Doodlefox

While watching Netflix yesterday afternoon, a retirement activity that becomes the majority of my social life when the diabetes demons are eating me, I started doodling a fox.  It was a pencil doodle at first.  And I was not drawing from life.  I was drawing the fox in my head.  I suspect it was the fox from Antoine de Saint Exupery’s masterwork, The Little Prince.

Yes, that fox.  The wise one that knows about taming little princes, and loving them, and being reminded of them in the color of wheat fields.  I began to need that fox as my doodle pen uncovered him on the blank page.  There he was.  Surprised to see me.  Either he was leaping towards me in the picture, or falling down on me from the sky above.  I don’t know which.  But I realized I had to tame him by drawing him and making him as real as ever an imaginary fox could ever be.  You will notice he does not look like a real fox.  I did not draw him from a photograph, but from the cartoon eye in my mind where all Paffoonies come from.  And this was to be a profound Paffooney… a buffoony cartoony looney Paffooney.  It simply had to be, because that is precisely what I always doodle-do.

And so he was a fox.  He was my doodlefox.  I had tamed him.  And then I had to give him color.  And, of course, the color had to be orange-red.

And so, there is my fox.  Like the Little Prince’s fox he could tell me, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.  It is only with the heart that we can see rightly.”  And I put him in a post with lyrical and somewhat goofy words to give you a sense of what he means to me, in the same way one might explain what the thrill of the heart feels like when a butterfly’s wing brushes against the back of your hand.  Yes, to share the unknowable knowledge and the unfeelable feeling of a doodlefox.  A demonstration of precisely what a Paffooney is.

Reading Other Writers

Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else.  It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own.  You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.

And not every other writer is Robert Frost.  Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s  Gene Kelly.  There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding.  What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease?  And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter?  Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”?  I think it is.  Trolls are not smart.

I know people have to make an effort to understand me.  When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head.  In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it.   See what I did there?  It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense.  That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures.  If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire.  I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues.  But most people don’t.  Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.

 Of course, there is the opposite problem too.  Some writers are not hard to understand at all.  They only use simple sentences.  They only use ideas that lots of other people have used before.  You don’t have to think about what they write.  You only need to react.  They are the reasons that words like “trite”, “hackneyed”, “boring”, and “cliche” exist in English.  But simple, boring writing isn’t written by stupid people.  Hemingway is like that.  Pared down to the basics.  No frills.  Yet able to yield complex thoughts, insights, and relationships.

Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point.  For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom?  For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom?  Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub.  I know.  I tried to stuff her in there for this picture.  And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?

When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things.  I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well.  I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better.   And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words.  I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust.  Thank God for that!  And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot.  And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value.  It is always worth doing.

 

 

Hidden Kingdom (Chapter 2-adding page 9)

To see the complete Chapter 1, use the following link;https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2018/11/24/hidden-kingdom-chapter-1-complete/

An Unexpected Gift

This post is a movie review for Thor : Ragnarok , though I don’t really plan on talking about the movie very much.   It was an excellent comic book movie in the same tongue-in-cheek comedy tradition as Guardians of the Galaxy.   It made me laugh and made me cheer.   It was the best of that kind of movie.  But it wasn’t the most important thing that happened that night.

You see, I spent the weekend in the hospital thinking I had suffered a heart attack during the Thanksgiving holiday. I thought I was facing surgery at the very least.   I knew I might have had an appointment to play chess with the Grim Reaper.   It is a lot to worry about and drain all the fun out of life.

Well, one of the things that happened that day, Tuesday, my first full day out of the hospital and, hopefully, out of the woods over heart attacks, was that I received my new replacement bank card because my old one had a worn out, malfunctioning chip in it.  So, I took my three kids to the movie at the cheapest place we could find.  I tried to run my bank card for the payment, and it was summarily declined.  I had activated it previously during the day, and there was plenty of money in the account compared to the price, but it just wouldn’t take.  So I had to call Wells Fargo to find out whatever the new reason was for them to hate me.  It turned out that it had already been activated, but a glitch had caused it to decline the charge.  While I was talking to the girl from the Wells Fargo help desk, the lady who had gotten her and her husband’s tickets right before us put four tickets to the movie in my hand.

