminded of the real reason I have been thinking so much lately about Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.  (Of course the fact that I am re-reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles has something to do with it).  It’s all about character.  That’s what Victorian writers were all about.  No one ever handled characters as masterfully as those two novelists.  And, being ill and in pain, subject to problems with debt and credit cards and bankers, I began thinking about villains.  Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist is one of the scariest villains in literature.  Murdstone from David Copperfield  and Daniel Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop are relentless predators.  Uriah Heep from David Copperfield is smarmy as they come.  In Tess young Master D’Urberville-Stokes has stolen the family name, and he steals Tess’s innocence in a manner that would make him a rapist in our day.  He gets away with his horrible crime and later destroys the innocent woman, one of the best and most worthy characters in literature, because a corrupt and disintegrating culture allows him to do so.  These characters are so carefully drawn and gloriously illustrated in the prose of these books, that I can see them in my artist’s mind’s eye.  So I was inspired to draw a villain today.  Since I am forced to think about bankers now, I drew a pirate.  Yes, I know there’s no transition between Victorian novels and this picture, but I am not well, okay?

Black Tim

This particular pirate has a red face, red hair, red mustache, and wears red clothes, so naturally his name is Black Timothy.  He is a credit card banker for Bank of America, the foulest kind of pirate to ever sail an international bank on the high seas.  His friend is named Scruffy Bill.  Now, when pirates get an arm or leg or other limb blown off by cannon fire or cut off in a saber fight, they replace that part with a wooden prosthesis.  Bill has lost every limb he has, including his head.  Now that his head is replaced with a wooden prosthesis, he can only repeat what Black Timothy says… but that works out well, because no one really understands Tim when he speaks, and Bill uses simpler words to say the same thing (primarily because he doesn’t remember all the bad words Black Timothy knows).  So Bill takes the place of a parrot, and he serves as a translator for Tim allowing all of us to be truly disgusted by what he says.

Now, I am aware that my villain in no way matches any of the wonderful characters in Victorian novels, but I wanted to make a Paffooney with pen and ink and colored markers, and I have a lot of red markers.  Forgive me for random acts of Paffoonery.

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September 21, 2014 · 8:02 pm

The Road Home

The Road Home

This sofa-sized oil Paffooney is called the Road Home because it was painted from a photograph looking west on US Highway 3 towards Rowan, Iowa, the little town I grew up in.  I painted it when I lived by myself in South Texas, believing that one day I would go back to Iowa to live out the rest of my life.  Here’s where today’s post gets mortifyingly morbid.  Yes, I know that last expression is repetitively repetitive, but that little bit of alliteration was necessary to lighten the load of this non-laughing part of my post.  I am not going to make it.  I am stuck in a North Dallas metroplex that I sincerely do not love.  My kids are not done growing up there.  I have family and roots there.  I have them in Iowa, too, but like a Sioux warrior, I belong to my wife’s tribe once I married into it.   I am old.  I have six incurable diseases and I am a cancer survivor since 1983.  Every day of life is a new miracle.  but the miracles are running out.  My COPD makes my chest hurt, and I have trouble breathing, especially at night.  The house is rotting away around us, courtesy of the housing bubble we bought it in back in 2005.  Doing what maintenance and repair that I can makes my arthritic body ache intolerably, more than Aleve can cure.  I will not go back to drugs like Vioxx or Celebrex and let them kill me to enrich the pharmaceutical industry.  My diabetes has made it almost impossible to eat without enduring a round of high blood sugar and nausea.  I do not look forward to either insulin or the possibility of losing an arm or leg.  So, if I get out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, it will probably be by curling up my toes and going bye-bye, followed by a cremation.  I would like to have my ashes scattered in Iowa, but the family will probably find flush toilets much cheaper. Ah well… dark part done.  Now for the part about going home.

The reason I feel uplifted, and crazily feel justified in calling this post “humor” is because I have already won my battle.  I was a teacher for 31 years.  I touched more than 2,500 lives, some of them profoundly.  I have almost raised three wonderful, talented children.  I have written and published three books, and if I can scratch out enough time, I have at least two more ready to be published.  I have shared what little wisdom I have acquired along with a lot of really goofy artwork I have done in this blog, and, although I used to be the best author no one had ever read, people are actually reading and liking my books.  In my stories, I have told about growing up in Iowa, about being a teacher, about being a friend, about being in love, about facing fear, and ultimately about being able to laugh about all of it.  In my fiction, I have already gone home, repeatedly.  When I get my cheapo flushing-funeral, that will not be me.  I will be in the cornfields under the blue Iowa sky with a threat of thunderstorms in the distance.  And while I may cry a little bit, because what is life worth without some of that? I will be mostly laughing and laughing and laughing.  Because life may end in death, but nothing about it is sad if you don’t let it be.  I like to delude myself into thinking the world is a little bit better now than when I got here, and I pretend that I have had something to do with that.  The game is won.  Everything else is just gravy!  (Sorry about that.  I do realize that gravy goes on mashed potatoes, not a game, but mangled metaphors are one of my specialties.)

