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Blog Archives
Cool Bird
I found Chilly Willy at a yard sale for 50 cents. He was a perfect rare find for our family stuffed animal collection. He has good taste in reading material too. He had a few bugs nesting in the straw somebody used for stuffing when they refilled him. A little work de-bugged the cool bird. Now he can skate like a pro again. (I’m a St. Louis Blues’ hockey fan, but Chilly predicts the Pittsburgh Penguins will win every year. Since Sidney Crosby showed up, he is very nearly right.)
April 9, 2014 · 12:45 am
The Stag of Prophecy
I painted this oil painting of Bambi-esques from a dream I had long before I met my wife. I admit, I didn’t actually finish it until a couple of years after we were married, but I have always felt it predicted what my family would be like. We now have two boys and a girl, two bucks and a doe. I am certainly not as majestic as poppa deer in the picture, but he is in general very like me in his cartoonish mildness and Disney-like gaze. It is a weird thing to feel you have to live up to a painting, but it is also weird to paint from a dream and then have it be a prophecy come true.
April 7, 2014 · 11:45 pm
Scooby Says…
Yes, I collect stuffed animals. I spent some time buying used ones, fixing them up, and reselling them on E-bay. So while I was doing that, Scooby Doo went to Mexico (for the burritos and chalupas), and while he was there, he saw UFOs near Mexico City. Honestly. He had to buy and read a copy of Catch a Falling Star so his mind would be at ease about alien invasions. He liked the book, but it dis-convinced him that UFOs are serious and not funny.
April 6, 2014 · 4:43 pm
The Boy With the Bugle
In many ways all my fiction is actually historical fiction. I am very careful about settings, times, and histories of my characters, since many of them are real people. I can only conceal who they are by changing their histories in the slightest of ways. The way of life I am trying to depict is always the real one I experienced, even when I dip back into the past beyond the reach of my memory. I can call upon the testimony and witness of others. I have relatives that tell stories about what life was like on the farm before there was electricity, before there was TV, before there was such a thing as a horseless carriage. I know what my little town was like a hundred years ago. I know who the important were. I know how things functioned all the way back to 1855. These are things that not only make my writing have purpose, but make it vibrate the very roots of my being by resonating with the stories of my ancestors and those who came before.
April 5, 2014 · 9:20 pm
The Boy Who Saw the Colors
Sometimes we have to take a moment to look at the inner landscape… and realize that it can look very different from what is real.
April 5, 2014 · 1:13 am
A Little Bit of Greek in the Gods
As a teacher in middle school, I always loved the myths and stories of the Greeks and Romans. The stories were full of some crazy wild stuff! God’s born from Zeus’ head and Zeus’ thigh. Giants with a hundred eyes blasted with a thunderbolt, scattering the eyes over the peacock’s tale. Blinding the Cyclops Polyphemus… And the centaur Chiron… now there is a hero after my own heart. He was a teacher for Hercules, Jason, Achilles, and Aesclypius. Teachers with magic powers! Blast that bad, bad kid with a thunderbolt! Teach literature with a lyre and a scroll… Love it, love it, love it… Ooh, that would mean Aphrodite and Eros! Cool beans!
April 4, 2014 · 1:31 am
Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright!
William Blake is a favorite poet of mine because he had a super-vivid imagination and he was basically loonier than pig who wears a bow tie and coat, but no pants… and eats bacon. He could look at a cloud, and he claimed that he could see the entire heavenly host arrayed there. He believed in free love and open marriage, but was strictly faithful to his one beloved wife. Contradictions are what makes him who he is. His book Songs of Innocence and Experience, an early independently published book full of poetry and artwork, contains the poem about the Tyger (Blake’s personal misspelling) that inspired the Paffooney presented here. The Tyger represents danger… rather than evil… and the danger inherent in God’s creation rather than the devil or Satan. The poem is often paired with the poem about the Lamb, or the poem about the Worm. Opposition. Juxtaposition. The very essence of surrealism. So, I have tried to place a certain amount of menace in innocence in opposition to each other in this drawing.
April 3, 2014 · 1:22 am
How Did That Happen?
Another celebration is in order. I have been blogging for a year and a half, a little more… And that doesn’t seem like very good progress, but the last 100 have come rather quickly. I think I am picking up momentum. Maybe somebody will get interested in reading my books.
March 29, 2014 · 9:06 pm
Snow Babies
Okay, so I didn’t actually win. I was only a finalist in the YA novel contest. But soon I intend to make certain this book gets published. I owe that to these three characters, Valerie Clarke, Denny Cole, and Tommy Bons. I like to say that this book is a comedy about freezing to death… complete with clowns. Honestly, I hope to make you laugh, and make you cry, and maybe stop and think for a moment… “Isn’t that true?”
March 29, 2014 · 12:51 am
Catch a Falling Star 