Sometimes people break,
And then, they fall apart,
And it takes a jigsaw master,
To Puzzle back their heart.
And if a foot falls off,
Quite busted on Monday’s hump
They may be legless, headless, limp
And lying in a lump.
But no face is ever busted
To a point of no repair,
And lips are pasted back in place
With a smile that wasn’t there.
I have just finished the final edit of The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. PDMI may not be ready for another novel from me, but it is ready for an editor or beta reader to be looking at it. I will not be making any further changes because of my perception of the shape, style, and meaning of the novel. I need input to proceed. I need to advance to publication.
This novel is about a lot of things. It is science fiction. It is a time-travel and alien-contact story. But the thing it is really about, theme-wise, is friendship. It is about the friends we need, the friends we have, what makes a friend, and how you treat a friend. It is about love. It is about love that has nothing to do with sex. It is about love between boys and girls, about love between boys and other boys, about love between a man who has lost his wife and son and a boy who has lost his best friend, and even about the love between family members who love each other even when they disagree and don’t like each other very much. It is also about love between a boy and his rabbit and how it changes when the rabbit is turned into a rabbit-man by the time machine.
Okay, part of the reason that all sounds so terribly complex, is because of the structure I adopted for this novel. This novel is a unique sort of sequel to Catch a Falling Star. I call it a Prequel-Equal-Sequel because it takes place before, during, and after the events of the other book. The primary characters are also different. The main protagonists in the first book are only minor supporting characters in this book. The supporting characters from Catch a Falling Star, the inventor and bicycle-wheel engineer Orben Wallace, and his next-door neighbor boy, Timothy Kellogg (also the grand and glorious and ludicrously uproarious leader of the Norwall Pirates, a small-town liars club of country boys), have become the protagonists.
It was all a very complicated process to write, but also strangely fun and deeply engaging to do. I originally assumed because it was overly complex and facetious, that it was really not that good.
Re-reading and editing, though, has caused me to think that it actually a very good story. I know that it is not as good a piece of writing as either Snow Babies or Magical Miss Morgan, but it has a very significant part to play in the over-all story arc of my home-town novels. It develops critical characters like the two protagonists, Mike Murphy, Blueberry Bates, Cudgel Murphy, Mary and her daughter Dilsey Murphy, and, of course, Valerie Clarke. So, this is a sort of celebratory post. I have finished another project and must now move on to the phase where I must try to get it published and publicized, packaged and promoted.
Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Spring cleaning is how I have spent at least a portion of my lonely invalid’s Spring Break. I get to walk the dog and clean the house while my family is enjoying the somewhat chilly beaches of Florida’s panhandle. Well, it isn’t all misery. As I was cleaning in the library upstairs, I came across a set of drawings from the 1980’s that I had been looking everywhere for. You have no idea what kind of treasure exists under stuff until you start putting stuff in other places. I picked stuff up, and low and behold… treasure. How long since I last moved that stuff? I have no idea. Stuff moves around in the library constantly. Some of the books fly off the shelves in the middle of the night, I swear it. But this stuff wasn’t books, so it was becoming a permanent accretion of stuff. Not yet icky stuff, but it was painter stuff, brushes and oil paints and mixing bowls and acrylic paints and linseed oil and all kinds of stuff that can become very icky in an upstairs room in Texas with no air conditioning.
So, let me give you a look at what I found before I start trying to turn it into writer’s stuff and Paffooney posts.
This first picture is called Bobby, because Bobby Zeffer sat for the portrait of the boy. (You are aware that I don’t use people’s real names in my work. So, Bobby, if you read this post and see this picture, you will have to remember that it is really you.) (No chance of that, though. Bobby is not illiterate, but I know he hates to read.) I could also call it Horatio T. Dogg, because that is the name of the talking dog detective who smokes a pipe and wears a hat and was the main character of a mystery novel that became too silly to finish. It turned out to be one of those stories where I reached the point of having a Tyrannosaurus leap out of a wormhole and eat all the main characters. I gave up on that story rather abruptly.