The middle-aged black couple had lingered by the ticket stand before going in to their movie just long enough to see a sad-looking old man with raggedy author’s beard and long Gandalf hair get turned down by the cheap-cinema ticket-taking teenager because the old coot’s one and only bank card was declined. They were moved to take matters into their own hands and paid for our tickets themselves.

That, you see, was the gift from my title.  Not so much that we got our movie tickets for free, but that the world still works that way.  There are still good people with empathetic and golden hearts willing to step in and do things to make the world a little bit better place.  The gift they gave me was the reassurance that, as bad and black as the world full of fascists that we have come to live in has become, it still has goodness and fellow feeling in it. People are still moved to pay things forward and make good on the promise to “love one another”.  I did not have a chance to thank them properly.  I was on the phone with Wells Fargo girl when it happened.  The only thing that couple got out of their good deed was thank-yous from my children and the knowledge that they had done something wonderful.  I plan to pay it forward as soon as I have the opportunity.  Not out of guilt or obligation, but because I need to be able to feel that feeling too at some point.

I do have one further gift to offer the world.

After we got home from the movie, I opened an email that contained the cover proof for my novel, Magical Miss Morgan.  Soon I will have that in print also if I can keep Page Publishing from messing it up at the last moments before printing.  It is a novel about what a good teacher is and does.  It is the second best thing I have ever written.

Sometimes the gifts that you most desperately need come in unexpected fashion.

In the Future…

The one thing I can say from all my search for true information both historical and scientific, is that there will be a future for this planet. I believe humanity will survive what is coming in the next hundred years. There will be pain, however. Billions of people are going to die horrible deaths in extreme heat, terrible storms, or societal collapse during famine and war. Only a few will survive and adapt. Hopefully, enough will survive to repopulate and rebuild. Those few survivors will have evolved significantly.

I do believe our surviving descendants will eventually join the interstellar galactic community. We will become powerful enough and wise enough to take our place amongst those who simply sit back and know things. The universe will go on, even if our planet doesn’t.

Taffy King, the girl in the Paffooney at the beginning of the post, is a fictional character from AeroQuest that I think represents what the future us will be like. You notice she has snake’s eyes with vertical pupils. This is because she is from a genetically fused race, part human and part Galtorrian saurian. A lizard girl without a tail or scales. The one lesson we must learn is that there is no us versus them. There is only us. Life in this universe is all one thing.

I don’t get to see whether my prediction of the future will come true or not. I do not have that many years ahead of me to see it with my own eyes. But when I die and melt back into the physical universe, the universe will continue as it should. What is inevitable is what will happen. And there is a powerful need to learn from the experience.

Slowing Down

I am no longer writing as much per day as I did for most of the past decade. My mind is suffering from a loss of focus. and short-term memory problems that keep me from finis… shing…? I used to write 500 words to 2000 words a day, Now I get 50,,, or none at all.

I am not despairing. If I never finish another book, I can be proud of the 24 books I have done. They are a solid body of work… even if they never mean anything to anyone beyond me. Most of my family have read one of my books at most. I get no positive feedback. But I know I have done some good writing. And I am satisfied.

This might be the last book I get published. And it is free today through Tuesday, May 21.

Philip K. Dick

There is a major drawback to being so smart that you can perceive the edges of infinity.  It makes you bedbug crazy.  I love the science fiction that populated the paperback shelves in the 50’s and 60’s when I was a boy.  I love the work of Philip K. Dick.  But it leads you to contemplate what is real… what is imaginary… and what is the nature of what will be.

the robot Philip K. Dick who appeared at Comic Con and answered questions

There are numerous ways to investigate life.  But it is in the nature of imaginary people to try to find ways to make themselves real.  When the replicants in Bladerunner try to make themselves into real people, they must try to create memories that didn’t exist.  They try to mirror human life to the extent that they can actually fool the bladerunner into letting them live.  Of course, it doesn’t work.  They are not real.  (Bladerunner is the movie name of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

It is like that for me as well.  Being an imaginary person is difficult.  You have to constantly invent yourself and re-invent yourself.  By the time you finally get to know yourself, you have to change again so that the anti-android factions don’t destroy you.  Although, I think I may not actually be an android.

