Tag Archives: satire

January 3, 2014 · 8:25 pm

Beautiful Barbie Dolls

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This is only a small part of the collection that sits on bedroom shelves.

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Star Wars 12″ Action Figures are a large part of my collection.

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Star Wars is not my only obsession.  Captain Action caught my heart in the 1960’s.

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Vintage Captain Action (circa 1967-68) (I always wanted to use “circa” somewhere in my writing.)

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My newest Captain Action and Dr. Evil.

 

Beautiful Barbie Dolls

Believe it or not, I like to play with dolls.  It all started in 1965 with a Navy G.I. Joe doll.  I had a black rubber scuba suit for him and it was the neatest toy I owned.  My sister had a Barbie’s friend Midge doll.  The comic-book adventures of the romantic heroes, Midge and Joe began that year.  I added a Captain Action with an Aquaman suit along with a German G.I. Joe and an Astronaut Joe with a Mercury Capsule.  My sister added a dark-skinned Christie doll and little sister had a Tammy doll.  I built a submarine/spaceship with my Constructor Set, and then the adventures were really off into the blue.

Today I collect Barbie-dolls, G.I. Joe action figures, Captain Action figures and suits, and a hodgepodge of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Planet of the Apes 12″ figures.  I am not ashamed to call them my doll collection.  I use my wife and daughter as an excuse for buying Barbies and my two sons as an excuse for buying the rest, but it is entirely me who is obsessed with dolls and doll clothes.  Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I will always be ten years old when I have a doll or action figure in my silly old hands.

There is something really absorbing about dolls.  My mother made them in a kiln we bought one summer.  She fired beautiful works of porcelain, painted, stuffed, and dressed them, an expensive obsession, but cheaper than buying them.  I know a fellow through e-Bay who molds his own reproduced Captain Action masks, and I’ve seriously thought that toy-making might be my next business.  Who knows?  Obsessions are often the best sort of inspiration.

Did you know Barbie started life as a German prostitute doll named Lily?  Mattel copied one brought back from Europe after World War Two.  G.I. Joe wouldn’t have existed if some bright boy hadn’t decided that little boys would accept the same doll-and-changeable-uniform toy if it was marketed as a fighting man action figure!  Captain Action was Ideal Toy Company’s plan to use superheroes to make an action figure to compete with Hasbro’s G.I. Joe.  The current market in dolls as collectibles is now driven by doll-playing old men like me, Baby-Boomers who long to recapture youth by recapturing the toys of their childhoods.  At least I am not the only Peter-Pan-Syndrome, sad old obsessed guy out there!

Take my advice.  If you have to develop a vice, ignore booze, drugs, and sex.  Stay away from identity theft and computer porn.  Go buy a doll, and see if it doesn’t bring back the child in you!

 

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January 1, 2014 · 9:37 pm

Wrestling with Themes

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I recently was advised by a fellow blogger to offer a few writing tips on my blog as a way to painlessly market my writing.  Okay, I’m a writing teacher, so I can do that.  But in my own writing I have hit a snag.  Yes, there are things much, much bigger than my humble skill as a writer.

My current novel project, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius has grown into a science-fiction monster.  It is not only about a scientist who has secret government connections, but about time travel and people changing into rabbits… or rabbits into people… or boys into girls… dogs and cats living together…   No, that is Ghostbusters. 

But it has reached a point where the most important theme is incredibly clear and difficult to deal with.  The theme I find myself weaving into this story is;  “All men are basically good.”   Gongah!  Wotta theme to try to write!  Do I believe it?  Of course I do.  Can I put the story together in such a way that  I illustrate it to the reader’s satisfaction?  Of course I can’t.  So what do I do?  This story has some of the best villains and evil people in it that I have ever written.  I can’t kill them off to solve the story’s plot problems (Well, I can, but I don’t want to).  I have to show how evil can be redeemed.

My cast of characters include the scientist himself, calmly dealing with time travelers, invading aliens, government assassins, and a group of young boys known as the Norwall Pirates.  There is a time traveler who appeared in a book within a book in my novel Catch a Falling Star.  There is also an alien space navigator who has been shot by a local Iowa Deputy Marshall and stranded on Earth.  Another character is an artificial man, an automaton who has been crafted as a government assassin made from alien technology.  Okay, I know you don’t believe I can make serious science fiction out of such crazy-quilt characters, especially with a primary theme like the one I’ve claimed.  So, I have to confess that it is not serious in any way, shape, or form.  It is a silly fantasy comedy.

