Tag Archives: Paffoonies

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!

I 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.

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.

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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Filed under cartoons, humor, NOVEL WRITING

Tagged as cartoons, connections, humor, novel writing, paffooney cartoony, Paffoonies, word games

July 5, 2015 · 1:27 pm

One True Thing

Sometimes I wonder why I write and what purpose it serves. And the fact that it is impossible to know the answer to things like that doesn’t even slow me down. The speculation-and-imagination machine chugs on, churning out all sorts of clever platitudes and sophomoric sayings that the editorial glands in my brain sometimes make me choke on. Purple paisley prose rolls out of my pen and curls and swirls across the page being more about the silly sounds and internal rhymes and alliterations than about the actual ideas. And I enjoy the process far more than you do.

Making connections is probably the most important process of the whole endeavor. Having returned home to Iowa for a week in July, I can testify that connecting your childhood to your recent past and your promising present is essential to determining both who you are and who you are supposed to be. The boy I was in the 60’s and 70’s is a key to understanding why I write what I do. I was smarter than a kid is supposed to be. A nerd is a target for verbal and physical abuse based on a shared feeling among those not as cerebral that it is somehow unfair to be smarter than ordinary folks. I learned to defend myself with wit and superior planning. I found it is possible to create an indispensable role for myself in practically any situation. I learned to be a good listener. I absorbed all the fascinating little nuances of personality and possibility that other people unintentionally exude. I learned to organize and prioritize and use all the other ize-es that help you structure reality to your liking. And I learned that it is possible, as a teacher, to pass the secrets of life and love and laughter on to others. Here is one true thing… The point of learning anything is to pass it on to others.

If you get nothing else at all out of this silly, meandering post of purple paisley prose, I hope it is that previous sentence. I delude myself into believing that all the experiences I have had and all the things I have learned can be wrapped up into pretty packages and given as gifts to coming generations. I strive to write with quality and make the ideas engaging and powerful. I am always experimenting with style. For example, this post is based on free-writing and associative thinking. I intended to create a “boneless” structure of gelatinous prose centered around one true thing. And I intentionally wrote it to resemble a blobby pile of mud in which the reader must dig for that nugget of gold. And I think I have succeeded in making it thoroughly muddy with random big words, loose connections that risk bursting the paragraph’s seams, and word eddies that could potentially explode the flow. If you have waded this far through the mess, then let me reward you with one more pointless Paffooney, re-posted like a pirate.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, wisdom

Tagged as humor, Paffoonies, wisdom, writing

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.

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.

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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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as 500 words, colored marker, colored pencil, goofiness, humor, novel writing, Paffoonies, pen and ink, writing process

June 22, 2015 · 3:04 pm

Another Dadgum Post About Pirates

This one isn’t about Bank of America or Aetna… specifically. It is just me adding to my cartoon vault and the story of the pirates in Fantastica.

This is the second panel of the story that can be found at The Pirate Vault

And panels three and four are all I have gotten done on this comic so far.

This nonsense will all be continued in upcoming days, and the whole thing is in my cartoon vault.

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Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as bankers, cartoons, goofiness, humor, paffooney cartoony, Paffoonies, Pirates

June 17, 2015 · 3:29 pm

The Mother of all Vacations

Well, vacation is a complicated idea around here any more. I sit here blogging while my family is on vacation in Florida with the camper. They went to see my son in the Marine Corps graduate from his MOS class, and they are staying for the beaches. I got left behind because, for me, breathing and camping no longer seem to be something I can do both at the same time. So, I opted to stay at home alone with the dog and the air conditioner to continually walk the dog, pick up dog poop in the park, and practice breathing. Breathing is hard with COPD. Chronic Obstructed Pulmonary Disorder basically means I have far too much lutefisk residue clogging up the storage sheds in my lungs. (For those of you who don’t know about the horrors of living as an Iowegian… lutefisk is a dish made by Scandahoovians from Norway out of white fish soaked in lye soap until it turns into a kind of bad-tasting poisonous Jello. Iowegians eat it constantly, and claim to love it, though I have it on good authority that eating it builds up your immunity to death… because what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And the funny thing is, I don’t even eat lutefisk. Lutefisk in the air back in my youth has managed to encrust my lungs with lutefisk residue. That, or the toxic chemicals we used to spray on the soybean fields… Naw, I’m pretty sure it is the lutefisk.) (That last parenthetic expression just squeezed into third place all time on my longest parenthetic expression list.) (But only by two words.)