The second picture is rather obviously Robert Newton playing the part of Long John Silver in the Disney version of Treasure Island. I was still in my twenties when I drew this. I was inspired to try my hand at further portraiture because the picture of Bobby turned out to actually look like him.
The third picture is the reason I was desperate to find these old drawings. It is one of my prescient pictures. I drew it in the 1980’s from an image that haunted my dreams as a young teacher. I later realized how remarkable it was while I was teaching in Cotulla in about 2000. The girl was in my seventh grade fifth period English class. I can’t tell you how many times I had to dig this picture out and stare at her face. Almost twenty years before, six or seven years before she was even born, I drew this girl, and it looks exactly like her. I became even more mystified by this portrait when the boy walked into my classroom last year. He was from Africa. Eritrea to be precise. He was a wonderful, soft-spoken, highly-intelligent boy with a deep Christian faith in God. I almost went crazy searching for this picture so I could compare what I had drawn to the real boy. It turns out he has a bit less hair in real life and a small scar above his left eye. How did I not see that in my dream?
The last picture was designed as a cover for my graphic novel Hidden Kingdom. I have recently revisited that project and I am thinking now more strongly than ever of trying to finish it. I can do a lot of drawing with my arthritic hands as long as I only do a little bit at a time. And this whole drawing thing, this raging addiction, has finally become fun again now that I am retired and have the time to do stuff. Not icky stuff… Treasure!
I have been doing an edit on a completed novel called The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, and I have discovered that I have grown quite a bit as a writer since I first began practicing the craft. This particular story has been rattling around in my brain since 1977. The mad scientist who is the title character, Orben Wallace, is based loosely on me. It is also to some degree a favorite science teacher from high school mixed up with a rather eccentric college professor whose bizarre nature led, apparently, to some really profound insights about the scientific reasoning process and how a person thinks rationally. From this character recipe I have learned the scientific method of experimenting, observing, theorizing, and testing theories works in all areas of life, including the complex mess that is our social life and relationship muddle. Order can be imposed on chaos, and even when chaos is not controlled, it can still be tamed.
I have learned also a thing of two about writing science fiction. I have made this story very science-y by adding elements of time travel, UFO’s, and conspiracy theories… as well as genetics, nutrition, black holes, and history from 1916 (World War I). I have done significant amounts of research because, even though the science is all about big, black, hoo-haw lies and prevarications, it sounds a lot more realistic and palatable if the science is right.
I have learned a few things about writing sequels and tie-ins. This novel is technically a sequel to Catch a Falling Star. No, that’s not right either. It is a prequel-equal-sequel because it happens before, during, and after the previously published book. I have learned to pick up scenes from the other book and rewrite them from the point of view of a different character than the story before. The dialogue is already fixed, but the interpretations and commentary on everything is from a whole different perspective. Not easy to do, but very enjoyable and educational.
I have learned that even though I am basically writing a comedy it also has to have its beautifully sweet-sad moments of melancholy to achieve balance and depth of theme. Two beloved characters die in this book, whereas in Catch a Falling Star only the villain dies without getting a last-second resurrection at the end. We do terrible things to our characters sometimes if it gives the book deeper meaning and resonance with reality.
I do still slavishly rely on the ridiculous. One of the characters in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is a rabbit who bites a high-tech carrot attached to the time machine and morphs into a rabbit man. Millis, the pet rabbit, is the second Paffooney I am repeating for this recycled sort of post.
I have also learned that by using my obsession with that which is surreal, I can actually write things that make me laugh even though I’ve read and re-read them ten times, and am now reading them again. Humor comes from word-play and cleverness as well as from situations full of slapstick.
So, whether you can stand my purple paisley prose…or not, I am definitely working towards throwing a new novel out there… into the world of publishing… or am I throwing it at your head instead?
Filed under NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Be warned… this is one of those art things that people use to post naughty pictures on the internet. Some of my conservative Christian friends will tell you that the local art museum is one of the most atrocious sources of pornography and images of naked people you can find. It is a terrible thing. People being exposed to what people look like if they take their clothes off! How could I do such a dastardly thing as to draw people… naked?