So, how do I generate a theme as big and bold and important as the goodness of all men?  Well, here’s a secret recipe;

  1. Take one genius who has lost all the people he loves and has to start over with new friends and, eventually, new family.
  2. Add a brother-in-law with mental health issues and financial dependency.
  3. Add a group of young boys hungry for adventure and new experiences and a little bit short on common sense.
  4. Add a paranoid evil government that has secrets it will kill to protect (the factual part of the story).
  5. Mix well.
  6. Add vinegar.
  7. Boil at 350 degrees for a year.

 

Of course, if you thought I was giving you real writing advice, then SURPRISE!  It turns out I have been making it all up as I go along.  That’s how you do it.  You write and write, knit it all together tenuously, and then edit the heck out of it, hoping to make sense of the whole thing.

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December 29, 2013 · 11:05 pm

The Surrealist Manifesto (Second Edition)

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(This, dear viewer, is called “Portrait from the Jungle”.  Three images from 1980 magazines put together in a surrealist manner.  It’s intentionally kinda creepy… that is of course why there is a chicken in it.  Chickens creep me out.)

 

The Surrealist Manifesto ; or Why I have to Juxtapose Silly Stuff to Make Meaning by Mishmashing

 

To begin with, you have to picture me as a seventeen-year-old geeky kid in High School Art Class in 1974.  Yes, I was four-eyed, but not with the cool round granny glasses, but the black horn-rims that were not only cheaper, but much more dramatically out of date and out of favor with my peers.    I was a participant in Art 3, a class that meant I was an Art nerd for the third time in only three years of high school.  Yes, I could draw well, and all the girls cooed in their sexy cheerleader voices, “Ooh, I just hate you because you can draw so darn good.”  And I would blush because it sounded like praise, even though you may notice they actually said they hated me.

Now that you have that awful image foremost in the inner eye of imagination, I can reveal that that was the year I discovered the work of Salvador Dali.  Yes, that’s right, the dumb old melted watches guy with the handlebar mustache that looked like he’d taken a pencil sharpener to both ends.  The melted watches, naked people with all their parts grotesquely stretched out and draped over stuff, and a soft sculpture that would thoroughly disgust anybody with baked beans scattered all around the foreground.  These were the elements of what was called the surrealist movement.  Surrealism, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, is filled with the element of surprise, unexpected juxtaposition, and non sequitur.    Silly old Andre Breton, the founder and chief sayer-of-what-is-true about surrealism, said that first of all it is a revolutionary movement.  Now, I grew up in a determinedly Republican and conservative household in North Central Iowa.  I had to look up juxtaposition in the dictionary just to know what the heck they were talking about.  Back then, of course, I used Webster’s, not Wikipedia.  I stood to lose significant portions of the hide on my behind if my family discovered I was using my swiftly enlarging and apparently all-knowing high school brain to investigate revolutionary ideas!  In fact, if I had realized that political surrealism had an affinity for both Freud and Communism, I probably would have closed the book on it myself.  Still, I was swept away.

I entered college a few years later convinced that my revolutionary art ideas were going to galvanize the world around me, that world being Cow College, otherwise known as Iowa State University.  I was going to revolutionize the novel form by writing everything about my little home town in Iowa and doing it in full color, comic book style panel cartoons.  My heroes would be small town people who took on the greatest of all issues in modern life and tackled them so brilliantly that it would create world peace, make universal happiness without the use of drugs, and be such great art that it would put my name in the art books right beside Salvador and Rene Magritte.  People would be studying my work for years to come.

This was the point in life in which I created some of my best characters, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius who shunned modern technology and created his own pedal-powered helicopter, the hippy hobo who wore a coat of many colors sewn together from pieces of patchwork quilts and ultimately knew the most important secrets of life, the universe, and everything, and of course, the numerous fools and clowns that would put Shakespeare’s Touchstone, Falstaff, and Bottom to shame.   I was going to revolutionize story-telling in cartoons! 

As you know, someone else invented the graphic novel.  I don’t even know for sure that I had the idea first.  Probably not.  And, with my lifetime of luck reminiscent of Joe Btfsplk, I developed arthritis at the age of 18 and had to curb my obsession with drawing comics.

