Tag Archives: Paffoonies

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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December 22, 2014 · 4:34 am

How to Rip Your Own Heart Out in Three Easy Steps

Okay, I do admit that the title is entirely misleading and wholly inaccurate, but it got you wondering…  Didn’t it?  I have apparently developed tachycardia, a condition where the heart races and beats like a jackhammer plugged into a nuclear reactor.  It is not fatal in itself, though it may lead to heart attack or stroke which are definitely in the fatal category.  Yesterday I did two things about that little heart condition, one which hopefully helped, and another which definitely hurt.  So, let me tell you a fairy tale.

Magnolia No kidding.  It is a fairy tale about novel writing, feeling like a murderer, and cardiologists.

Step one… I went to the cardiologist in Plano, Texas.  I have had a heart monitor taped to my chest for three weeks.  I have to push the record button three or four times every night.  The tachycardia is a night-stalker, hitting me while I’m asleep.  Then it shakes me awake, makes me sweat and fret and try to decide if I need to go to the emergency room or not.  I lie awake worrying just long enough that when I awake in the morning I am a sleepless, colorless zombie that feels the need to stay in bed all day, but can’t for fear the heart problem will attack again at any moment.  The heart monitor itself likes to complain and make a nasty beeping noise to irritate my sleep-deprived brain, and the places where the electrodes are taped to my chest are so itchy from three weeks of sticky plastic thingies stuck to them that I want to claw my own skin off.

At the cardiologists office, I had a sonogram done.  They used sound waves to map out what my beating heart looked like and how the blood was flowing through it in daylight.  The objective was to make certain that there were no holes or lumps or discarded candy wrappers in there that would require surgery.  So I got probed with a hot sonogram beeper offset with cold contact gel, and wouldn’t you know it… I didn’t even get to take the heart monitor off for the procedure.  No rest for wicked, itchy chests.  But on the up side, I did not at any point notice the technician shaking her head sadly or calling for an ambulance.  There were no immediate negative results to the testing.  So now I get to fight tachycardia some more without knowing anything more about my condition until the doctor explains on December 30th.

Step Two…  I am using my down time to continue writing my NaNoWriMo novel, The Magical Miss Morgan, which I didn’t finish in November.  It is a story about a sixth grade English teacher based on personal experience, when I taught sixth graders myself and was a woman… wait, that can’t be right.  Is it possible that tachycardia effects the brain after a while?  The novel has a number of characters who are fairies.  Willowleaf(I did say this was based on real life experiences, didn’t I?)  The fairies get involved with an irate parent, trying to help the teacher who has befriended them, and I am at the critical part of the plot where a crisis point is reached and a murder is about to take place.  (The usual for parent-teacher conferences.)  Anyway the conflict comes to a boil, and though the murder is prevented, a fairy is killed in the prevention of it.  And it isn’t just any fairy.  It is my favorite among all the foofy little buggers.  I wrote that part on Monday and edit it into permanence yesterday.

Step Three…  I spent half an hour crying my eyes out.  I know it is not normal to be so affected by the unexpected death of a beloved character, but I can blame it on the tachycardia.  It kept me awake so much, and I am such a sleep-deprived zombie-writer that it is possible that I dreamed the whole thing.  I may discover when I reread it for a fourth time that the fairy character didn’t die after all.  Except… no, wait… that’s not what it says.  I need to finish this up now so that I can go on another half-hour crying jag.  I have no one to blame except myself.  And I can’t even write the character back to life (though I may try) because the scene is just too good the way it is.  Oh, well… hopefully soon the cardiologist can give me a magic pill to make everything all better.

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December 20, 2014 · 4:30 pm

For the Birds

Redbirds

If you have looked carefully at my blog and tried to make sense of it, you have probably noticed that sense is hard to make.  It certainly makes no cents.  Though, I am told by my writer and publisher friends that a blog is critical to marketing books, I really and truly have not figured out how.  I am guessing here, but successful authors must do what they love in their blogs and hope that leads people to think seriously about buying a book with their name on it.  But will people ever want the frabjous daylight that makes them say “caloo calay!” from my burbling books filled with nonsense and purple paisley prose?

Maybe I need to clarify what I write about.  Hmm, how do I do that?  I end up with such a plethora of scattered categories… err cattered scattergories… err, no… right the first time, that no one can make a mental framework that accurately describes my work… including me.  But I have to try… even if it kills me… but if it wants to kill me, I already have six incurable diseases (maybe seven) and am a cancer survivor, so it will have to take a number and get in line.

