The Problem

The Solution

Making Space

Where Fact and Fiction Collide

Writing, publishing and promoting The Truth Is a Lone Assassin was the most difficult decision I've ever had to make as a writer. I don't write to titillate my readers and never have. I write to entertain them and to make them laugh and to make them think. This 32,000-word novella (approximate word count) is my second literary work under the pen name Jonco Bugos.

The Truth Is a Lone Assassin may or may not entertain people and, if it does, it won't feel like entertainment, unless you like to think. It will certainly make you do that. There are people who will want me dead for writing this book but that's what freedom of speech is all about. Especially when you feel as strongly as I do that there is more fact in fiction than there is in real life.

But there's nothing to laugh about in this book. This is my "literary" science fiction writer's mind at work again. I love to make people laugh for "comic relief" in my regular sci-fi novels but this isn't one of them. I didn't want to write this novella but I realized that it was a choice I had to make if I was to remain who and what I really am. A guy who still thinks the world is worth saving from itself. Somebody has to do it. In fact, I'd write it again, even if it killed me.

And it just might. But I hope not. I'm not done having my turn with words and I'm not nearly done trying to make the world clearer to us all. Especially when a lot of writers are busy muddying it up because there's a lot of money in that. But not for me. Not for all the money in the world. Not even if my life depended on it. Life is all about choices. Making choices is our job and our work as human beings. It's the only way to live when living is all we really have.

A Rainy Night in the City through the Windshield

Sometimes a work of art is about something. I've held this childhood memory in my mind's eye for half a century. Today I finally painted it so you could see what I saw from the back seat of my parents' car. Or it might have been from the back seat of my maternal grandparents' car, if the "city" was York or Lewistown, PA. Where this was or when it was, I'm not sure. My guess is that the city might have been Cleveland or Detroit but then I would have been eleven or twelve and remembered more.

But it could have been just a late shopping trip a bigger Pennsylvania town like Bellefonte, State College, Philipsburg, Clearfield or Lewistown or a small city like Lock Haven, Williamsport, Tyrone, Altoona or Dubois. I can't recall. All I remember is being a kid and being awed by bright, wet colors and the wonder of seeing a rainy night in the city through the windshield.

Primitive Urban Art

Digital Visions

Seeing Is Believing

Or something to that effect. The bigger picture might be to question whether or not the thing you're seeing is really what you're getting. But I won't elaborate because the worst thing an artist can do is to paint a picture and then tell you what it's about. More often than not, a work of art is not about anything. It simply is. Maybe you like the colors or the shades or the lines. Maybe you like the way it makes you feel or think. Or maybe you hate it or it makes you sick or afraid. Art is all of that and much more. If you look at it, even only once, then it was worth it. As for me, my sentiments are purely subjective. I paint. Therefore, I am.

Day and Night

I put this picture here because I wanted to do something with this blog today but I really had nothing to say.

Winter Rerun

Click on Picture

New Video for "Blind Fool Running"

Watch this video at michaelcasher.com

This winter I still plan to publish my second literary novella, The Truth Is a Lone Assassin, but a lot of people don't know anything about my first literary novella, Blind Fool Running. So I made a new promotional video for it in January 2013 and this is it.

I'm primarily a science fiction author but I also write "literary science fiction" under the pen name Jonco Bugos. When my second novella is out in paperback and "Live" in Amazon's Kindle Store I'll post the new video for that book on at least one of my blogs (the footer at A Portrait of the Author as an old Man) and I'll embed it on the "News" page at michaelcasher.com and on the Jonco Bugos Page at Science Fiction for Thinkers.com, from the SciFiforThinkers Channel at YouTube.

Like most book "movies", this video is good, but the book is even better. Thanks for watching. Post Updated 3-10-13 to add video links for "The Truth Is a Lone Assassin"

German News Reel

The New York Times keeps updating the original news story to make it appear more like a touchy-feely, "we are the world" kind of story each time, instead of the nightmare it really is. It's changed since I first read it today and I decided to go after the Times and Germany for lying their goddamn asses off to the entire world. Who in the hell do you think you are?

Jesus Christ! Doesn't anybody remember the 20th Century and the untold buckets of inhumane, criminal SHIT the goddamn Germans put the entire world through? Well, you'd better remember it or you'll be part of the Fourth Reich before you know it. The Germans cannot be trusted with a military role. Not now and not ever. They're lying their goddamn asses off to us just like Hitler did to them. Wake up world!

I used to respect The New York Times for its penetrating, tenacious, truth-seeking newshounds but now it's become just another liberal ass-kissing rag like all the rest (except for the L.A. Times). I'll be sure to read more of the L.A. Times and less of this Big Apple Pussy Paper.

The book,  If You Survive by George Wilson, is a MUST READ for All Americans and for everybody who thinks Germany should ever have a military role in the world again, anywhere. This true account of the horrors of war ought to be required reading in every American high school history class. If you were ever cat-fascinated by Germans in uniform, like a lot of sick, twisted freaks, read this book about the real Nazi plague and how an awful lot good people died eradicating it. Let's not subject the world to any more Germans in uniform.