So, a thirty year career as a middle school and high school English teacher taught me that life is a series of surprises, juxtapositions of an unexpected variety, and non sequiturs.  Where had I heard that before?  Ah, yes!  I had realized that life is an exercise in surrealism.  Therefore, now that I am finally on track to become the story-teller that I set out to be, I will be a surrealist.  I will take the surreal bull by his electric pink and curly-cued horns and say, “Whoa, kitty-kitty, don’t permafrost this old wombat!”  Why will I say that?  Is it to be a surrealist like Dali?  Heavens to murgatroid, Baba Louie!  Of course it is!

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December 21, 2013 · 1:27 am

Autorumination (the reprise)

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(This is a black-and-white cartoon in pen and ink that I have shamelessly colorized with colored pencil.)

    I have to tell you, driving in Texas, especially the “Big D” is taking your life in your hands, gripping that old steering wheel in a grip of death, and trying like heck not to hit any of the myriad things flying in front of you.  I have had in my lifetime three accidents and too many near misses to count.  Drivers that don’t have their number of kills painted on the driver-side door are rare indeed.
    One of the scariest encounters on the road has to be the legendary Texas Killer Grandma.  They have a private club where they get together over knitting and compare the goriest kills they have managed with their oversized automobiles.  These old lady drivers are invariably white-skinned and have hair either of strange shades of blue and periwinkle, or silver, almost chrome.  They have Killer Grandma nicknames like Suicide Sadie and End-It-All Emma.  They drive big black Cadillacs, Buicks, and Mercedes.  They have mostly no-fault insurance that will guarantee they can mash your children in the back end of your family car without jail time, and usually without paying for a penny of your damages.  They cruise around Dallas watching for unwary drivers so they can leap in front without signaling, getting bashed from behind by the victim, and sending the victim swirling off the overpass to a fiery death and dismemberment.  Then they cackle all the way to the next club meeting.
    Killer Grandmas drive a class of vehicle I call the American Wasp Rocket.  These are large, unwieldy vehicles from Ford and GM that wreak havoc with smaller, slower cars, especially foreign-made cars like Toyotas, Subarus, and Volkswagens.  In the northern precincts of Dallas, Austin, and Houston, where these vehicles truly dominate, you will often see BMW, Volvo, or Italian Wasp Rockets, which are almost an oxymoron by their very nature.  (“I only buy them gol’ dang furrin cars iffen they’re status symbols, cause I only buy American, but I figgur high-dollar wagons like them thar Lambourginis count as American too!”)  These cars are all large enough to crush an SUV under their wheels, and, of course, they are only driven at hyper-speeds while winding their way through heavy traffic so the occupants can arrive anywhere they are going FIRST.  Besides Texas Killer Grandmas, there are few other drivers of these vehicles who aren’t over-weight, middle-aged white males who have high-paying white-collar jobs.
    The most common vehicles on Texas highways are, of course, the typical Bubba.  Bubba cars are always pick-up trucks, and almost always Chevys.  In fact, they almost have to be white, red, or brown, or they don’t count as a proper Bubba.  Bubbas drive like Foster Brooks on speed, always weaving, wobbling, wagging, and wrecking.  The highway is their own personal demolition derby, and if they don’t get you with a straight-on hood-smash, they’ll ding you with whatever falls out of the back of their pick-up (beer bottles, kids, used tires, tools, parts of the vehicle that have already fallen off once before, and sometimes ugly wives).
    A more-or-less brain-damaged sub-species of Bubba is the Billy Bob.  They drive Ford pickups, white, red, brown, and sometimes gold.  They will kill you no less quickly than a Bubba, but they do tend to have better insurance.
    Of course, I can’t even talk about Beaner cars.  It is not politically correct, as a young Hispanic student was pointing out to me just two weeks ago.  “I can say I’m a Beaner,” he said, “But you can’t say it because you’re a Gringo Loco.  Only Beaners are allowed to call a Beaner a Beaner.  You could be killed for saying that in the Barrio!  Even for thinking that!”  So, I won’t talk about those cars on the road in the fast lane doing a mere twenty-five miles per hour.  I won’t mention how they have eighteen kids and a Tia Carmen in the back seat and can’t see out with the rear view mirror.  I won’t even talk about the rosary beads, fuzzy dice, and numerous brightly colored stuffed animals that hang from the rear view mirror blocking the windshield also.  It just wouldn’t be nice to talk about that.
    So, I guess I have to sum up with a concluding statement that makes sense out of all of this Texas road-rage and bumper-car nonsense.  It would have to be something like this:  If you ever plan to drive in Texas, be prepared.  Have your burial plot purchased, your insurance paid up, and “Drive Friendly!”