It is difficult to rationalize my terrible crimes. I mean, the “Beauty and the Beast” picture is clearly the depiction of mental depravity and sex addiction from the mind of a fiend. There could be no other explanation of it, right? I mean, Beauty’s stark nakedness can’t possibly represent fearless innocence in the face of ugliness… or a compounding of meanings that have to do with the notion that true beauty exists also under the outward ugliness of the Beast. After all, I am a cartoonist. How dare I think that I have the same right to draw naked people as some great painter or long-dead artist?
It doesn’t count for anything that I had art training in college and sat through at least two courses in anatomy drawing where I not only drew skeletons and body parts and clothed people, but also sat down in front of live nude models (mostly fellow art students, but all were paid for modeling… I think I posted elsewhere about what happened when it was my turn to model… but I also think you have to search my posts yourself if you want to know more about that embarrassing episode).
I must also confess that I have had some experiences with naturists. Here we are talking about those crazy hippie-inspired folks who go camping in the wilderness with their kids, take off all their clothes, and go hiking and biking and playing volleyball in front of real bears. It was there that the artist in me first noticed there was a difference in anatomy, shape, color, and form between bare kids and bare adults. There are distinct differences between my pictures of Eve and Artemis here, based solely on the fact that one is an adult and the other a child.
I am not trying to depict something evil and horrible that will strike you in the eyes and corrupt your very soul. I am not a pornographer or a pervert when I create these drawings and share them with you. They really represent only about one per cent of all the drawings in my portfolio. They represent mainly my need to get the form and lighting right on the most fundamental level. They are an attempt to share something about what is like to be human. Being naked is a part of the life of everyone except the most monumental of prudes who don’t ever get naked and probably wear long underwear in the bathtub even in the summer. Let me end with the first paragraph of Kenneth Clark’s 1956 book, The Nude; a study in ideal form.
“The English language, with it’s elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word “nude” on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central object of art.”
So, you see? I am not merely making excuses for posting naughty pictures on my blog. At least, not unless all artists are making the same excuses and there is a vast world-wide conspiracy to put pornography in every art museum… Conspiracy? Wait a minute… let me think about that some more.
I am trying to hold everything together. I have made my plans, including plans for dealing with irrational things that some people might do. And so, it is time to go visit the rabbit people.
The Rabbit people represent the people and personalities from my past, fortifying me with good memories and pleasant thoughts. I depend on my interior mental life more and more as my body breaks down and my present life is more and more limited.
The hero is a younger me, leading the way to places I have been before and ready to defend me with old truth.
But there is no such thing as a perfect sanctuary. No castle of willpower and mental toughness is ever impregnable.
A thousand things now assail me. Unpaid tax bills, surprise expenses, continued struggles with illness, and other horrible goblins of chance and bad fortune continue to hound me.
The battle is not over. I have not yet lost, though I have not won yet either.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, rabbit people
When I was a teenager and suffering from a terrible secret, I first began to see and hear invisible people. I know this is not normal. In fact, it comes under the heading of “wacko-stupid-maniac-loony”. The first one was my friend the faun. Now, for those of you who do not know, a faun is a mythological creature in the shape of a man (or possibly boy, or even little girl) with the legs and tail and horns of a goat (or possibly kid). This creature is a sensual being in the Dionysian tradition. Wine, women, and song so to speak.
When he first came to me it was a snowy winter’s night, long about December of my 17th year. At that time I was still repressing the memory of what happened to me out behind the neighbor’s house when I was ten. But I guess I knew I needed help in reaching out to others. I was lonely and convinced that for some terrible unknown reason I was a horrible creature not worthy of love. Then he came rapping at my window. He was kneeling there in the snow, outside my upstairs bedroom window, on the roof of the front porch of the house, naked except for the goat fur on his legs. But he wasn’t shivering. After all, he wasn’t real. No one but me would ever see him. He was grinning at me.
“You aren’t going to leave me out here in the snow, are you, stupid?” he said.
“Who and what are you?” I asked, as I opened the window. The snow was shining with a silvery, blue-white light that originated with the street light out in front of the house.
“I am Radasha,” he said. “I am your faun… the part of you that feels things and needs things… the part of you you have stupidly been pretending doesn’t exist.”
