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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.
Remember
Young Elvis/Old Elvis?
​
At right is young Sly, full of zip, of beans, of hope for the future. There's a spring in his step and a song in his heart.
He's accomplished a lot in his few years of life. He knows his worth. He's gonna do great things.
FYI: This art is by Louis Wain, the celebrated cat illustrator of the turn of the last century.
I love that face, don't you?
That face, and the jaunty stepping, say,
​
Look out world, here I come.
​
Sly's taught himself to speak. If you listen closely, you can make him out. He's learned to read. And to write. Sure, he scrawls, but, hell, don't you?
He writes poetry. It ain't bad. He's full of opinions. He corresponds with thinkers all over Europe. That's the safest way to go about it, in letters, a faceless entity. Not everyone, in those times, would be thrilled to discover they'd been enjoying the scholarly ramblings of a cat.
He does tend to ramble. Like me, I'm afraid. Where do you think he gets it from? Maybe I shouldn't have let that cat out of the bag. But you'll find out soon enough, why beat around the bush?
He works his song-and-dance, I work mine. We're both up for just about anything. We're a damn good team.
​
Look out world, here We come.
Not his best-known style.
I would't have known it was Wain
but for the signature.
-------------------------- the RamblingBoy ---------------------------
Above, Sly, bright eyed and bushy tailed, sets out from his childhood home in the northwest corner of England to see the world.
You'll find the story of his early years in my children's books. Below, I concentrate on the novel.
Got your traveling shoes on? We're headed south, all the way to the neck of the Iberian Peninsula.
It's a bit of a hike, we'll have a chance to chit-chat along the way.
Ready? . . . . . . . Here We Go . . . . . . . (follow the arrows) . . . . . . . .
to my made-up
kingdom of
HAUTE-NAVARRE,
an isolated mountain enclave in a harsh terrain. Sly's been comfortably mired there for years. Now, for a bunch of reasons, he's ready to move on.
*
​
From here the arrows
are replaced by asterisks,
due to tiresome
mechanical problems that you
don't want to hear about.
​
​
​
THE CASTLE
way below us,
that's King Jakome's castle. Above,
Elizabeth represents the English seat of government. I could say London, but that wouldn't be correct. The queen traveled, and the court moved with her.
Sure wish I had a ewe to stick in there. Ewe's milk cheese is the pricipal money-maker in the God-forsaken realm.
No sheep, crap skulls, a sad castle. (I could fish for a better one elsewhere. Screw it.) it At least they've got great parrots, lotsa neat birds. Zillions of birds. (Not really.) Gobs, definitely gobs.
Sadly, no Dodos. I could use a Dodo, for when I construct a map of Sly's childhood adventures. But, then, all he does is wander around his farmyard playing pirate. I don't really need a Dodo for that. He pretends the hens are Dodos. Is there a nice chicken in the free art? I'll check that out.
The manicured gardens of the royal residence double as a sheep pasture. That's Bittor's idea. He's the Crown Prince. He's obsessed with sheep. It's the only area of his life that he has any control over. You'll be reading about that sad situation shortly.
Can't get my mitts on a ewe. A pug dog will do. He's one of the reasons Sly's wants to beat it north, home to England.
​
HAUTE-NAVARRE*
A land of chilly, wind-swept hills and rocky soil. The contentious giants
north and south valued it as a place to gather information, meet with
allies, and prosecute a centuries-old animosity.
That's why it was allowed to remain independent, even with a king so
dotty he couldn't be manipulted. (It was whispered that he was advised
by a cat.) The son showed signs of being more malleable, despite an odd
animal obsession of his own. France and Spain took a wait and see attitude, and jockeyed for influence with the future monarch.
* Statelets came and went. There was a Navarre, also a Basse Navarre. Lost in the mists of time is Haute-Navarre. Read about it here. You'll find a mention of it nowhere else.