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December 1, 2013 · 9:31 pm

What Does Paffooney Mean?

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You may have noticed the word “Paffooney” used in some of my posts.  You may have been deceived into thinking it is some kind of real word.  Sorry.  It isn’t.  It’s my own original made-up word for postable buffoonery, baloney, and goofiness… with accompanying picture.  Yes, the picture is the key, though it may have no discernible connection to whatever the heck I happen to be writing about.  It is an illustration for illustration’s sake… and a story for the sake of putting words with the picture.  I confessed early in my blogging endeavors that I am basically a surrealist.  I juxtapose disparate images and ideas and make meaning by forcing the relationship.  Of course, you have no idea at all what I just said, and rightly so, because I tend to speak in college-art-history-meta-cognitive-gobblety-gook-speak, a language I first learned in college and have since banged into weird word-sculptures over the last thirty-three years by trying to explain things in a classroom to teenagers.  (I love the job, but I do not recommend it for those with a loosening grip on sanity.)

So, here is the definition; Paffooney, proper noun, (Origin from a silly blogger’s head, consisting of Paff, meaning a silly cartoon sound effect, and fooney an even sillier derivation from buffoon and looney.)  A silly picture and post combination caused by a brain fart or other gaseous anomaly inside Mickey’s head.

Forgive me, for I know my sins are many.

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“A Portrait of Mark Twain”

Here is an old pencil drawing from 1980. It shows MT as an observer of all that country cornpone stuff that makes up his humor and written genius. It also shows the loyal dog that would dearly love to get his teeth into that piece of chicken.

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November 21, 2013 · 2:38 am
November 10, 2013 · 9:45 pm

Because Naked is Funny

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The nightmare is always about standing in front of class naked.  I had that nightmare as a kid.  I have it still as a teacher.  Why do I so fear having everyone see what I most don’t want them to see about me, and all of them really don’t want to see… especially if they have any ghost of an idea what that might actually look like in real life?  I would make an extremely poor nudist.  People would go blind.  Honestly.

And yet, I find myself writing about naked people far more often than is comfortable.  Why?  What’s the matter with me that the topic keeps coming up in my silly little fiction stories?  Why was it a part of my boyhood fixations that just won’t go away?  I am not a pornography writer, er, I mean erotic fiction writer, like some of the indie novelists I have met online.  I don’t actually even read that crap.  And yet, I seem to find the word “penis” used somewhere in every work of fiction that I have so far completed.  That doesn’t seem natural, does it?  Most of the instances in my fiction are not about adult people having sex.  They are instead about kid-people being caught au natural and deeply embarrassed.  They are about unwanted and unexpected revelations of what we most want to conceal about ourselves.  “No, Miss, I don’t have one of those.  And I never go to the bathroom, either.”

So why do I keep pulling the metaphorical privacy curtain away?  Because naked is funny.  Revealing the awkwardness and bare foolishness of our inner selves is what comedy is really all about.

Mark Twain once said, “Clothes make the man… naked people have little or no influence in society.”  This is a very wise saying that is probably entirely true, and is only mentioned here so that I can quote Mark Twain and pretend that, for a moment at least, I have grown suddenly and comically profound.  But I do think that clothes are the person we construct on the outside of ourselves to influence others and convince them of the lie that we are actually in control of anything at all in our goofy lives.  Under the clothes is more nearly the truth.  We do not choose what we look like.  Our birthday suit leaves no room to make any kind of impression other than, “what a silly-looking blob of naked pink fat that one is!”  And this is why I will at some point in a story strip my characters naked and reveal things about them that they would really rather hide.

Of course, you may have realized about the previous purple-faced paragraph that I am speaking at least partly metaphorically when I say I “strip my characters naked and reveal things about them that they would really rather hide.”   It is the person inside that you are trying to reveal, not necessarily the naked person.   It is probably inappropriate to dwell too much on nakedness when you write primarily for younger readers, even if you have pretensions of writing Mark-Twain-like literary quality kids’ lit the way I allegedly do.  Can you write a book like the Diaries of Adam and Eve in this day and age?  Probably not.  After all, it has naked people in it!