The bird-word post I did yesterday is what I call humor.  It is pun-ish if not punny, but possibly pun-ishable.  I like word play and word pictures and rhymes and alliteration, all the stuff that my serious writer friends warn me against.  Mark Twain, whom I actually deeply respect, says “When considering the adjective, cut it out!”  But I find myself unable to do that.  I have to spread the adjectives on two or three layers thick like butter, jam, and peanut butter.  I never use one word for something when I can use seven.  So part of the style that is mine is excessively goopy phraseology.  I guess I write like I talk and, since it’s humor, I actively try to talk funny.

What else can I say is characteristic of what I do?  Well I was a teacher for three hundred and ten years (possibly divisible by ten).  That may have impacted the way I write and what I write about.  I am pigeon-holed in the Young Adult novel genre because I write mainly about school age, particularly junior-high-aged, kids… Their problems with corresponding creative solutions, and the kind of things that make them laugh (there’s a lot of pigeons in that hole!).  Education issues are important to me.  That is probably the key reason that the novel I am working on today, The Magical Miss Morgan, is about a classroom teacher.  I hope that doesn’t limit me to an entirely kid-audience, because adults have the book-buying money, and not every adult gives in to a kid whining about wanting to buy a book (because most kids don’t and there are adults who don’t have kids).  (Besides, says another aside, kids is really little goats who eat books before they read them).

Finally, I am a student of art.  I search for it, chew on it, digest it, rearrange it in my heart and guts, and spit it back out with colored pencils (Dang!  I must be a kid too, at least at heart).  In my blog I have written about and shared with you Norman Rockwell, Paul Detlafsen, Thomas Kinkade, Maxfield Parrish, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Frederick Remington.  I know of a few more like George Herriman, Cliff Sterrit, and E.C, Segar that I am compelled to write about too.  Oh, and N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Milt Caniff.  Uh-oh, better stop before another list comes on.  So, in conclusion, this whole mess will never really be concluded and since it’s convoluted, it will get all mangled up and end up back where it began.  I have tried to make sense out of everything, but instead I’ve just made soup… or if I take out the broth… stew!

Blue birds

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December 19, 2014 · 9:22 pm

The Truest of Magicks

Okay, life is like this; you are born, a lot of dumb stuff happens that you are mostly not in control of, you suffer a little bit, you are happy a little bit, and then you die.   That is a pretty gloomy prospect, and most of us spend our entire lives obsessing over it, examining it with microscopes, doctoring it with needles and potions and chainsaws, trying to make it last a little longer, wailing and complaining about our sorry allotment, and wasting what little time we have.  So what secret exists that could ever make a difference?  Could ever open up our eyes… even just a tiny bit?

Zoric

The secret, as far as I can tell (and I am certainly one of the dumber and more random among you because I am cursed with insight and wisdom won through suffering and making huge mistakes), is reading the right books.

Eli Tragedy

I am not alone in this sort of thinking.  There are those who believe that if you gather the best books together into a personal library and read them, they add experiences and knowledge to your life that you would not otherwise have.  (Of course, one must acknowledge, especially if you read fiction, that most books are filled with lies and misinformation, and some, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus leaps to mind, might leave you stupider than you were when you started.)  It deepens, broadens, and intensely colors the experience of life.

Skorpio

People who read books a lot… really read them, and re-read them, and collect them, and study them, and think about and write about them… are called wizards.  Wizards are wise men.  It is what the word means.  Being one does not make you better than anyone else.  In fact, wizards are generally weaker than normal men.  It comes from all that ruining of eyes and fuddling up brains with too much thinking.  You don’t want a wizard to back you up in a fist fight.  You will certainly lose.  And you don’t want a wizard to tell you how live your life.  They are not good role models.  But if a wizard tells a story, you should listen.  Because if you really listen, and the wizard is really wise, you can expand the borders of your life, and push on nearer to immortality.

Ice Alchemist

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December 17, 2014 · 9:41 pm

Beast Men

I recently broke out my old Talislanta Dungeons and Dragons book.  It contains drawings from the late 80’s and early 90’s in which the never-ending adventure went to the world of Talislanta where there are no elves or dwarves or goblins.  The primary enemy were the beast men.  They inhabited the great plains in the middle of the world.  They were ravenous, and mostly evil… but a few were adopted as heroes and heroes’ companions.  Here’s a look at the good guys and bad guys I found in the Plains of the Beastmen of Golarin.

