My GuySly & Friends.
Scads of friends. Scads! Oodles, even.
Top: Taken with the sea from an early age. His Unk Dec's ex-ship's cat cronies had a big hand in that, spinning their drunken yarns.
Bottom: No rough and tumble lad, he had weak ankles, he was forced by his Mama to wear ankle supports. He hated them, until she had a brilliant idea.
Follow Sly's
childhood adventures
in Catly Curiosity and Yo Ho!
Sadly, the cutie
had a less than
idyllic childhood.
I could say,
Sly's been through many a squall, that he's tsken a pounding, both personally and professionally.
I could say, he's traversed storm-tossed seas aplenty.
Trouble finds him, follows him, like a bizarre local weather event dogged the sadsack Joe Btfsplk in the comic strip Li'l Abner.
All this,
absolutely true.
Nevertheless, my real intent here is to show you this charming rain cloud, so sweet. (Wix has some great clip art.) I had to get it in, on any pretext.
Mission
Accomplished.
Puss in Boots Picture Book, published by
........., 1878
Hey, hey, hey,
he's on the road again.
(Yeah, I've been listening
to Tom Rush.)
________________
Sections of this strip
would make great
promo bookmarks.
I'm thinking
bumper stickers too.
If you saw
one of these mugs
on a bumper
in front of you,
wouldn't you
jot down
MyGuySly.com
and check it out?
Don't tell me no.
I won't believe you.
THE GREAT JOY
OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH IS,
you find stuff way better than
what you could have made up.
Like with the pencil. The invention of the pencil in the area of England that Sly hails from (the site of the only large hard-graphite mine ever discovered) twenty years before his birth (icing on the cake) meshes with my narrative in wonderful ways.
Graphite sawed into sticks, encased in wood, had been devised by English sheepmen to mark their animals. Sly had adopted the tool for its mobility. He likes to jot verse on the go.
In A Dire Deceit,
his ship taken by pirates, Sly hunkers under a captain's desk, scrawling a phony code with his precious lead. A good smudge cakes the pages with grime,
spit warps them, producing an aged look. A plausible item
(at first glance, at least) is produced in a few tense hours.
Others latch onto the tool for their own amusing ends. And I'm not through exploiting the amazing technology myself.
Not by a long shot.
Dee's image will be tweaked, this cat's head
replacing the globe.
On the far right, that's a meercat. More historically accurate would be a monkey, but I need the right monkey, small, cat size, with
a very ugly nose .
Sly has written a lovely sonnet
in praise of the bizarre feature
to comfort one who, longing
to be esteemed a court
beauty, despises it.
You'll find his touching
Ode to a Nose
on page _
A Mischievous Look
at the Life and Times of an Icon of Children's Literature,
a beloved brat, the sharp/scholar/wonder of a wonderous age, Sylvester "Sly" Boots.
Whoa!
Get a load of the puss on that puss. Someone's not too happy, looks like.
What's up with this guy?
Could be he's annoyed. He's annoyed a lot lately. He's at the beck and call of a man who can't get along without him. His time is not his own, and he's sick of it.
It could be an impatient look. A cat can’t teach himself to read? Can’t learn to write? He’ll show the world what a cat can do.
Hell, he’s probably going for dignified. We have here the haughty stare of a gentleman, which he considers himself to be despite low birth and a hardscrabble childhood. He’s made his way up, way up in the world, and he’s damn proud of it.
Wait. It might be a come hither look - he’s a notable rake. Or a world-weary pose. He’s seen it all.
continued on page
_______________________________________
Boots spent his life defying limits, social, intellectual, every which-way.
Between giggles, think about this:
The never-say-die critter is a role model for us all.
A Taste of Things To Come.
Meet (a few of) my (glorious) Goofballs.
Frogs and Hogs and Damselflies. A Monkey. A Queen. A Scientist-Doctor/Astrologer.
A disgruntled devil of a (since, like, forever) Royal Favorite. (Yikes!)
Oh! What a time it was! A rigid class structure was crumbling. Anyone with an ounce of brain was on the jump, after their piece of the pie, their bite of the apple. Hey! Speaking of apples: Sly, curious abou the physical world (in addition to being a splendid poet and a canny diplomat), will be hatching his own theory of gravity fifty years before Newton. Okay, John Dee, a scholar, a scientist, widely esteemed a brilliant man and a level head (he's far from it, lucky for me) is gonna help. Another super nutcase! My cup runneth over.