Does that sound a bit crazy?  Well Philip K. Dick’s life story may in fact have led him down the path to really crazy.  In 1971 he broke up with his wife, Nancy Hackett.  She moved out of his life, and an amphetamine-abuse bender moved in.  In 1972, ironically the year I began reading Dick’s work, he fell in love at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention.  That was immediately followed by erratic behavior, a break-up, and an attempted suicide overdosing on the sedative potassium bromide.  This, of course, led directly to his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly.

The story is about a police detective who is corrupted by a dangerous addictive drug that takes him down the rabbit hole of paranoia, and being assaulted by the perception of multiple realities simultaneously.  His novel Ubik from 1969 is a story of psychics trying to battle groups of other psychics even after they are killed by a bomb.  The crazy seems to have been building for a while.

In 1974 he had a transcendental experience when a lady delivering medicine to his door wore a fish-shaped pendant which he said shot a pink beam into his head.   He came to believe the beam imparted wisdom and clairvoyance, and also believed it to be intelligent.  He would later admit to believing he had been reincarnated as the prophet Elijah.

Imagination has its dangers.  It is a powerful thing able to transform reality.  Science fiction writers often use their imagination to shape what the future will actually make come into being.  But it can also turn your mind inside out.  A great science fiction writer like Philip K. Dick can contemplate the nature of reality and turn his own reality inside out.  It is a lesson for me, a lesson for all of us.  Wait, is that a pink beam of light I see?  No, I just imagined it.

Having Written a Book of Evil Poetry

For four more days, you can go to Amazon and get an ebook of Evil Poetry for free. It needs to be read by somebody. So far, I have only given away one free book with a fifth of the promotion already gone.

I may not have much time left to get any kind of success with my writing. Hopefully, this poetry book will help. I believe I am a truly terrible poet. But it can’t be denied that there is evil power in poetry. It can bring the dead back to life. It can make you see images and metaphors that are totally foreign and exotic to your mind, but were conceived in the mind of a terrible poet. It may literally be evil to let Mickey write poetry for other people to read, But I have gone ahead and composed this book of verse regardless of how many scalps grow white overnight and how many innocent readers are transformed into addicts, compulsive poetry writers, and little yellow birds. The link at the beginning will, for a few days, take you to Amazon where you can get an ebook copy for free.

Flying the Magic Flying Carpet

There are many ways to fly.  Airplanes, bird wings, hot air balloons, bubble-gum-blowing goldfish… well, maybe I am really talking about flying by imagination.  The more my six incurable diseases and old age limit my movement, my ability to get out of bed and do things, the more I rely on reading, writing, and the movie in my head to go places I want to be.

Sometimes the wings I use to fly come from other writers.  I get the flight feathers I need not only from books, but also from YouTube videos, movies, and television shows.

This magic carpet ride in video form is by the thoughtful creative thinker Will Schoder.  In it he carefully explains how Mister Rogers used the persuasion techniques of Logos, Ethos, and Pathos to talk to elephants and convinced a congressman intent on cutting the budget to actually give Public Television more money for educational programming.  This is a video full of warmth and grace and lovingly crafted magic flight feathers that anybody can use to soar across new skies and blue skies and higher skies than before.  I hope you will watch it more than once like I did, to see how beautifully the central explanation spreads its wings and gives us ideas that can keep us aloft in the realm of ideas.

It is important to stay in the air of fresh ideas and new thinking.  The magic carpet ride that takes you there is the product of vivid imagination, cogent thinking, and the accurate connection of idea to better idea.  So instead of falling from the sunlit sky into the darkness that so easily consumes us on the ground, keep imagining, keep dreaming, and keep flying.  You won’t regret having learned to fly.

Bright Eyes Are Watching Us

Susu, my imaginary granddaughter, is looking down from the window.

The Way Mickey’s Mind Works

If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind.  The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back.  He just isn’t a normal thinker.

But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan.  If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order.  Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books.  If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time.  A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next.  A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.

Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies.  The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous.  And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories.  How dare he think like that?  In undulating spirals instead of straight lines!  He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.

But there is a method to his utter madness.  He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve.  And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality.  Simple moves on to complex.  Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.

And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman.  He is a powerful wizard after all.  The Sandman and creator of good dreams.  So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says.  And he will write another story.

It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written.  And it will be glorious.  It also rips Mickey’s heart out.  And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys.  It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will make that magic happen.  So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.

Here’s the link to the finished book.