Beast Man Blood Brothers Dar Wolverin Hal Vas Pahluks

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December 16, 2014 · 7:00 pm

Magical Moments

There comes a time, a moment of truth, in which a decision has to be made, a problem has to be solved.  In the teaching business those moments can occur once per hour, or fifty times in the space of two minutes.  You can bat 900, hit nine out of every ten out of the park, and still come out on the losing end.  More often than not, you lose.  You continue to get it wrong, and you feel totally defeated at the end of the day.  No World Series of education for you.  Sorry about that.  But once in a while, you do not fail.  You say the perfect thing to diffuse the situation.  You think of the perfect example that, once explained, turns on every light bulb in every head in the room.  That is magic.  That is the reason you teach.

class Miss Mcover

I am writing a novel right now, The Magical Miss Morgan, about a teacher.  Without making a mystery about it, the teacher in the story, Miss Francis Morgan, is really me.  I am basing this story on things that actually happened to me.  Now, before the yelling and the accusations start, I will confess that I realize I am a male teacher and the main character is female, and there are things a female teacher does all the time, like hugging a student, that a male teacher can never do.  And I must also confess that this teacher I am writing about loves all her students, even the ugly and stupid ones, and that is probably only true for teachers who really are magical.  I further realize that the fairies in the story, just like the ones in Peter Pan, are not real outside of the story being told.  I’m not insane… well, okay, I’m a teacher… a middle school teacher… so let’s just say I am not completely insane.

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But there is real magic.  It happens in that moment when you desperately need that perfect solution to pop out of the magic hat like a white rabbit and say, “Howdy!”  Because if you have the courage to reach into that hat and pull the rabbit out, more often than not, it is there.  And it doesn’t end when the teaching ends.  I hit the wall with this novel at about 30,000 words.  I wrote myself into a corner with no way out.  But then I realized that I already had the answer.  I am basing this story on what really happened.  So, all I have to do is turn me into her and sprinkle some fairy dust, and voila! the rest of the novel is already plotted and as good as written.  Everything fell into place in only a moment.

Magical Moment

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December 12, 2014 · 9:31 pm

My Own Race of Aliens

In Catch a Falling Star, the only good novel I have actually in print so far, I have a race of aliens called the Tellerons.  They are an unusual sort of green men from Mars.   They are green,and they have a base on Mars, but they are from a distant star system in the local group and the swampy world called Telleri that orbits that far star.  The ones in my book come from the space station their empire established in the Barnard’s Star system, where the characters in my stories were all born.  They are also not men.  They are amphibianoid beings, frog people.  They have never set foot on the home planet.  Here are two aliens who are crucial characters in Catch a Falling Star.

My Art 2 of Davalon

These two are Farbick the Navigator and young Davalon the tadpole.  Farbick is a very wise and loving male Telleron who gets foully treated for his racial differences.  I know you and I can’t really tell by looking, but his race is Sindalusian Fmoog.  You can tell by the yellowish cast to his amphibian face.  Oh, and there’s something funny with his ears.  Davalon is the son of the Telleron captain, Xiar.  He loves Farbick who has been more of a father figure to him than Xiar has.  Dav is unusually bright for a Telleron, just as Farbick is recognizably more competent than others of the Fmoogish race.  You might actually think, if they were the only two Tellerons you ever met, that their people are highly inquisitive, intelligent, and have no racial prejudices at all.  Of course you would be highly incorrect and most sincerely wrong.

I have started work on a sequel to Catch a Falling Star.  I am calling it Stardusters and Lizard Men.  It follows the crew of Xiar the Slightly Irregular’s Base Ship in their adventures following the invasion of Earth.  They accidentally fix the on-board computer systems by correcting a math error in navigation that had been present for more than 100 years of star travel in the Telleron Empire.  Of course this means that all of their space coordinates for every destination they know are wrong.  And so, without hope of ever returning anywhere else in the universe, they arrive at Galtorr Prime, the planet of the infamous carnivorous  reptile people.  They will have to colonize or die.  And the Galtorrians are just like Earthers, except, they have a society that is even more corrupt, greedy, prejudiced, and hateful (if such a thing is even possible).  I hope to show in this story what human society may become on the path we are currently following, so it will be a kind of post-apocalyptic bit of science fiction set on a world that is not Earth.