The Secret Lives of Indie Authors

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Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Sometimes people can be as gullible as children. When Art Linkletter hosted his show "Kids Say the Darndest Things!" back in the 1960s the stuff those children came up with back then and the things they said were not only hilarious but endearing and touching. On the other hand, grownups today come up with stranger things than that and they're deadly serious.

I read a dumb grownup story today that really takes the cake. Click on the eyeball for that news story. You got it, the Palestinian government plans to exhume the body of Yasser Arafat to examine the remains for signs that he may have been murdered by a spy. I'll be honest with you, Yasser Arafat really gave me the creeps and, now that he's finally six feet under, please leave him there. And, you bet, there ought to be a show on TV today called, "Grownups Do the Damndest Things!"

What do they expect to find? Maybe he was poisoned by a spy but I think they're more likely to find a wooden stake through his heart or a silver bullet in his head. Let's just hope they don't find Ringo Starr down there. I'd hate to think that I'd finally get to see Abbey Road before I died just to find Yasser Arafat standing on the corner waiting for the "WALK" sign to come on. In this upside down world of dumb adult ideas and crazy notions, stranger things have happened.

12 Things That Still Scare Me

As a 61-year-old grownup I'm not too easily scared these days. I've been through way too many big-ass disappointments and real-life horrors to be "scared stiff" anymore. Oh, don't get me wrong, I still get a shock and butterflies in my stomach and even a slight urge to evacuate my bladder at times, but not enough to make me turn and run. I've seen too much in six decades on Earth to turn tail and run from anything, even if it's the smart thing to do. By the same token, I'm old enough not to confuse complacency with bravery. Not giving a shit and not being scared are two different things entirely.

I'm not afraid of being shot or killed in an automobile accident or being struck by lightning. The prospect of having a fatal heart attack doesn't make me want to do daily exercises and eat bean curd and drink soy milk on a regular basis. I'm not giving up candy and ice cream and chocolate, even if I may die of blocked arteries in my recliner with chocolate drool on my chin and a Dirty Harry movie in the VCR. I'm not afraid of what the paramedics might find or what people will say. I'm not afraid of bullets whizzing past me and hitting rocks in front of me because of careless target shooters who think they own the woods because they have camps there. I'm not afraid of accidentally running into bears in the woods. I don't fret and fuss anymore about the possibility of nuclear warheads raining down on me. Been there and done that countless times, especially in October 1962. And I'm not afraid of being broke, destitute and homeless. Not anymore. Been there and done that, too.

But there are things that would either scare me or make me jittery enough to be slightly embarrassed by it. You bet there are. Things most people would simply take in stride. So, I might not flinch if my car suddenly ramped and went airborne one day on the Interstate and I probably would tell somebody what they can do with that revolver if they pointed it at my nose, but I'm not so old that I'm confusing bravery with stupidity. In my case, what appears to be bravery or stupidity is actually just being too damn "sick and tired" of everything (I love that worn-out phrase) to give a shit. But I probably would get all shook up if any of the following things happened to me:

1. The hair that's left on my head would stand straight up if I opened my refrigerator door one day and saw that I was completely out of dill pickles.

2. I'd get big-ass butterflies in the pit of my stomach if I heard on TV that there was a chocolate shortage anywhere in the world.

3. I'd immediately break into a sweat if I was headed for the bread rack at the local store and spotted someone ahead of me dropping the last loaf of white bread into their cart.

4. I'd probably turn white as a sheet if ever heard my name mentioned on TV, even if it was a news story about how I'd won the State Lottery. Especially if I'd won the lottery, because that would surely mean that I was about to die, before the first lottery check ever arrived from Harrisburg.

5. I'd get goose pimples all over my hairy arms if someone said behind my back, "Stop right there!"

6. My mouth would go dry as dust if somebody pointed at me in a crowded mall and everybody turned to look. Then, I'd get butterflies in my stomach and break out in a sweat.

7. I'd want to turn tail and run if I ever ran into an old girlfriend again, especially if she was using a cane.

8. My heart would leap into my throat if I was on my way back home from shopping and I got behind a fire truck or an ambulance that was going my way, turn by turn.

9. I'd just shit if I ran across somebody in a store who'd read one of my books.

10. I'd damn near shit if I heard that somebody actually read one of my books and actually liked it. Actually, I've been there and done that. Twice now.

11. My hand would shake like a leaf if I ever opened the ice cream cooler at the local supermarket and saw that they were completely out of Dutch Chocolate.

12. I'd probably faint if I woke up one morning and found out that I wasn't in Appalachia anymore but on a chaise lounge in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France. But I'd soon get over it and I'd never want to go back. Not until I realized that it's not the wonderful, pretend Beaumont-sur-Mer in the movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, it's the real France. The country that turned its back on the people who helped liberate them from ruthless, German oppression, twice in the same century. Then I'd wish I was just about anywhere in Monterey County, California, where I'd rather face the big earthquake than people who hate good people for no other reason than the pure sadistic pleasure of being bad and mean. Just like the Nazis treated them.

A Message From Sam Shithead