This topic comes up because of my first completed novel (not yet published) called Superchicken.  In that story, the main character, a seventh grader pictured in this week’s paffooney, is asked to be a guest on a camping trip by a pretty young girl who owes him a big favor.  But when she tells him it’s a naturist camp, he thinks that means they study nature and do back-to-nature stuff like making a fire with sticks.  Needless to say, he is surprised to learn that her very liberal parents are allowing her to invite him to a campground full of naked people.  Naked is funny.  But the book will invariably get me into trouble and called a pervert repeatedly.   But should I avoid trying to publish it because of that?  I think…  heck, I could make a lot of money with that kind of controversy.  

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October 19, 2013 · 6:30 pm

Monkey Mathematics

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(colored pencil, pen, & ink – entitled “Math Monkey” – by Leah Cim Reyeb (my name backwards))

It has been said that if you have an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters, and unlimited time, they will reproduce all the works of William Shakespeare.  Not only that, they will produce every other work of literature in every language on Earth that has ever been written… and that ever will be written, for all time.  Not only that, but every version of Hamlet that has one misspelled word, two misspelled words, three misspelled words… and so on to infinity.

I was having an argument recently with a boy from Brazil who insisted there was no God and Creator.  He claims to be an agnostic, but argues like an atheist.  He was trying to “save” me from my erroneous belief that there is an underlying intelligence and purpose to all of creation.  His intentions were good, but he failed to convince me before sailing off back to Sao Paulo.  Alas, I am unrelentingly still convinced that I am not wrong, as he apparently believed all school teachers are by definition.  Yes, it is written that way in the teenager’s guide to life, the universe, and everything.  “Teachers are clueless and only teach you the wrong stuff” – page two hundred and three, in Chapter Twelve, Adults are Always Wrong.  And, of course, I’m blaming it on the monkeys.  It’s always those danged monkeys and their typewriters.

I tried to explain that the whole infinite-monkeys thing is based on flawed math.  After all, math was invented by enraged Greeks who danced around naked in caves worshiping circles, squares, and right triangles.  Pythagoras must’ve really hated school kids.  He gave them all this froo-frah to learn about whole numbers, integers, algebra, and geometry and stuff, and then threw in theorems and equations to give them something to mind-numbingly practice at their desks in Math classes until they were no different from infinite-monkey typists. 

If you take a pile of bricks up to the top of a mountain and then throw them off, even if you throw them an infinite number of times, how often will they actually land in the configuration of the Parthenon?  …And the Parthenon with one brick out of place, and then two bricks, and …wasn’t the gol-danged Parthenon carved out of marble, not bricks?  If you believe all of reality is based on random chance, then you obviously are figuring that out with infinite-monkey math.  I’m not saying the Theory of Evolution is wrong.  That is ordered and principled in ways that fit Occam’s Razor and is probably just as correct as the Theory of Gravity (which we don’t fully understand, either, yet we don’t go flying off into space with each rotation of the Earth).

“Wait a minute!” screams the head monkey.  “Are you saying you believe in Evolution, or in Creation?”   (I am constantly hearing nearly-infinite monkeys screaming that nowadays.)

Shoot, I think both things are true.  You can’t deny what science offers proof for, fact or theory.  Yet, God speaks to me and comforts me, even though he doesn’t actually answer prayers.  The evidence of God is in all that he created, including the process of evolution, the monkeys, the typewriters (well… man-made is made by God too if he created man with inventive capabilities, right?), and even the voices in my silly head that I interpret as God talking.  Am I guilty of Infinite-monkey math?  I try not to be.  But I also try not to argue with Brazilian teenage agnostics about the existence of God.  Oh, well… can’t win ‘em all.

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October 7, 2013 · 6:50 pm

Of Rabbits and Men

I have been working on my novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and just now reached the part I originally planned back in 1977.  It, of course, has to deal with ten-year-old Tommy Bircher and his pet rabbit Millis.  Now, I must confess that Tommy is a real person.  He is based half on me (I was the rabbit raiser as a boy), and half on my best friend who was the Methodist Minister’s son.  The personality of the character is primarily my best friend Mark, and the inevitable parting of the two friends Tim and Tommy is based on us when his dad, the reverend, had to go to a new church in another part of Iowa.  Of course, in the book, we do to the rabbit Millis what it would’ve been impossible to do to my own alpha bunny Ember-eyes.    For those of you imagining how terrible two boys can be to a rabbit, let me give you an excerpt from the novel to explain how the boys in the story are far more terrible… but unintentionally so;

Canto Twenty-Seven – Behind the Computer Named Dewey

 

Millis was not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill dumb bunny.  He was, in fact, a highly educated rabbit.  He had eaten several of Tommy’s books.  He had chewed on the computer cords of Tommy’s video game machine and the shock it had given him had actually made him smarter.  He was more than a little conceited about how much smarter he was than other dumb bunnies. 