The menu will eventually read: Home
Page 2. The Rambling Boy. (A map of Sly's travels across Europe)
Page 3. My So-Called Plot. (Folks, I ain't kidding) Page 4. Excerpt of the week.
Page 5. Himself, in All His Glory. (A paper doll.)
(Haven't figured out menus yet.)
A wise-guy from the get-go.
____________________________________________
He's been written about and written about, but my joker
is the ultimate in crackpot cats, and the unequivical sharp of sharps.
Sly blunders, blusters, and bamboozles his way across late sixteenth century Europe, abetted by a variety of critters, including a frog and a hedgehog (Catly/Yo Ho!), a runaway eight-year-old duke (A Dire Deceit), a pugnacious pig and, more importantly, a love-struck monkey, Sha-Sha, and a trusted civil servant, the redoubtable John Dee. (A Delicate Delimma) He comes to the assistance of many, including the Queen of England, though she never learns of it. Finding himself persona non grata with her after certain missteps, he departs for greener (so he hopes) pastures. (On The Road Again)
Sly and I share a smart mouth, a skeptical view of the world, and the inability to admit defeat. We're the same fool, which is how I write him with sincere regard and deep understanding.
Demanding to have his way in all things, to-the-bone a brat, he nonetheless is capable of empathy (once in a rare while), experiences (fleeting) self-doubt, and is full of impossible dreams (more than his fair share).
In other words, he's as human as he can be. Check him out.
The Rogue Decamps
A Novella/Intro to a 3-Part series. Coming soon, here, in installments.
A Dashing Fellow, indeed.
Robert Dudley had nothing on this dandy, but for one remarkable episode.
IN SEARCH OF
SILLY HISTORY
You might think that one who situates a well-worn fairy tale in a well-reported age has it easy. Fantasy means anything goes, right? And, a world is in place, no inventing of cultures, politics, none of that from-scratch necessary.
I reconfigure history around the antics of a talking cat, which certainly suggests that I lean on the ol' bippity-boppity-boo. Well, I do, a bit.
But, mostly, not. I focus on personalities. I play with history. I fudge history. Then, I fiddle my fudges in footnotes. Have your cake, etc. I've got that all worked out.
My central episode was written, then I discovered Dee. My original goof is out the window. What I’ve learned of him is too too wonderful to pass up.
continued on page ...
Wise-Ass Animals IN
Pants! *
(Which I consider
to be my genre)
and you'll have
a damn lot of fun,
maybe as much fun
as I've had with . . .
my GuySly.
_______
* Crap!
The word is Pants!
Damn, they got lame a's
in this font.
--------- A formidable fellow, by all accounts. Yeah, the accounts are mostly mine. So What! ---------
He tried the flute,
made progress, but
savagely mocked,
he abandoned it.
Years later,
he took up
the fiddle.
What next? How About a Menu?
Wise-Ass Animals IN
Pants!
And boots.
And baby bonnets.
(That would be
Herk Hedgehog, in
A Fool in Love.)
What can I say?
My genre, for sure.
I got nothing without
a wise-cracking critter in it.
-----------
You can have a lot of fun
on here with fonts,
even with
the slim pickings.
(Wordpress is way
worse on that score.)
You can tweak kerning
and line spacing, though
the slider bars are horrifyingly crude.
I see more pluses
than minuses here but,
Oh ,
for some
Dingbats!
Ode to a Nose
by S. Boots
Where does your foremost fascination lie?
I tell you, Mistress, not where you suppose.
You are magnificent of brow and eye,
but I rejoice, above all, in your nose.
Abundance of the snout is no vile thing,
an aperture odd, no horrific flaw.
Cavernous nostrils suck the scents of spring
more readily than dimple dents. What law
requires that a nose be slim, or pert,
to be admired, to be reckoned fine?
High handsome is less sturdily alert,
admiring, above all, a divine profile.
The buttonholes, so meek, so sleek, so pink,
just darling, do not snort with the same greed
to savor life in all its sweet and stink,
as does your sneezer charmingly indeed.
A chiseled symmetry, it does not do
for a merry force of nature such as you.
Your thug has more exuberance than those
lady-like honkers. Celebrate your nose!