Tag Archives: Recipes for Gingerbread Children

April 1, 2017 · 3:45 pm

Mickey Notes

This is the purple-furred Mickey Icon done Don Martin-style.

If you are one of those readers who has taken to regularly reading Mickey posts on Catch a Falling Star ( a habit that is probably bad for you, but certainly not fatal), there are some things and random recent developments that you should probably be made aware of.

Mickey recently finished a rough-draft novel. After giving birth to a massive 12-month-long-gestating thought artifact like that, there is bound to be some necessary recovery time involved. He may be difficult to understand for a while as he puts the pieces of his psyche back together again. Using mental duct tape for such things takes time and patience.
The novel is called Recipes for Gingerbread Children. If that arouses curiosity in you (a condition that I also hope is not fatal… You are not a cat, are you?), there are instances of rants and delusional spoutings about this story to be found in recent posts on this blog. Unfortunately, it will not be published immediately. You will have to wait to actually read it until I or my heirs eventually get it published… by whatever means necessary (though I have my doubts about the plan involving kidnapped alien slaves and mimeograph machines.)
The novel I do have nearing publication is Magical Miss Morgan. I recently submitted approval for final edits to my project manager for Page Publishing. Since I am investing my own money in this publication project, I am expecting that it will get published before 2017 is done. I will continue to relentlessly plug the thing here.
Page Publishing is a less expensive and less professional publisher than I-Universe that did Catch a Falling Star for me. If you are reading this for ideas about pursuing publication yourself, I would recommend the more expensive publisher first, due to the quality of their professional editors, though I intend to continue publishing my books with less expensive self-publishing options like Amazon from here on. As I finish the publishing process I am now involved in, I promise to complain about publishers and throw Mark-Twain-like insult fits in future blog posts. No one should have to repeat the egregious mistakes that Mickey has made.
Catch a Falling Star, the blog, will continue to be a blog about my artwork, my story-telling, my teacher memories, and my generally confusing and bombastic opinions about life, the universe, and everything… including pies. Mmm! Pies are good. You might even want to look at my essay on Gooseberry Pie.

In case you were not aware of it, this purple mouse-man is Mickey, and Mickey is the writer-spirit within me. Mickey is not actually me. You know how Mark Twain is not really a real person? The real person was Samuel Langhorn Clemens. Mickey is not a really real person either. Michael Beyer, cartoonist, writer, and former middle school teacher is the real person… if any former middle school teacher can ever be considered a real person.

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Filed under feeling sorry for myself, humor, Mickey, novel, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, publishing, strange and wonderful ideas about life, work in progress, writing, writing humor

Tagged as blogging, Catch a Falling Star, Magical Miss Morgan, publishing, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, writing

March 27, 2017 · 11:08 am

The Hardest Part to Write

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I finished a novel rough draft today. But the end is not the hardest part to write. Well, this one was, but not because it was the end of the story. It was the part where a character you have carefully crafted over time, and really learned to love, has to die because that is simply how the story goes. It was not a sad death, or an unresolved death, as such. It was a fulfilled life of meaning and magic that simply came to its ending point. My own real-life story may come to an end sometime in near the future too, and I can only hope it is half as much a satisfying completion as this one was. And yet, my heart is sore from having written it.

The novel is called Recipes for Gingerbread Children. It is a story of a little old lady. She is alone in the world, except for the people in the little Iowa town where she is now living, especially the middle school age people who gather at her house to eat her gingerbread cookies and listen to her German fairy tales. She was also a concentration camp survivor, so this story has Nazis in it. Don’t worry though. They are dead Nazis. And there is a werewolf in it. But only a baby werewolf. Oh, and there are two twin teenage girls who are practicing nudists in it. But you probably aren’t worried about them. There are also fairies in it. She tells fairy stories, after all. And the whole book is more or less a collection of fairy stories. And there is a lot of magical gingerbread cookies.

But I had to write the “character dies” part that I knew was coming for about six months. It is the part that will make or break the story. It is the part I will most need to polish and rewrite. But the fact remains, the story ends with a death. So there is that. Life with gingerbread in it is also life that eventually comes to an end.

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And that part of the story is always really, really hard to write.

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Filed under feeling sorry for myself, humor, new projects, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, writing

Tagged as finishing a novel, humor, novel writing, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, writing fiction

January 13, 2017 · 12:18 pm

Unrepentant Blog Plans

I am not out of things to write about. In fact, I have far more ideas than I have time to manage. So I will waste some time I don’t have in plotting out the way forward through the creative jungle.

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I am at the climax of the novel Stardusters and Space Lizards. I have seen by posting it chapter by chapter here that I must not only finish it, as a good, timely science fiction novel, but that I must experiment with publishing the entire thing on my blog. I may later self-publish the thing, but you will get the chance to see the entire rough draft here… on Tuesdays.

I also have several cartoon series that I want to expand upon and publish here. That includes my Action Figure Follies, my Tales From Fantastica, and Hidden Kingdom. These are also posted in my vault, Mickey’s House of Fiction.

I want to post further on what I am learning about the perilous publishing journey that I hope to complete before I die, sharing with you some of the many secrets, tricks, hopes, and foolishnesses I have used to shoot myself in both feet and sink myself into the quicksand of author anonymity.

I have a post in mind about the YouTube videos of the NerdWriter, an auteur of infinite and in-depth ideas. I want to share some of his amazing work and insights with you.

