Michael Gerard Bauer Author

2024 Week 18: Would a ‘me’ by any other name smell just as sweet?

Posted on May 7, 2024 by mgbauer

In the last blog I looked back 20 years to when my writing career began with the publication of The Running Man and talked about the creation of my first book cover.

This week I thought I’d look back 20 years to the creation of my author name.

The story goes that when my mother was pregnant with me, the old lady next door said something to her like, ‘Not long now till Michael is born.’ For some reason she just assumed that Michael would be my name even though my mother had never suggested it. In the end, she was right.

I like to think our neighbour was possessed with psychic powers that allowed her to foresee some great destiny for me. (On the other hand, it’s possible that she might have just been possessed – which would probably explain a lot about her. And me.)

Anyway, an interesting thing about having Michael as your name, is the many different forms and variations it can take. Personally if I sign off an email for example I usually refer to myself as Michael. (Sometimes I use Mike but it feels a bit strange and a little too intimate. I just don’t think I know me that well.)

However many close family and friends never call me Michael, preferring Mike or even Mick. But that’s not the end of it.

Over the years I have also been called Mikey, Micky, Mikail, Mitch, Michael Gerard, Michelle, and when I was very little, Micky Drippin’! (No, I don’t know why. I only hope it didn’t refer to a leaky part of my anatomy.)

Once during a school visit a boy (a fellow Michael) told me that when he was little he got branded Mickety Pickety! What is wrong with you non-Michael people out there?! Haven’t you got anything better to do?

Which brings me to the important moment in my life when I had to settle on an author name.

The only thing I knew for sure back then was that I certainly wasn’t going to use a pseudonym. I mean, a miracle was about to happen wasn’t it? I was having a book published for goodness sakes. There was no way I was going to give the glory to some wanky pseudo-me!

But like every first time author, I was still faced with a big decision. What variation of my real name should I go with? Michael Bauer or Mike Bauer or Mick Bauer or Michael G. Bauer or M. G. Bauer or M. Gerard Bauer or Mike G. Bauer etc etc etc?

In the end I went the whole hog and decided on Michael Gerard Bauer.

Here are some reasons why:

The main one was that as a name (and some people might unkindly claim, as a person) Michael Bauer is just too common.

Bauer (meaning Farmer or Peasant in German) is like the name Smith in Germany. There are heaps of us Bauers! And loads of “Michael Bauer”s around the world.

But if you were to put “Michael Gerard Bauer” in inverted commas and Google it (not that I’d ever do such a crass thing!!) you’ll basically just get me and not, for example, the famous food critic from the San Francisco Chronicle, or the unconventional German artist, or a million other assorted people.

Also, when I was in secondary school, once you reached the senior levels, it was trendy to have a briefcase with your initials embossed in gold on the side. (Yes we were born to rule! Although I should point out my briefcase was cheap vinyl not leather.) My initials, including my middle name, were M.G.B. just like the sports car. I loved it. For one brief shining moment, there was actually something almost cool about being me! So for me having my full name was a plus.

Finally, in grade 12 we studied the English Poet Gerard Manly Hopkins.

I developed a bit of a thing for Gerard. I loved the way he combined words and sounds and even created new words. He was ahead of his time – a bit of a 17th Century rapper. I could recite his poem The Windhover by heart (probably still can) and I always loved Spring and Fall which describes a young girl confronting her mortality.

So the Gerard in my name was also a little nod to the famous poet. (Also by a strange coincidence his initials have a strong car connection as well. GMH. Spooky! I thought it might be an omen for success.)

But as I’ve discovered, there are DRAWBACKS to choosing the name Michael Gerard Bauer as your author’s name.

First up, a three part name makes you sound like a bit of poser. Especially when people pronounce your middle name ‘Geraaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrd’ rather than the shorter ‘Gerrid’ like it’s meant to be. Probably not great when you end up writing mainly for children and young adults.

Then I found that the longer your author name is the more opportunities there are for confusion. Is his last name Bauer or Gerard-Bauer? Do we call him Michael or Michael Gerard? And what order did they go in again? Gerard Michael Bauer wasn’t it?