So, I chose this lonely vacation from vacationing because I kinda like breathing, and I am definitely not ready to risk finding out if the lutefisk in my lungs has actually made me immune to death in the Iowegian tradition. And so, what happens while I am staying home alone with the dog? Bill came to visit. Bill is a tropical storm. After the record setting water-soaked Texas month of May he is not a welcome visitor. Take a look again at my family’s swimming pool. That pool has about thirty cracks on the bottom perfect for making it act more like a sieve than a pool. It has only held a few cup-fulls of rancid mosquito-water for the past three swimming seasons. I had fallen far enough behind sticking chewing gum in the cracks that it does not hold water. It was finally beginning to empty before Bill showed up and added six inches just today. And rain is so good for COPD in the most sarcastic way I can possibly write those particular words. I did not need Bill to visit. I find I am forced to live with his visit, and he is not even a relative.

So I have been stuck in bed, drawing cartoons about Pirates who rob people by being bankers and throwing me into the powder room as their prisoner, practicing hard on my breathing, and feeling very depressed about missing vacation. But, it occurs to me that, since I am now retired from teaching… for an entire school year already… and too ill most of the time to try to make extra money as a Walmart greeter, smiling and saying hello to ugly fat people in warm-up sweatpants, like I had planned and claimed I was looking forward to doing… I am actually on the longest vacation of my life. Longer even than the two jobless years of substitute teaching the Wicked Witch of Creek Valley sentenced me to. I may actually be on vacation now for the rest of my life. Whoa, baby! Bring on the babes in bikinis… the non-alcoholic Margaritas… there is already water in the pool!

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, vacations

Tagged as feeling sorry for myself, goofiness, humor, more dog poop references, Paffoonies, swimming pools, vacations

June 16, 2015 · 2:50 pm

Cartoon Nuts n’ Bolts… Mostly Nuts

I am setting out to make a web comic that I can post piece by piece on my blog and then build into a graphic novel in my vault. But that is a harder task than you might realize. The stories exist in rough draft form, very, very rough, but will have to be re-drawn to turn into something publishable. Naked cartoons are a problem for me. Not only do I draw them while I am naked because I have considerable discomfort from moderate plaque psoriasis and sitting in the nude is less painful, but I have a tendency to use naked ideas and even draw naked toons…which all need to be toned down to be publishable. I do believe that naked is funny… but I don’t hold with naked and crude or naked and gross. So I am going to rebuild these stories element by element and put some clothes on them. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough money to buy the equipment I need to draw directly on computer. I also don’t have any real practice at that. So, I am stuck with drawing on paper with pen and ink and colored pencil, and then digitizing the result with a camera and photo-shop. So here are some cartoon elements that I will now start whittling into shape. I will try to show you my process here as much as it is possible to do.

Here’s some nuts;

And here’s a bolt;

And if you can figure out how it all fits together already, then you are definitely smarter than I am. I will be busy in the next few days trying to figure out how to insert Tab A into Slot C without giving that phrase any unfortunate double meanings… and I will do my best to keep you posted and show you the results.

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Filed under cartoons, humor, work in progress

Tagged as cartoon-making, cartoons, goofiness, humor, naked is funny, Paffoonies, work in progress

June 13, 2015 · 4:09 pm

The Haunting

I have been resting and recuperating, but also planning for the worst. I mean, when I am ill I often get a little depressed because I know what has to eventually happen to me. I am not immortal. So I have been having some fun planning all the people I will haunt when I become a ghost.

Ghosts are usually around for the sake of cosmic justice, seeking to wrong the rights done to them in life (did I say that backwards? Maybe so). So, my first task will be to choose the ones I will haunt because of how they helped shorten my life and contribute to the misery I’ve endured.

I really thought the best place to start grinding axes was in the political arena. (The sound of grinding axes would be spooky, wouldn’t it? Especially in a State capitol building like the big pink-marble mausoleum in Texas.) I would very much like to haunt the people who helped kill me with stress by making it so difficult to be a Texas teacher. This State is rather anti-education, at least since the conservative Republicans took over and made the State their sovereign province for perpetuity. Rick Perry and the Republican agenda have slashed budgets for education, cut teacher jobs… especially in the arts and music areas, and set up a system of State tests to measure educational progress that are rigged to show that we are failing in Texas to provide a decent basic education. (If you make the test harder and harder at the same time you make the stakes higher and higher every single year, you are bound to get results that show educators doing worse and worse. And, of course, the tests are designed by lawyers consulting with test-makers… no teachers allowed in the process.) So I can haunt Rick Perry to wrong that right. (Okay, I am saying that backwards because “right” also means “conservative”, and it is apparent that they hate education, especially for people of color and people who are poor. Can’t have those unfortunates reading up on basic human rights, now can we?)