NOTHING
SAYS
PIRATE . . .
like a big, bright, loudmouth bird, right?
Another stand-in, of course, no pirates to be had here. Skulls, forget it, I explained that. I won't tap Edvard again. I don't reuse images.
Sly hops a coastal trader. A cabin boy turns out to be a runaway duke, fleeing a murderous uncle. Captured by pirates, the cat engineers an escape, landing them on the coast of France. There they join a circus, the perfect place to hide.
​
*
THIS
ART FOR VISUALIZATION PURPOSES ONLY
FINAL
GRAPHIC
TK
It will be some combo
of the period maps I've found,
plus my own embellisment.
Sly intercepts a message meant for John Dee. Having always longed to meet the man, he delivers it. Together, they foil a dastardly plot.
Dee takes the cat to court, where he encounters a female with the most elegant of court manners, except when she's sloushed. Then, she swings bare-naked from the rafters. He falls hard for Sha Sha, above.
*
Sly had
played the
flute as a
kitten.
In an itinerant
street show he
plays a mandolin.
How on earth did he master it?
Mark Knopfler says,
"It takes perisitance. You've got
to make your fingers go where
they don't want to go."
Sly taught himself to pluck and strum with nary a lesson, like Mark, self-taught all the way. He willed his toes to to an agility that defied all notions
of catly competance.
Was Sly the MK of his day?
Quite possibly.
*
I don't usually repeat images,
but I'm relaxing my most-of-the-time hard-and-fast rule for once.
I've a dancing bear in my circus. The bear has a vital role. He's the reason Sly falls into the hands of villains headed north.
He's grabbed by a jealous bear-handler (he puts on a hell of an act, you knew it, right?) but escapes out the window of an inn, tied up in a sack. He lands in an innyard, near a party about to depart.
Thinking the sack is fallen from their horses, they hook it over a saddle horn and go on their merry way, leaving the kidnapper hanging out his window screaming, Sirs!
In the name of all
that's holy! Return
my wonderful
trained cat!
THE PUG THE COLLAR
THE LESS THAN MAGIFICENT ROYAL ABODE,
home-sweet-home to our hero for many-and-many a year.
WE'RE GOING DOWN . . . . .
​
DOWN
DOWN
​
DOWN
DOWN
DOWN
Animals IN
Pants!
​
Everything I write is built around smart-mouth animals. In pants. In boots. In baby bonnets. (That would be Herk Hedgehog in
A Fool In Love.) He'd shed his quills from stress, Sly's fault, of course.
The cat ties a baby bonnet around the poor guy's middle to make it up.
I've got a fairy who turns herself into a mouse, in order to have the vocal chords, in Celestine and Her Sisters. I've got critters in poodle skirts dancing to be-bop in On Gaudy Night.
You get the picture, I guess.
I've got an odd
animal obession also.
*
*
​
​
Let me tell you about my plot. I call it my so-called plot, because a lot of folks have complained that not much happens. Wrong! A real lot happens but it's, like, interior stuff. Fun interior stuff, honest.
The collar on the cat (below) is the trigger of an incident that almost turns deadly. Sly almost shreds the nasty pug of the mistress of the next king of France, a gigantic diplomatic blunder.
He's losing it. The king is on his back about a matter they've debated amicably for years. Now the old man is pushing, pushing hardfor a capitulation that the cat cannot countenance, that violates his deeply held beliefs. It's time to bail.
And the Queen, natch.
*
​
Haute-Navarre,
a boil on the neck of Spain
or the ass of France,
depending on
how you
looked
at it.
Sha-Sha, the queen's panpered pet, is Elizabeth's living doll, wigged and painted and dressed just like her. That's Sha on the left. When I get through with her, she'll look just like her mistress.
This is the end of book two. Sly and Dee have both offended the queen mightily. Together, they flee to the continent.
Art here
*
LONDON
TOWN!
Home to runaways.