My Art

These two female Telleron tadpoles are Brekka and Menolly.  They are dancing to Mickey Mouse Club music because Tellerons, quite naturally, have been totally corrupted by Earther television shows.  Galactic English, the language all Tellerons speak, is based on the language of old I Love Lucy television episodes, the favorite show on the home-worlds of the entire empire.

George Jetson

Meet George Jetson.  He is named after one of his father’s favorite shows from the 1960’s.  He is one of the Telleron tadpoles that will take the lead in exploring the dark and dangerous planet of the lizard-guys.

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December 2, 2014 · 8:37 pm

The Rest of my Classroom Gallery

Here’s what’s left in my camera from school white boards and lessons.

Photo0107 Photo0110 Photo0112 Photo0118 Photo0123 Photo0126 Photo0127 Photo0133 Photo0137 Photo0139 Photo0144 Photo0146 Photo0149 Photo0142There you have it, the results of 31 years of doodling on the chalkboard (which became the dry erase board).  And yes, I did tell them the cartoon fairy drew all the pictures.  Especially when they were in my class for the second or third year when they asked, “Who does all the pictures on the board?”  And yes, I started doing this back in dinosaur days in white chalk on a green blackboard, followed by colored chalk, which later became a gray marker-board for washable marker, and finally became dry erase white board.  And I really bought my own chalk and markers too.  Teachers do that, you know.

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November 30, 2014 · 5:27 pm

Cartoon Board-Work

I admit it.  I was a goofy teacher.  Kids never knew for sure whether I was serious, joking, or halfway in-between.  I worked for hours sometimes preparing the chalkboard, or later, white board, for the days lesson, putting key points and reminders up in cartoon form.  I used characters, symbols, jokes, pokes, and silliness to get the idea across.  Principals and others who evaluated my teaching always wondered why my classroom sounded so raucous and wild from outside the door with kids laughing, music playing, and sometimes desks being shuffled and shoved around the room.  The perfect-classroom-is-a-quiet-classroom crowd always hated my teaching style.  But the ones who came in and participated, got involved in paying attention and watching the kids interact with the content loved it.  I am not bragging.  My lesson plans were a mess filled with booby traps, explosions waiting to happen, un-intended consequences (also called teachable moments), and brainstorms that threatened at any moment to electrocute somebody with lightning.  Teaching is a dangerous business.  But the point is, there is an art to teaching that brings out the artist in you.  I offer the following evidence;

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November 23, 2014 · 4:34 pm

A Bildungsroman von Michael Beyer

class Miss Mcover

Okay, I know it’s in German.  Being from a German-American family from Iowa in a mostly Germanic/Scandinavian little Midwestern town, everything I write is in German, even though it’s written in English.  So let me explain my square-headed German logic here.   Here is a quote from Wikipedia to define it;  “In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman (German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːn]; German: “novel of formation/education/culture”), novel of formation, novel of education, or coming-of-age story (though it may also be known as a subset of the coming-of-age story) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age), and in which, therefore, character change is extremely important.”  I wrote one of these previously.  My episodic tale of a young boy who is the new kid in the small Iowa town and through experience learns to become one of the gang, is called Superchicken.  superchick_novel  It is an example of the coming-of-age tale that closely follows the pattern.  Edward Campbell has to learn the hard way that being mature both physically and emotionally is really hard work, and you can fall short of your goal without even meaning to.  But his opposition to his parents’ rules and sense of propriety eventually leads to acceptance.

Miss Morgan, however, follows a slightly skewed version of the pattern.  In the novel, Francis Morgan is a good teacher and mature woman at the very start.  She has convictions about teaching and how to handle students that she is willing to fight for.  And society around her seems to want to break her of her habits and convictions.  Principals and school boards can bring enormous pressure on a teacher, and they generally don’t want to hear you’ve been teaching magic in the classroom.  She is going to learn lessons the hard way, whether she wants to or not.  But it is entirely possible that she will not change, not give in to society’s demands.  I don’t think, however, that it means that she won’t mature and change in some very important ways.

I am working on this novel, The Magical Miss Morgan, this month.  It fills me up and then exhausts me.  It uses up most of my hard-won wisdom from my years as a teacher, and I am hoping it will turn out to be the best thing I have ever written.

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