Once on a pamphlet advertising a talk I was to give I was referred to as Michael Gerard Butler. An easy mistake to make I’m sure you’ll agree.

Finally, the longer your name is the harder it is to fit on the cover of your books and so the smaller the font will need to be. And as we all know, the size of the author’s name is usually in direct proportion to the author’s success and popularity. I can’t complain though.

So there are pros and cons, but I’m happy I went with Michael Gerard Bauer even though you could argue that maybe the shorter, punchier, gender-neutral M. G. Bauer would have been a better choice.

I have only one nagging thought.

Could Micky Drippin’ Bauer have been even bigger than Andy Griffiths?

Cheers
Michael/Mike/Mick etc

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Author name, books, fiction, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Just a Dog, MGB, Spring and Fall, The Running Man, The Windhover | Leave a comment

2024 Week 17: A cover story.

Posted on April 29, 2024 by mgbauer

My first novel The Running Man was published in 2004. My wonderful publisher at the time Dyan Blacklock assured me that the book would be around for 20 years. Ha! Sure.

But she was right. This year marks the novel’s 20th Anniversary and it is still in print, still selling and still being used in schools here and in Germany. Pretty amazing to me.

Anyway because it’s been 20 years since my first publication, over the next couple of blogs I thought I’d look back at some Running Man related things.

Starting with the COVER.

It wasn’t long after I got the exciting news that I was going to have my first book published that I began imagining what the cover might look like. One day I sat down with my son Joe and he roughly sketched some of the ideas we came up with together involving various running figures, mulberry trees and silkworms.

Below is one of my contributions. It’s man being attacked by a giant killer silkworm caterpillar. (I may have been losing focus at that point!)

I also had fun trying to design some covers using a set image and playing around with various fonts. I think I sent some of these to the publisher but they weren’t keen.

I actually really liked the background image. It came from the chair below that my daughter Meg had created for a school art project. We still have it in our garage. It could have been famous!

I had another attempt at creating a cover on my computer which I also thought was quite good but Meg reckoned the little white figure up the top looked like a half-man half-crocodile.

That’s when I decided I’d better leave cover-designing up to the experts!

The original cover design for the book was the one below. I really liked it as did Dyan my publisher. I thought it captured the moody, mysterious atmosphere of the novel. And I loved David Kennett’s depiction of the Running Man character.

However the pre-publication feedback from booksellers on that original cover was that they thought it was too dark and looked a bit like an adult murder mystery cover. They believed the cover needed to reflect some of the positive and uplifting things in the story.

So at the last minute before official publication the cover was changed to this (the stickers came later):

The new version was obviously brighter, with silkworm moths featuring along with words from Douglas Stewart’s beautiful poem The Silkworms which is central to the story. I was happy with it and glad David’s illustration still featured prominently.

So that remained the cover until the 10th Anniversary edition in 2014 which reverted back to the original concept with the addition of a lovely quote from Markus Zusak (The Book Thief).

And finally these are the overseas covers. (And isn’t it great to see the Dutch version using my original idea of giant killer caterpillars!)

So that’s my cover story on The Running Man.

Next time as I look back 20 years to the start of my writing career, I’ll blog about the process of deciding on an Author name.

Did I make the right choice? I’m really not sure.

Cheers
Michael

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Book covers, The Running Man | 2 Comments

2024 Week 16: Where do I begin …

Posted on April 25, 2024 by mgbauer

One of the most common questions writers get asked is ‘Where do you get your story ideas from?’ The truth is, they can come from anywhere. And for me at least, they’re often quite small things that grow and evolve into a story. Sometimes they are lost in the process.

In my experience, the beginning of a story is like finding one piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Something about it grabs your attention. So much so that you begin to wonder what might connect to it and you start searching in your imagination for those other pieces.

Sometimes the first piece you discover is at the heart of the final picture. Sometimes it ends up a minor detail almost lost among the other pieces.

