Greetings and salutations, Beautiful People!

Halloween has passed, Thanksgiving looms and the distant thunder of Christmas can be heard. Here in the Northern Hemisphere the days grow shorter and water falls from the sky in a variety of formats.

This is the newsletter. I’m guy drinking coffee and drawing stuff. You’re one of the Beautiful People. (Duh. It’s there in the opening sentence.)

Lovecraft Kids

The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection by Oscar Rios, published by Golden Goblin Press featured four scenarios. The Halloween scenario is actually the first in the book as well as being the first one Oscar wrote. An earlier version of it was published as part of Halloween Horror, a collection of Halloween themed scenarios, back in 2005. That collection is out of print and I couldn’t find a link to it while I was writing this. If I’d been smart I’d have featured these illustrations in last week’s newsletter.

Halloween In Dunwich –
A group of six cousins, from across Lovecraft Country, gather at the Dunwich farm of their great grandfather Silas for a family celebration. There will be a day filled with Halloween themed activities and games, followed by a night of feasting and ghost stories. However, as the midnight hour approaches, the children discover that a certain old family ghost story is quite true, as a vengeful spirit from their family’s distant past rises from the grave.  It falls upon our adolescent investigators to save their family and thwart the aims of their sinister foe.     

Talking to Myself

Scene:
The Studio. (Also: The Library.)

The Cartoonist is sitting at his desk. He’s staring at his computer monitor. A fat orange cat sleeps on the actual computer at the right of the monitor. The Salesman enters.

Salesman – “Are you thinking? Or have you fallen asleep with your eyes open?”

Cartoonist – “I’m thinking.”

The Salesman waits for the Cartoonist to elaborate. The cat on the computer yawns.

Cartoonist – “Punk rock. Zines. Getting the work done and getting it out.”

Salesman – “Did that make sense in your head? Because it’s not making sense out here.”

Cartoonist – “I’m thinking about how to approach Red Storm Elegy. How to do the art. How to craft the story.”

Salesman – “Maybe just leave it alone? Maybe start an Instagram and draw fan art of popular characters that people recognize instead of trying to salvage a decades old project that the writer abandoned? It would be easier for me to sell people on something they recognized.”

Cartoonist – “I’ve got the new story in my head. Mostly. I’ve rearranged the pages and I’ve written dialogue for about a third of it. I’ve done new art.”

The Salesman sighs. He scratches pets the cat a couple of times. The cat shifts its position slightly.

Salesman – “Red Storm Elegy is lousy title.”

Cartoonist – “It’s the working title. I had to come up with a new title for the project so I could start thinking it as a new thing instead of an old thing that I was trying to expand.”

Salesman – “It is an old thing that you’re trying to expand. Are you sure you’re not stuck in a case of Sunk Cost Fallacy? Maybe you think that because you spent a bunch of time drawing a bunch of pages you need to use those pages in something otherwise the time that you spent drawing those pages was a waste?”

Cartoonist – “No.”

Salesman – “No? No to what?”

Cartoonist – “No to being caught in a Sunk Cost Fallacy. Probably. I don’t ever consider a project done until it’s done. Some things just get set aside because other things take priority. I’m working on Red Storm Elegy now because now is the time to work on it.”

Salesman – “Talking to you gives me a headache.”

Cartoonist – “So do something else. Isn’t it Friday morning? Don’t you have a newsletter to write?”

Salesman – “I just finished it.”