All right, I know it sounds crazy. But I needed him in my life. Elwood P. Dowd had an invisible white rabbit. Why couldn’t I have a faun? And it was a very, very good thing. He taught me how to laugh, and how to love… how to actually live. And I know he has always been inside me, not really separate from me. In many ways he is the real me. But crazy people have their own set of priorities. And when I was a confused teenager whose personal self-concept had been sexually violated by another, older boy… Radasha was mine. An invisible friend to talk to. One who could explain everything… make me laugh and make me happy. And there is a sound to that. Do you know the piece by Debussy that this post is titled after? It is my favorite piece of music in all the world. And it tells the sweet-sad story of Radasha and me.
Filed under classical music, Paffooney
We have a second day off from work and school. The ice and potential snow is far from a blizzard, but sometimes the mere presence of snow can aid the death that stalks on silent cat feet.
My novel, still in the process of publication, called Snow Babies, has a central problem that concerns a blizzard. The primary threat, or possibly antagonist, of the story is a deadly blizzard that descends on a small Iowa town. In the midst of blizzard, whether they are actually hallucinations, ghosts, or banshee-like harbingers of death, are a number of snow babies. I call them snow babies. The Japanese call them yuki onna. They are spirits of the snow that can both lure people to their demise and help to save them for brighter things in their later lives.
I can’t actually speak about who or what the real life ones stalking about the suburbs of Dallas actually are. Lives are at stake in my world right now. I have to deal with some serious depression and mental challenges right now. The foretold consequences include things worse than death. I can no more name them than the owner of a glassware factory can afford to take up throwing stones. Things will shatter that I am trying desperately to protect. One thing that will definitely help is the passing of the snowstorm. Just like in my book, people are forced together in the areas of love and warmth that they depend on to survive. The snow babies themselves are, as you can see by my paffooney illustration, naked children bleached snow At this post is not meant for you. It is done for me. It is a statement of resolve and personal refusal to accept that what comes is due to fate alone… that no one can ever change an outcome. No story-teller ever believes that is the case.
So, here is a post from the snow. I was born during a blizzard. I have always known that the snow will come for me in the end. And it is very cold now where I live. More snow is in the forecast. But I will never give up trying to be warm.
Filed under Paffooney, philosophy
I know that you are probably immediately listing all the reasons that my title is totally wacky monkey-thinking in your head. And if you want to lay into me in the comments, you are more than welcome. But the reality is that teachers have to develop the mindset that all kids can learn and all people have value… no matter what. That can be hard to accept when you factor in how corrupted, warped, and badly-taught so many people have turned out to be. It honestly seems, sometimes, that when faced with the facts of how people act… being violent, or greedy, self-centered, thoughtless, un-caring, and willfully stupid… that they really don’t even have value to others if you kill them, let them rot, and try to use them as fertilizer. The plants you fertilize with that stuff will come up deformed.
But the Doctor I have pictured here, the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton always seemed to find Earth people delightful. Alien people too, for that matter, unless they were soulless mobile hate receptacles in robotic trash cans like the Daleks, or mindless machines powered by stolen human brains like the Cybermen. There is, indeed, music in every soul, even if some of it is a little bit discordant and awkward. And people are not born evil. The classic study done on Brazilian street kids showed that even with no resources to share and living empty, hopeless lives, the children helped one another, comforted one another, and refused to exploit one another. As a teacher you get to know every type that there is. And there are stupid kids (deprived of essential resources necessary to learning), and evil kids (lashing out at others for the pain inflicted upon them), and needy kids (who can never get enough of anything you might offer and always demand more, MORE, MORE!) Sometimes they drive you insane and make you want to resign and leave the country to go count penguins in Antarctica. But the Doctor is right. No matter what has been done to them, if you get to know them, and treat them as individual people rather than as problems… they are delightful! 
So let me show you a few old drawings of people.
Cute people like Andrew here.
Or possibly stupid and goofy people who never get things right.
Or long-dead people who made their contributions long ago, and sacrificed everything to make our lives different… if not better.
