Yesterday was Thursday. That means today is …
Newsletter Day!

These Days …

Last week we went to Mississippi. I’m supposed to schedule my vacations at the beginning of each year. That week wasn’t scheduled. We had friends who decided to get married after all my vacation time had been nailed down. All the slots last week were already taken. Fortunately I was able to get one of the other carriers to give up her vacation time so I could use it.

Monday and Friday were both spent traveling. Monday involved getting to the airport. Going through security. Waiting around. Sitting on a cramped plane. Trekking across the next airport from our arrival gate to our next departure gate. More sitting on another, smaller cramped plane. Getting a rental car. Getting to the hotel. Friday was basically the reverse. The folks who work at the airport and on the planes were generally kind, friendly and helpful. The people who run the airline industry and profit from it are horrible monsters who deserve nothing but contempt. I’d rant more but I’ve already given them two days of my life.

Our time in Mississippi, Tuesday to Thursday, was quite pleasant. We’ve known the bride for decades, me since high school, Sarah since the beginning of this century. We met the groom on Tuesday and, thankfully, liked him and enjoyed his company quite a lot. We’ve been considering moving to Mississippi when I retire (living in Seattle gets more cost prohibitive every year) so we were also doing a little exploring when we weren’t hanging out with our friends.

The wedding on Wednesday evening was small. I performed the ceremony. The bride and groom wrote their own vows. They’d intended to have it outdoors in their backyard (they have five acres) but, after days of sunshine, a storm had rolled in, so we did it in their living room.

Thursday Sarah and I did some more exploring in the morning and hung out with our friends in the afternoon. We talked. We cooked. We listened to old records. We ate. It was very good.

This week has been one of my scheduled vacations. As is traditional, we haven’t gone anywhere. We just hang out, I do some art and spread out the chores that I would normally be trying to stuff into my evenings and single days off.

Process Writing

David Mann has written a process post about the comic I illustrated. Follow the link to read all about it.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of a trio of faces. Mugs for mugs. Or whatever.
Available on:
A mug in my Zazzle store
A variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Mighty Nizz

The third page of the first Mighty Nizz comic is live at her website. Below is the scan of the original art. Follow the link to see the page in color.

Sketches

I do a lot of sketches. Most of them are a patchwork of faces and partial figures and random things. This week I’ve been doing some sketches with the idea of depicting full figures in relation to each other. I liked the way these turned out so I’m sharing them here.
NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. I usually forget about it until I see someone posting about it early in November. Life is too busy for me to play catch up so, at that point, I figure it’s too late for me to participate. “Maybe next year,” I tell myself.

This year, on October 15th, Facebook tossed one of those historic “Maybe next year” posts into my reminders feed. That’s an early enough notice for me to think about whether I could join in with any success. NaNoWriMo considers a novel to be about 50,000 words. 50,000 words divided by 30 days is about 1700 words a day. A double spaced manuscript is about 250-300 words a page so I’d need to average about five and a half pages a day.

Given the other things I am responsible for and want to accomplish, I don’t think I could succeed at writing a novel.

Except.

I can use NaNoWriMo as a prompt to make progress on updating one of my earlier projects.

Daughter of Spiders is an illustration/writing project that I posted here daily in 2013. Back in (I think) 2010 I’d had the idea that it would be fun to do a portrait of every version of the Frankenstein Monster. I thought it would give me subject matter to post here. Then I thought of adding portraits of monsters/creatures that were take offs of the Monster, mostly from B-movies. And then I thought it would be fun to do portraits of other monsters from B-movies. And, for me, every picture tells a story, I started thinking of a story that would connect all those portraits. And that led me to invent some characters and scenarios and an overarching mythology to tie things together. It became something very large, featuring illustrations of beings inspired by pulp fiction, horror movies, fairy tales and … stuff.

Originally I planned to start posting in 2011. As the project got more complicated I pushed the start date to 2012. I finally started posting on January 1st, 2013. Each illustration was accompanied by a short “excerpt” from Briar Rose Taylor’s memoirs.

Every once in a while I’ve thought about expanding those excerpts and doing new illustrations. This last Wednesday I read through the whole project. For a moment I thought about trying to put out a new version starting in 2023 – ten years since the first version was posted! Cool!

Dumb. 2023 is set aside for the Mighty Nizz.

But I did decide that I will do a revision and expansion. At the moment I’m thinking I could be ready to post the new version in 2024 but I’ll be okay if I can’t do it until 2025.

Skookworks.com is already a massive website. Rather than create 365 new posts I’ll be pulling the original posts, expanding them and reposting them with new illustrations in 2024 (or 2025). If you’ve never read the original series you have until November 1st to do so. Start here. Click on “next” at the top right of the post to go to the next installment.

And that’s it for this week.

May the next seven days treat you well!