----------- I've been writing my very Silly Story for a very long time. -----------
Seriously
Deranged
As you can see, I've borrowed a lot of art. I'm cutting corners to get this site going. Some of these images will be replaced, hopefully, before the copyright cops catch up to me. These are century-old drawings, I sure thought they'd be public domain, but research has led me to doubt.
------- Courage, mon ami, le Diable est Morte. --------
The Rogue Decamps is far from nailed down. First off, I've removed material to streamline a novella. It will be added back in the full book, several unresolved issues dealt with.
Then there's this guy here. Miguel de Cervantes, not yet a literary giant, was working as a purchasing agent, buying provisions for an Armada assembled in the harbor of Cadiz. What fun if he were to be sent to Haute-Navarre, supposedly to strike a deal for a foodstuff, but actually to court Prince Bittor's good regard with a fabrication, to reveal the discovery of a new process for rendering ewe's milk cheese amenable to far transport, its remarkable health benefits available to crews on the cross-Atlantic trade routes.
This information will set Bittor's heart to racing like nothing else. Vast new markets will open to him. The drawback with soft cheese is that it doesn't keep like the hard stuff does.
This idea took hold of me as I was fishing for info on sheep and sheep byproducts. How'd I get from sheep to Cervantes? I'm drawing a blank at the moment. Maybe it will come back to me. In the meantime, here are a few true facts, a few so-so assertions, and a few creative falsehoods:
Cervantes is in danger of being jailed for financial irregularities related to his purchasing duties (more from incompetence than villainy). True! He's been imprisoned previously, in Algeria, and he's desperate to avoid another interment. True! He is a member of minor gentry - true! - and claims a connection to the Haute-Navarrese royal family, dining out on it, as they say. My speculation. Shabby gentility, if presentable, has its place at a smart table. He is a pretty young thing - as true as it can be - Look at him! (at this time mid-thirties) - and he was surely a graceful
conversationalist. Ha! Look at me! I'm talking myself into it, here, right here in front of you. Seriously, I can do something with him, I believe. I've worked with far less.
He holds a royal post, but a minor one, he's a low level civil servant, a cog. True. He's writing plays during this period, but has had no success with them. True. Madrid society is willing to feed him, he is a witty, charming dinner guest. (This I conclude from his sublime stotytelling. I have no trouble pronoucing it true.) An amusing story (he's greatly embellished some piece of family lore) of royal relations in a backward but strategically useful region reaches the right ear, probably at one of thse dinner parties he's always going to. Free eats! A penurious writer would take full advantage. Absolutely true, I did it myself. Miguel suddenly has himself a much more important, far better paid, assignment. My goof.
I've had a lot of fun with historical personalities. John Dee was a nut of gorgeous proportions. I've goosed him, but not all that much. I can only pray that a future literary icon obliges me in a tenth as delectable a fashion. Tomorrow I hit Amazon in search of a good bio.
I''ll post my novella, a chapter at a time, while I try to solve my problems with the second half of book one. I'm told that my back-stabbing has gotten so intricate that no one can follow it. Frankly, I have trouble keeping it straight myself. When I can't follow my (convoluted) logic, I'm really in trouble. My usual too-much-too-much has gotten, finally, too-damn-too-much. I guess.
​
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
WHO MIGHT THIS BE?
Does the title
give you a clue?
Mimi
Speike
Seriously
Deranged
Seriously
Deranged
Has been obsessing over
and wrestling with her
​
Very
Silly
Saga
Mimi and her alter ego/
imaginary best friend. Notice a resemblance?
____________
​
. . . for a very Very long time.
She hopes that publishing
her Never-Ending Story
in serial form will get
her ducks in a row, plot-wise.
​
NEXT: a few chapters,
eventually the whole,
of a teaser-novella:
The
A tongue-in-cheek adventure
staring the ultimate wise-ass cat.
Garfield, eat your heart out.
Ro
DEcamps
gue
Deliciously
Deranged
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