And the conspiracy theorist inside me is bursting to get out with everything I have learned about William Shakespeare. who has never really been who we think he is, and the very solid evidence of why I believe in this loony conspiracy theory when I don’t believe that the moon landing was faked by Franco Zeffirelli.

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At some point, too, I need to let you in on the creative processes that occur as I write the novel Recipes For Gingerbread Children. It seems to be another inevitable novel that has to come out of me before my stupid old story-teller head explodes with it.

And maybe I need to explain who Dr. Seabreez is, and why there is more than just one me traveling through time and space and laughter.

I know that is a lot to threaten you with all at once, and you may find a post like this extremely boring. In fact, you may have given up reading already. But I do intend to make these writing abominations actually occur, so you may as well grit your teeth and get ready as the creative wheels turn, or have a flat, or grow spikes… something like that.

Saturdays With Gingerbread

This is the pen and ink start of an illustration of the novel I am working on, Recipes for Gingerbread Children.

I admit that my obsession with the benefits of gingerbread is mostly in my head. Specifically, in my sinuses. I find products with ginger in them, diet ginger ale, ginger teas, and especially gingerbread cookies, help reduce the tightness in my COPD-laced lungs, clear my sinuses, and make breathing mercifully easier. Gingerbread cookies are also seasonally wonderful in that they are slightly Christmassy and help bring my family together.

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So, yesterday, a Saturday, my daughter the Princess and I executed a perfectly evil plan to commit evil acts of gingerbread and whip up some wicked little gingerbread men in a frenzy of deliciously evil bakery.

Okay, maybe not evil exactly… but I have diabetes and the Princess desperately wants to lose some weight, neither condition being one that benefits by having the temptation of wicked little gingerbread men around.

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And, as with any evil plan, many things proceeded to go awry. We did not have any actual flour available to make the gingerbread dough less butter-and-egg sticky. All we had was some corn starch… which had bugs in it. After struggling to craft sticky little bodies a few times, we decided to go ahead and use the tainted corn starch. After all, a few little larvae that get overlooked and not picked out will only add a bit of extra protein, right?

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And we had the added bonus that you can make just as much mess with corn starch and margarine as you can with flour and butter!

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But we did get the corn-starchy little buggers baked. (And they were probably literally buggers due to the potential for having bugs in them. Oh well, it should fortify the old immune systems.)

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The only decoration we had was chocolate frosting, since someone ate all the sprinkles and sugar dots we bought last year for the gingerbread house. (Don’t look at me. I have diabetes.) So we frosted them, prompting the Princess to begin calling them “little burnt souls blackened in hell”.

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So then the cookie cannibals could allow the eating to begin.

Mmmm! Good cookie!

Okay, I know it looks like the Princess did all the work, and all I did was eat them. But somebody had to do the hard work of taking all the pictures, right?

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Filed under bugs, fairies, family, humor, illustrations, imagination, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as baking cookies, cookies!, family, gingerbread, happiness, happiness to the point of stupidity, health, humor, Recipes for Gingerbread Children

November 5, 2016 · 3:31 pm

What Mickey is Really Up to Now

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I have not been well. Six incurable diseases combined with colder, wetter weather will do that.

But Mickey has been busy. Yes, my goofy writer alter ego has been pecking away at a novel that pushes the boundaries of “strange” into a purple dimension where having a president that looks like a racist sour-lemon-flavored cookie dipped repeatedly in Orange Fanta with fingers covering the eye holes almost makes sense.

The novel is called Rezepte für Lebkuchen-Kinder which translates to Recipes for Gingerbread Children. The more I let Mickey work on it, the stranger it gets. It currently is about an old German lady who lives in a little Iowa town where she likes to bake gingerbread for children. But it is also a fairy tale where the fairies of Tellosia are still fighting their never-ending war against darkness. And in this story with a magical fairy war in it, there are gingerbread men who magically come to life. There are also teenage nudists, evil Nazis from the past, fairy tales that can solve life’s problems, and a lurking possibility of werewolves. (This is a companion novel to The Baby Werewolf and happens simultaneously to that story.) It has hit the 20,000 word mark. And you know how novel writing works. Too many words all put together into the same thing will magically merge and metastasize into book form. I know this is true, because I’ve seen Mickey do it before.

Grandma Gretel Stein talking with fairy General Tuffaney Swift.

Granny Quest 2016; Not the Conclusion, but Close

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Here is the result of my colored-pencil push for Granny Quest 2016. This is not the final picture of Grandma Gretel Stein that I will need to do in the course of this novel project. But it is the first real accomplishment in defining what she actually looks like. Work continues on the novel, but today is a busy day. My wife is returning from a month in the Philippines today. My son is taking driver’s education as I write this. My daughter is busy trying to clean the messy house that I have characterized as Muck Man’s Swamp in previous humorous posts with a superhero theme and an unfortunately too-accurate-to-be-weathered-without-shame sort of basis in fact. The Princess is determined to reach a point where she can invite friends over this summer without having to claim she was kidnapped and raised by a tribe of baboons. So, as always, the potential for utter disaster looms large, and I anticipate having something to write about where I can turn disaster into laughter. It’s what I do. It is my real super power. (Although the stunning of villains with pungent odors thing is also pretty effective and pretty nearly reality.)

Tag Archives: Recipes for Gingerbread Children

Mickey Notes

The Hardest Part to Write

Unrepentant Blog Plans

Saturdays With Gingerbread

What Mickey is Really Up to Now

Granny Quest 2016; Not the Conclusion, but Close

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