I used to love doing jigsaw puzzles when I was young but the difference between those puzzles and putting together a novel is that for a novel you don’t get all the pieces at the start. You have to find them.

Also at the start you don’t get a picture to guide you of what the completed puzzle is supposed to look like. You have to figure all that out as you go along.

Here’s a brief guide to the ‘jigsaw puzzle pieces’ that started my stories.

Beginning: A childhood memory.The first line of the book mentions silkworms. That was the first jigsaw puzzle piece of the story – a childhood memory of looking for silkworms on the mulberry in our backyard. I didn’t find any and I was frustrated and disappointed. That same afternoon my older brother came home from a friend’s house with a shoebox filled with silkworms. It was an Ashgrovian miracle! Somehow that memory grew into a story about a lonely teenage boy, a damaged Vietnam vet and a man bent out of shape by an unbearable tragedy.

Beginning: A picture and a line from a book. I had a still image from the movie version of MOBY DICK on my noticeboard. The famous first line of the novel is ‘Call me Ishmael.” I looked at it one day and imagined a boy complaining, ‘Don’t call me Ishmael! A three book series came from that thought.

Beginning: A movie. I was watching an old film on TV that was set in the Middle Ages and featured a dragon. The dragon looked a bit like a dinosaur. I began to wonder if the fables about dinosaurs could have come from people actually seeing a dinosaur. Question: How would a dinosaur get to the Middle Ages? Answer: Time travel of course!

Beginning: A name. Out on a walk the name Mr Mosely came into my head as a good name for a dog. I don’t know why. But it made me wonder what a dog with that name would look like. It also made me think of the dogs I had grown up with and their stories. Some of them were funny, some were sad and some were weird. There would end up being a particular reason why the dog in the story was called Mr Mosely, but I had no idea what that was at the start.

Beginning: An ending. A scene came to me involving a man and teenage girl. They had a fractured relationship. His was either the step-father or the mother’s new partner. They are confronted in a fish and chip shop by a violent, drunken, aggressive bikie. It’s a dangerous situation and they have to work together and trust each other in order to escape. It heals their fracture. I then wrote a whole story where that would be the final scene. It didn’t work. The ending no longer suited the story and characters I’d created. The final scene of the published novel still involves a confrontation with a bikie but it’s a very different one.

Beginning: A teenage memory. I was out walking (again!) and for some reason I was thinking of a time when I was in my late teens at the University of Qld and I was in the foyer of the Schonell Theatre waiting for a movie to start. I was watching the other students as they drifted through the door to buy their tickets. There was a girl I liked from one of my tutorials and I was kind of hoping she might walk through. Spoiler Alert: She didn’t! I began imagining someone else in that position desperately hoping for a ‘special’ person to enter who ends up with someone entirely different – the ‘wrong’ girl.

Beginning: A typing mistake and a title. Instead of writing ‘epic fail’ in a social media post I wrote ‘eric fail’. My daughter Meg noticed it and said is sounded like a character from one of my books. That led me to thinking of a book title – Eric Vale Epic Fail. Six books resulted from this and I got to work with my son Joe as illustrator.

Beginning: A previous piece of writing. I was asked to write a story for this series, so unlike all the other examples this didn’t start with me just stumbling across a jigsaw puzzle piece that developed into a story. On this occasion I went looking for an idea for a story. I ended up adapting a humorous article I’d written years before for an online writing school. It was about the battles my wife and I had with a very determined scrub turkey. I made it more child centered.

Beginning: A previous story. The very first thing I tried to write was a picture book about a little boy who loved drawing and dinosaurs and who unsuccessfully tries to draw a T-Rex and gets upset. It was based on my son Joe who loved (loves) both those things. The only difference was that in real life Joe could actually draw an excellent T-Rex! That picture book never got published but years later when I was thinking about it I imagined Joe getting upset (losing it) not because of a bad drawing but because he lost his favourite pencil. The double meaning really appealed to me. Then of course, I turned Joe into a rabbit!

Which just leaves the two pictures books due out sometime next year.

