Most nights I read to Nizzibet. Lately I’ve been reading from the Earthsea novels by Ursula K. LeGuin. We’re currently about halfway through The Tombs of Atuan. The Earthsea books were examples to me of how a story changes depending on ones age. When I first read them as a kid, when there was only the Earthsea Trilogy, I remember liking A Wizard of Earthsea and being mostly bored by Tombs. Lots of stuff happens in Wizard. Ged travels all over Earthsea hunting the shadow he’s loosed. Tombs?. Arha/Tannar lives a life of ritual at a mostly forgotten temple in the middle of a desert. Not so exciting to me as a kid. As an adult now (and as a young man the second time I read it) the story is engaging and interesting because the writing is.

I started reading the series because we’d watched the SciFi Channel’s Earthsea miniseries and Nizz had enjoyed it. I couldn’t remember enough of the original novels to tell her what SciFi had changed. Ursula LeGuin has complained about the miniseries but her complaints have been primarily about casting. Rereading the novels has been great. The Earthsea of the novels is not a perky place.

I’m going to be submitting an image a day to Epilogue.net for my gallery. That doesn’t mean there’ll be a new image every day. Epilogue reserves the right to refuse any piece that doesn’t meet their standards. Epilogue can get backed up and images won’t appear for two or three days after submission. Still, I’ve done enough work lately that I can probably submit a piece a day for two weeks and still not give away the store.

Today I submitted a panel from Strange Eggs. Resubmitted actually. It was rejected the first time. Often times the rejections don’t make sense to me. This time they said the image was too small. That’s easy. I’ve resized and resubmitted. Time to wait.

My latest submission to Epilogue.net has been posted. It’s from the last Worlds of Cthulhu, number 2. The illustrations I’m working on currently are for the sequel/continuation of an article on playing Call of Cthulhu in the Wild West.

The lawn has become a little jungle. The most jungly lawn on the block. Paliki adores it. She sleeps in the middle of it and dreams jungle cat dreams.

But I’ve borrowed back the lawn mower and tomorrow is yard waste day for the garbagemen. When the hour is decent for lawn mower noise I clear cut the jungle.

I found this illustration by Bethany Berg while looking at new contributions to Epilogue.net. Good lord. Berg is fifteen. I still don’t draw that well. May she live a long and productive life.

A new Gamera movie has been planned.

Still working my way through the illustrations for the Worlds of Cthulhu assignment. To anyone who has been expecting to hear from me and hasn’t – please don’t hold your breath waiting. Blue is not your color.

The Big Book of Cults by Ben Counter is available from Chaosium. It’s got a cover and a few interior illustrations by me. I hadn’t intended to do the cover. I’d done the illustration for one of the interior articles and I guess Ben decided it fit for the cover.

Finished my Strange Eggs story. I’m not sure when the issue will be published. The first issue is just out so probably the next will be available in two or three months.

Finished Wicked. I enjoyed it. It’s one of those enjoy-the-ride novels; meaning that the ending wasn’t exactly satisfying but the events of the story and the way the story is told is engaging enough that I can forgive the lack of resolution. Which is fine. I didn’t expect it. Lack of resolution is probably part of the point. Elphaba was a great character. Not much of a witch. Also part of the point. It’s not a book to read if you haven’t seen the Movie. That’s obviously the inspiration for the story. Maguire uses Baum’s novels as base for his Oz but if you’d simply read Baum you’d have a very different Glinda and Wicked Witch of the West in your head. If you’d seen the Movie you could probably read Wicked without having read Baum. You’d miss a lot of the references but you’d probably still enjoy the story. Or at least get the story. Being as it’s a Tragedy I’m not sure if “enjoy” is the right term.

Opened the boxes that Luvset sent. I figured that since I had scanning to do anyway I might as well pull out the minis that I needed jpegs of. Oops. It’s worse than I guessed. While it looks like some of my minicomics are in there the bulk of the contents is something far scarier. Other people’s minicomics. Old correspondence. Crap. The boxes got closed up again. If I start looking through them it will be hours before I’m done. Best to leave them safely packed until we’re moved.

Today I do my best to eat through my Worlds of Cthulhu assignment.

The credits ran. Derek asked, “So which was better, this or Return of the Sith?”

To which I replied, “This, definitely.”

Nizzibet enjoyed herself. That was good. She’s often espressed a bafflement to the appeal of Godzilla. Godzilla: Final War did something that most Godzilla movies don’t. It never stopped moving. Scenes of people standing around talking, going over the latest pseudoscience, were short. Lots of action sequences. Lots of monsters.

Complaints? Too much Gigan. Godzilla’s head redesign gives him fragile looking duck jaws. Beyond that, why complain? It was a Big Loud Crazy Stupid Godzilla movie. Much as I love Godzilla most Godzilla movies are Stupid. Not all of them are Big and Crazy.

Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera Trilogy looked at kaiju through a serious, epic lense. Godzilla: Final Wars gets drunk and parties. If this really is the last Godzilla movie for a decade it’s a good note to end on.