“You are a nicer boy than I am,” Millis heard the boy who was some sort of servant of Tommy say.  “You have a good heart and burble burble burble, blah, blah.”

The thing that had Millis’ attention was apparently a carrot.  Carrot!  Now, idiot people seemed to think that all rabbits loved carrots above all other food.  No way, monkey boy!  Nothing beats a good chunk of lettuce, a clump of yard grass, cabbage, leaves, and other green foods.  Green foods make a buck rabbit feel sexy.  But you never turned down a good carrot either. 

“Is it gonna hurt?” asked Tommy.  Tommy was a good boy.  He brought Millis green food, clover hay, salt licks, and water every day.  He almost never forgot.  And when Millis opened his cage to get out and go for an explore, Tommy gladly came to find him where ever he was when he got lost and carried him back to his house.

“It’s not going to hurt at all,” said the big owl-eyed man with the yellow fur on his head and his chin.  “Burble burble, blah, tickle.”

Millis looked at the carrot with his right eye, and then turned his head and used the left eye.  Looked the same both ways.  It had a funny leafy part that was not the right color.  And it kept going in a long vine to the back of the big red and white clink-and-bonk box.  That wasn’t quite natural.  He sniffed.  It only slightly smelled right.  Still, he was hungry, and it did seem to be a carrot, and… well, he just had to take a bite.

ZZZAKAKAKAKZZZAM! 

“Ooh, that’s hard on the teeth!” Millis said aloud.

“What?”  said Tommy.  “Did you hear that?”

“I did,” said Tommy’s servant.  “We’re not the only people here.”

“Idiot boy,” said Millis.  “You are the only people here.  I’m a rabbit.”

“Ghosts?” asked Tommy.

“I believe it is your rabbit,” said the owl-eyed man.  “He’s over behind Dewey.”

“It can’t be Millis.  Millis doesn’t talk.”

“Rabbits would never reveal how much smarter they are than people,” said Millis.

“It is Millis!” declared the servant boy as he came around the big gray clonk-and-clank box.  Actually… it was called a computer.  How did Millis know that?  He couldn’t say.  Well, actually he could say, but didn’t know and didn’t want to say.  The servant boy picked him up.  And on top of that, he didn’t really know how to hold a rabbit.

“You are hurting me, you stupid boy.”

The stupid servant boy dropped Millis as if he were on fire, his rabbity fur blazing and crackling and burning his fingers.  Wait-a-second!  He was on fire!  His skin was burning and bubbling.  “Ahh!  I’m burning!”

“Oh no, Millis.  What did you do?” cried Tommy.

“Are you brain-dead, fool?  I took a bite of the evolutionary accelerator tool created by the Xandar Empire.  It is accelerating me.”

“Gee, that’s kinda cool,” said Tommy, staring at him with wide eyes.  The owl-eyed man was staring too.  Glasses.  Those were glasses making his eyes look so big!

“Your arms and legs are growing,” said the servant boy.  “You’re getting bigger.”

“Yes,” said Millis in amazement.  “I am accelerating to become more like you.  I am still a rodent, but I’m becoming sentient and man-like!  Why would anybody be so sadistic that they would do that to a rabbit?”

“I’ll have to ask him,” said the man with glasses.  “How did you know it was from Xandar?”

“E equals MC squared.  Polytetrafluoroethylene is the proper name for Teflon.  Richard Plantagenet became Richard the Third upon the death of his brother Edward IV and the mysterious disappearance, possibly murder, of twelve-year-old Edward V, Edward IV’s son.”

“Millis, you’re a genius!” cried Tommy.

“I am suddenly very tired,” said Millis the rabbit-man.  “I must sleep now.  Good night, Tommy.  I will bring you cabbage and clover hay from now on.”

Rabbit eyes closed and the world veered away into darkness.