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September 20, 2014 · 6:50 pm

Playing With Picture Paffooneys

Valerie n Butterfly

As an artist, you find many ways to cheat and make more with less.  I have discovered that with a cheap photo-shopping program, I can snip elements out of existing artworks and combine them together into something new.  My fingers no longer have the dexterity needed for intricately detailed backgrounds, but I find that photo-backgrounds fit my plan better anyway.  Here I took Valerie Clarke and pasted her on a photo of hollyhocks created by Belinda Buchanan.  I then pasted in the Swallowtail butterfly from a recent Paffooney.  Now, I know that if your mind doesn’t accept the butterfly as in the air and closer to the viewer than Valerie, then I have created a picture of pre-historic monster-bug.  Mothra does Iowa.  Oh well, I think it is pretty anyway… and it leads to further noodling with old art.

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September 19, 2014 · 1:22 am

Baring the Soul of Creativity

CreativitySo, I finished the Paffooney pencil drawing that I was working on to illustrate my struggles with the creative act.  I can noodle on the piano to some effect, but I cannot play Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor the way the boy (or is it a girl?) in the picture is doing it.  What I can do is create a symphony of words and pictures that reveal my inner self as thoroughly as if I were performing naked in front of the audience.  So what you see here is not the real naked me.  It is, rather, my naked thoughts, my soul, the beauty that is hidden inside my hideously aged and peeling flesh.  Inside my mind is beauty and rhythm and rhyme…  On the inside you can see what is there without the usual patina of pain and depression and pessimistic pondering.  I have explained the naked piano player, but you may be wondering still about the butterfly.  You see, long ago when I was a butterfly hunter, I longed to catch the tiger swallowtail that flitted about our back yard and played about the neighbors’ hollyhocks.  It was a very elusive butterfly, you see.  Monarchs and red admirals, mourning cloaks, fritillaries, painted ladies, and even spicebush swallowtails I had captured and mounted in my butterfly box.  But never the tiger.  He always seem to flit too high above my net at the last moment.  I would see him towards the tops of towering maples, but rarely within reach, and never long enough to grab him in my net.  So, one day, I was sitting under the little maple in the back yard, reading a book, when the tiger swallowtail came to light on the back of the hand I used to hold my book.  Now, I could have grabbed him right there.  I would have been victorious.  But in clapping my left hand over him to capture him, his wing dust might have smeared, or his lovely wings might’ve cracked and broken.  I had to make an instant decision.  I chose to let him flutter away.  I did not crush the butterfly, and so… my life, my art, my inner self have all benefited.  To this day I can say… “I did not crush the butterfly” and that has made me who I am.

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September 17, 2014 · 12:43 am

Wyzoll Hootigan – D & D Professor of Psionics and Magic

In the Dungeons and Dragons game I play with the two kids still at home, they were recently assisted in a killer adventure by a giant owl gifted with full awareness and intelligence.  He is a professor of psionic magic at Morgrave University in Sharn, City of Towers.  I don’t know if you have any idea at all of what the Eberron Campaign is, or can make any sense of any of the things I mention here, but it is a published game, a version of the D & D game currently published by Wizards of the Coast.  The player characters, the non-player characters, and the castle they invaded are entirely created by our little game group.  Professor Hootigan is entirely my creation.  So here is the portrait of an NPC that I created just today in another goofy colored-pencil Paffooney.

Wyzoll

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September 15, 2014 · 1:35 am

More Paffooney Progress!

DSCN5279

As you can see, I made a tiny bit of progress over yesterday… but in many different ways.  I got my son to finish his week’s worth of online school despite his not being completely well.  I got the fake shutters off the windows on the wall where the city is expecting me to put up new siding so the house doesn’t shame the neighborhood.  (I wonder if they threaten the other shabby yards and houses in the neighborhood with fines, or am I just special?)   I got the dog to choke down 30 per cent of her heart-worm pill.  And I added the keyboard and a tiny bit of Chopin to the Paffooney.

Why is the piano player naked, you ask?  (Well, really you don’t ask, that was really me.  But I have to connect the idea somehow, don’t I?  Don’t answer that.)  The piano player, like all writers, story-tellers, performers, artists, and other motley fools must put something of herself or himself into the piece.  It has to be the true self, the inner self, the often private self.  Having been the victim of sexual abuse as a child, the fear of being naked and vulnerable like that is nearly overwhelming.  And yet, in a very metaphorical way, it is what I am compelled to do.  (What?  You can stop screaming.  I’m not going to take my clothes off, if that’s what you’re afraid of.  I know how horrifying that thought is.)  I am only baring what I feel about the creative process.  I am writing that part near the end of The Bicycle-Wheel Genius (the fool novel project I am now working on) where the bad guy must be defeated, the good must be made clear and maybe win out, and somebody dies or does something else irretrievably sad.  I did it in Catch a Falling Star.  I did it again with a major character in Snow Babies.  And now, one of the characters that I have created and loved will die at the climax of this novel.  A resolution and a death at the end of the tale, just like some cheap Robert Altman movie.  How can you possibly have a comedy where nobody dies at the end?  Wait, am I doing something wrong here?  Who knows?

So that is the meat of this Paffooney process.  I give you the drawing, even though it is not complete.  I give you the ideas, even though they are half-formed and goofy as heck.  A naked piano player… and, I don’t know if you can see it yet, a tiger swallowtail butterfly.  The butterfly will be naked too.

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