So, I plan to haunt Rick Perry by spelling out threatening messages in his alphabet soup. That’ll get him, right? Scare him out of his cowboy boots, maybe? Heck… I don’t know for certain that Rick can read, do I? Not even with the glasses he wears now to look smarter. And his successor, Greg Abbot, can he read? He is advertising his latest education initiative to make education in Texas #1 by establishing higher standards in preschool and the lower grades. That will make education better, right? Make the little kids reach higher scores on harder tests? And do it by passing a law that they have to reach those standards or the schools will be punished? Not spending more money or anything. Heck, he probably doesn’t even eat alphabet soup. What scarier things can a teacher ghost do? I will have to think harder on this subject. And I am thinking I want to haunt more people too. I just have to decide who. So maybe I save some of my spookier insights into what I will do as a ghost until another post. Let me end by giving you an idea of what I want old Rick to look like when I haunt his sorry old cowboy behind.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, satire

Tagged as haunting Rick Perry, humor, Paffoonies, pen and ink, Rick Perry, teaching

June 9, 2015 · 3:10 pm

The Mickey Himself

I was desperate for a daily topic and trying to pull together all the best Senator Ted Cruz jokes I could think of when this message from my publisher, PDMI appeared on Facebook;

Daven Anderson

May 31 at 3:52pm · Edited

Good evening PDMI family!
Attention new PDMI team members: I would like to run features about you on our company Facebook pages. Don’t worry if you don’t have a book ready, these posts are about you. What drives you. What got you here to PDMI. Your hobbies and interests. Who *you* are.
Message me, the PDMI Publishing Facebook page, or e-mail me at (his proper email address not revealed here)@pdmipublishing.com.
Thank you! smile emoticon

Aha! I can write about myself, post it here to count for my goal of posting on WordPress every day this year, and then send it to him to fulfill this request. That right there tells you a lot about me. No, I don’t mean that I’m lazy. Although I do re-post a lot of old Paffoonies on this blog (https://catchafallingstarbook.wordpress.com/). It means I have to be efficient and economize my best efforts. I was a Texas public school teacher for 31 years, ending in a retirement last Spring because I suffer both from six incurable diseases, and the need to become a published author before I croak. I have forty years worth of stories in me that have to get out in whatever time I have left. I am ill and having breathing trouble today as I try to knock this post out at my usual 500 words plus of finished prose per day (that’s the minimum I have set for myself). To date I have successfully published my book Catch a Falling Star that I published the hard way through I-Universe (now owned by Penguin Books). That, however, is the hard way to publish. All the editorial help and marketing help offered by I-Universe is offered for a price. I had to write the book well enough to pass all their editorial standards and I had to pay a hefty sum of money for the privilege. So, with the next novel project, I finished writing, and made it to the finals of Chanticleer Book Reviews YA novel contest, and then sought a new publisher, pdmipublishing.com, who agreed to publish Snow Babies and gave me a publishing contract in which I no longer need to pay out of pocket to get my precious stories into print. So, it is safe to say writing is now my second career, and if I starve to death in old age it won’t be because the government basically hates teachers. No, that isn’t accurate either. The government doesn’t hate teachers (not even the Texas government); they only hate having to pay them for their work. To finish up, I should make a list of my many life-consuming useless hobbies, but blogging is one of them, so you can read about doll collecting, comic books, and other such nonsense on my blog. I am also an amateur cartoonist, which I will prove with a couple of my picture Paffoonies that I created to go with my novels;

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as autobiography, colored pencil, goal-setting, humor, Mickey references, novel writing, Paffoonies, publishing

June 8, 2015 · 3:53 pm

Five More Pages

When you are reading a good book, it is hard to stop even though you know you’ve no reading time left. It is hard to put the thing down. My comic book, Hidden Kingdom, is absolutely nothing like that. I am doing five pages today, and no more. I am adding them also to my vault. So maybe today’s the day you would be better served to go look at the whole thing (so far) in the vault.

Hidden Kingdom

Here are today’s five pages (along with another look at my goofy cover)