Or young people who live and learn and hopefully love…
And try really hard at whatever they do… whether they have talent or not.
And hope and dream and play and laugh…
And sometimes hate… (but hopefully not too much)…
And can probably tell that I really like to draw people…
Because God made them all for a reason…
even if we will never find out what that reason is.
Filed under art my Grandpa loved, humor, Paffooney, philosophy
Yes, there was frost on the ground in the Dallas suburbs today. A bit of fog too. And I mean that both literally and figuratively, in a very Robert Frost-ian sort of way. The air was clean and cold and crisp for a change. I could see, hear, breathe, and think well for a change in this gawd-awful city of death and decay. It was poetically, virtually, and monumentally a moment of clarity… such clarity that only three adjectives could possibly be enough to provide the complex understanding of my Robert Frost moment.
My typical apology for living, and for writing this, and for making you read it comes in the second paragraph today. You have to forgive me for being so much of an English teacher. Do you know who Robert Frost is? Frost is a great american poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times in the 20th Century. Does that really tell you who Frost is? Of course not. Only this does;
The Road Not Taken
a poem by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,,
And that has made all the difference.
Yes, like Robert Frost, I took the road less traveled by in life. Having a gift for creative writing, drawing cartoons, and generally being seriously silly and obtuse (and claiming that meant I was funny), I chose to not be a novelist and cartoonist when I was young. I chose to be a school teacher. Of course, if you pin me down and ask me, requiring me to answer before you let me up, and threatening to spit on my nose if I don’t answer, I will tell you that God really decided I needed to be a teacher. After all, I developed arthritis that effected how often and how long I could spend drawing. I had the usual novelist’s problem of a keen awareness of how to write, and no real life experiences to write about. But even though it was a holy mission from God, it was my own decision to become a teacher.
And look what I got from it.
This is a picture of Freddy. I started this picture in 1986, drawing the portrait from a photo and from real life. Freddy was a vato loco from Cotulla. He is the sort of kid that teachers dread. He is the kind that if you let him sit in the back of the room, he will shoot spit-wads into the girls’ hair… but if you put him up front, he is constantly putting on a show, a stand-up-sit-down-again comedy routine for the entire classroom. And I had the honor of being his favorite teacher both in his seventh and eighth grade years. He made me laugh almost as much as he was laughing at me. He claimed he was a Mexican even though he was born in the U.S. and has always lived in the U.S. and if he goes to Mexico, they won’t understand his Texican version of Spanish without an interpreter. (Now, you probably already know that I never use real names of people I write about in order to protect the innocent… or in Freddy’s case the only-mildly-guilty. But I haven’t actually revealed his name in this post. Alfredo Giovanni is such a common name in Texas that you will never be able to find him through research. And Alfredo Giovanni is a name I made up anyway.) By the time I actually put the color on this picture, Freddy will no longer look even remotely like this. He’s in his late forties and Hispanic. He probably weighs at least ten times what his tiny self did back in 1986. But I was honored to know him and teach him, even though I have more than a few gray hairs on my head that he specifically caused.
And that brings me to my final movement in this classical opus. Here is the difference I have made by choosing the path I chose. Now that poor health has forced me to retire from teaching, and I have a limited time left to me to pick up the novelist/cartoonist thing again, I have done so with passion and insight that I would not otherwise have had. I have crafted a novel in The Magical Miss Morgan based entirely on my experiences as a classroom teacher. It is the best thing I have ever written in my life. And one of the main characters, the rapscallion leader of the Pirates’ Club, Timothy Kellogg… is Freddy in fictional form.
Oh, it is true that the character is the son of a high school English teacher in my story, and he does have a lot in common with my own oldest son… but he is actually Freddy. The things he does and says (translated from Texican into Iowegian) and thinks and feels, are all Freddy. And how do I know what Freddy thinks and feels? Come on! I was Freddy’s favorite teacher. There is no way I would still be alive and sane unless I could read minds.
Two roads diverge on a frosty morning pathway in the park… One over the bridge into an entirely different life that I didn’t choose… and one that leads straight on into the new dawn… whatever the consequences of following it.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy, teaching
Catch a Falling Star 