Disappointing Outcomes

This is an all-felt recreation of my picture of the Girl with the Green Eyes. It was simply a matter of running my digital picture through the AI Mirror Felt Filter which used its special AI magic to transfer every part of the image into a needlecraft-looking thingy made of what appears to be felt. But no beaver pelts were chewed on to make it. It is a brief look at what the incredibly single-minded magic of AI can actually do. And I would like to submit more of my artwork to this filter, but that would cost money to use it. That’s the thing about AI. It is meant to generate lots of money for somebody… and that somebody is not me.

I enjoy using digital and AI tools to draw. Arthritis and color blindness and muscle spasms have been leeching away my art abilities. These tools make drawing easier and not only restore my drawing ability, they help me go beyond what I have done before.

This gives you an idea of what I used to be able to do, drawing freehand and blending colors with colored pencils. I have been told by friends and family familiar with my older artworks that they prefer my old style to the new anime-style, AI-filter digital stuff. And I understand that sentiment completely. I wish I still could do that.

This is an example of the very best I can do the old way that is also done this year. The colors are no longer fully blended and solidified. It hurts too much to put enough layers on to achieve the solid colors and the blends. My hands no longer manage the repetitions of small lines in layers.

This is about an hour’s worth of work on the digital drawing pad. You can see the basic design and you can also see the splotches and glitches caused by arthritis. I did take it further before applying the AI Mirror art editor, but the flaws are not gone until the AI cleans them up completely.

Here it is after the first application of AI Mirror.

Then clothing is added. That, of course, needs to be cleaned up too and a background added.

And I reach an endpoint that satisfies my need to draw and create. Picsart AI Photo Editor inserted the background.

I know there is way too much AI artwork out there on the web. Much of it is downright lazily created and awful. I hope mine isn’t too. But I have seen things that are masterfully done which reveal possibilities of using AI tools in very artful ways. I am not satisfied with AI art on the internet. But I don’t believe we are wasting our time completely either.

Depressing Pessimisting

I have been feeling low and mortality is weighing heavy upon me. My dog has cancer and she is probably dying. She’s already slowing and not going on the usual walks with me. My dad’s little dog stopped going on walks shortly before she died. And my dad loved her enough that he only survived her by a couple of years. I am seeing an alarming pattern here.

, My health is headed downhill. I can’t read and write like I did two years ago. I am floundering and passing out frequently. But I can still draw with the aid of digital tools and AI art and photo editing apps. I am using a Drawing Pad program with AI Mirror and Picsart AI Photo Editor. I can draw faster and better than ever before. But it is a matter of doing what I can before I die.

There don’t seem to be any heroes coming to the rescue. This Summer will be hotter and dryer than ever. People will suffer. More hurricanes, tornados, and wildfires will hit us by this coming Fall than we ever faced before.

Sorry to be such a downer, but I am not looking forward birthday number 68 and the world it will happen in.

Creepy’s Haunted House

“Hey, howdy, Pearla! Fancy meeting you out here, outside the new house I am going to haunt. You wanna come along and help me ghostify a few terrified human-types?”

“Oh, no, Creepy. Look at all the lights on in there. People might actually see me. And I am not wearing any ghost clothes. I don’t want humans to see me naked.”

“Ghosts is supposed to be naked, Pearla. Didn’t you ever read those Casper the Friendly Ghost comic books when you were a living kid?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you ever see Casper or the Ghostly Trio wearing any pants?”

“Well, no. “

“That’s it then. They all walk around naked all the time in that comic book. Every issue. No ghost clothes!”

“Wendy the Witch is never naked.”

“Yes, but she ain’t a ghost. The uniform for kid witches is funky red pajamas. But I’ll bet she goes naked as soon as she dies.”

“Do kids in comic books ever die?”

“Well, where did Casper and Spooky and Poil come from if they don’t? They are ghosts.”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Yes, I admit it. I was a weird kid. I loved Casper comics because I thought they were practicing nudism. It didn’t bother me that they had no genitals. When you are a kid, genitals are pretty much a nightmare waiting to happen. We might live better lives if we died as kids and became ghosts with no genitals. Of course, civilization would end sooner if everybody did it. I had weird thoughts as a kid. Maybe due to the fact that I was victimized at age ten. But weird thoughts are creative thoughts. And I can create my way out of anything.