                                                            *****

 

 

So, there you have it.  The accelerated evolution of the rabbit-man Millis.  I will even provide a picture.  Oh, and he’s not flashing a peace sign, that’s the universal signal for “rabbit ears”.

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October 5, 2013 · 8:05 pm

Star Dancing with Lizard People

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the picture above : Davalon and Farbick near Mars (by Leah Cim Reyeb)

I am constantly bubbling over with ridiculous ideas and dreams.  After writing the book Catch a Falling Star, I was asked by an editor what happens next to some of the characters.  The Morrell family, changed into children, travel into space with the Tellerons aboard Xiar’s Base Ship.  Harmony Castille, the elderly church lady who falls in love with the Telleron Commander Biznap marries him and travels with the aliens too.  The task; find a new home world and start a mixed civilization.  Since the aliens have no inherent religion or morality, it falls to the humans on board to make Christian values the norm for the Telleron frog people.  That is a challenge old church ladies can’t resist, but also can’t manage without help.

So what can I do with this story?  Where can it go?  I am trying to build my work in fiction around certain rules or boundaries that will give it the consistency and power that I need to achieve with my work.  Well, the biggest rule is that all my stories have to fit like puzzle pieces into the entire picture, an imaginary history of the universe centered on the little town where I grew up.  Space empires in the future, time travelers popping in and out freely, and imaginary breakthroughs in physics, astrophysics, and various sciences cannot be allowed to interfere with the unified history of the future of the galaxy.  I know how silly this sounds, but silly rules inform the under-structure of all reality.  How else can you explain things like the politics of Texas?  Further, I adhere to other silly rules.  It must be science fiction or fantasy.  It must also be humor.  And the most important characters are always children.

So what will this book I am planning be like?  Well, first of all, there must be strong elements of science fiction.  Of course, silly me, my heroes are on a starship looking for a new home-world.  You can’t get too much more science-fictiony than that.  But I have been overwhelmed with internet researches of late into the looniest of the internet conspiracy theories.  Besides my obsessions with who killed JFK and what really happened on 9/11, I have also found cartoon characters like Alex Jones (the conspiracy world’s version of Elmer Fudd on PCP and prodded to ridiculous levels of vitriolic-aggressive anger management failures) speaking about lizard men from outer space who have taken to controlling our government by shape-changing and masquerading as Hilary Clinton.  Whew!  Humor is a breeze!  All I have to do is set my lost space-colony down on the hostile, warlike world of the space lizards, the world of Galtorr Prime.  The science fiction is then firmly grounded in the pseudo-science of paranoid madmen.  And, joyfully, further research into the lizard people trying to take over earth will be justified by the creation of this book.  Who knows?  I may actually uncover their secrets in real life!

The humor, as I already indicated, is built in.  Warlike lizards who want only to conquer and destroy!  And don’t forget, this will be set on their war-torn home world.  The satire is set.  I will be writing political satire about Republicans and Democrats.  Hot dang!  And I can depict crazy folk who would gleefully destroy their own government and their own environment in order to spite their worst enemies, who are thankfully not us, but themselves.  I can continue to describe the battle between good and evil in my book in the same religious terms I have always tried to use.  It is not good against evil as much as it is Love against Heartlessness.   All good comedy, from Mark Twain, to Charles Dickens, to Terry Pratchett, to Douglas Adams, is precisely about that.  (Of course it will mean more of the run-on sentences, multi-adjectival descriptions, and infantile allusions and metaphors that I always use in my signature purple-paisley prose.)

And finally, I have the characters already fairly well set.  Davalon, the boy Telleron explorer, his nestmate/sister Tanith, their friend and mentor Farbick, Davalon’s adopted child-parents Alden and Gracie Morell, and the crew of Xiar the Slightly Irregular’s whole wacky starship are already living and arguing in my head.  Of course, the moldy underwear and dirty dishes in my head are not a particularly good thing.  When will fictional characters ever learn to clean up after themselves?  Only time will tell.

So there you have it, an entire book idea that came into being in the last week and a half.  It will be interesting to chronicle the progression and creation of it.  Will it actually get written?  Will it take twenty-two years the way Catch a Falling Star did?   Will it be worth doing more with than merely writing it and then burning it to save future generations from reading it and burdening themselves with the corrosive insanity it will most likely cause?  Well, please, don’t bet any actual money on it.  Imaginary or funny-money will be good enough.  

 

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