The first story was inspired by an illustration on a web page. The owner of that webpage I’m happy to say is now in the process of illustrating the book.

And the second story was inspired by a phrase spoken by a character from a novel. In fact from one of those books shown above.

So yeah, story ideas really can come from anywhere. What about you? Where have yours come from?

Cheers
Michael

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Beginnings, books, Dinosaur Knights, Don't Call Me Ishmael, Eric Vale Epic Fail, jigsaw-puzzles, Just a Dog, Rodney Loses It!, Story ideas, The Pain My Mother Sir Tiffy Cyber Boy and Me, The Running Man, The Things That Will Not Stand, Writing, You Turkeys! | 2 Comments

2024 Week 15: Dog Tales

Posted on April 18, 2024 by mgbauer

Well it’s Thursday and I normally post my weekly Blogs on Mondays but … yeah this week I forgot, didn’t I.

But I do have an excuse! We’ve been down in Melbourne for nearly a fortnight staying with my daughter’s family and only flew back this week.

In Melbourne we spent a lot of our time with our two gorgeous, non-stop grand-children. Some of that time involved re-watching some of our favourite BLUEY episodes as well as catching up with the most recent ones.

What a brilliant series BLUEY is! Such a rarity for a show to appeal to three generations and bring so much laughter and joy, along with plenty of happy and sad tears, to adults and kids alike. It deserves every acclaim it receives. I love it.

Now we are back home in BRISBANE and in case you didn’t know, Brisbane of course is also the home city of Bluey and the Heeler family. So it’s always fun to watch the show and spot local landmarks and to see settings and places you instantly recognise like South Bank and the City Skyline.

In fact the suburb I grew up in, the suburb where my wife and I met as teachers and where we mainly raised our children – ASHGROVE – features prominently in the BLUEY series as do the surrounding suburbs of Bardon (my wife’s home suburb), Paddington, Red Hill, the Brisbane CBD and other areas of South East Queensland.

Here are just some favourite examples.

Our previous house was in Hawthorne Ave Ashgrove about 100 meters from the Golden Crown Restaurant in Waterworks Road (now closed down) where Bandit takes the girls one episode for a chaotic takeaway pick-up. We also used to get takeaways there and from the Fish and Chip and Indian shops beside it.

The library the Heelers go to is the council one in Ashgrove. It’s our local library and when it first opened (back in the late 60s I think it was) my sister Helen was one of the librarians there.

The playground where Bandit takes Bluey for her bike riding lesson is based on Woolcock Park at Red Hill. We’ve taken the grand-kids there.

The hardware store Hammerbarn that the Heelers go to is based on Bunnings at Keperra. We’ve also shopped there. And in an example of life imitating art recently Keperra Bunnings was temporarily transformed into Hammerbarn! They quickly sold out of gnomes.

And of course it was great to see that like us the Heelers are big supporters of the MIGHTY MAROONS of Queensland!

But that’s not all. I have some other (very tenuous) connections to the Bluey universe!

The first is that JOE BRUMM the incredible creator of Bluey did his secondary schooling at Marist College Ashgrove – and so did I (albeit decades apart!). I also taught at Marist Ashgrove when Joe would have been in Year 11 and 12. (I don’t recall coming across him at all but surely it’s possible I could have inspired him from a distance!)

A second connection is that like Joe Brumm, I also wrote a story about a dog, which although nowhere near as astronomically successful as Bluey, was a Honour Book in the CBCA Awards, won a Queensland Premiers Literary Award and made its way to some other countries. (By the way, if by some miracle you are reading this Joe, I’d like to make it clear that Mr Mosely is very open to a guest appearance on your show at any time! I’d suggest you get your people to call my people except I don’t have people so I’m guessing that they probably wouldn’t answer.)

A third tenuous connection is that my story The Running Man is also set in Ashgrove. So I’d like to think that I’ve also done my little bit to promote my home suburb overseas, particularly in Germany where the book has been used as an exam text over the years. (Images of pages below featuring Ashgrove are from a wonderful German language study guide by Thorsten Utter and Elinor Matt)