These Days …

I started to type my usual “It’s Friday!” greeting and stopped. As much as I want to be cheery and as much as I want to avoid being depressing, I’m not feeling cheery. I’m not depressed. Not in a way that fits any of the usual descriptions of depression anyway.

I got back from Fairbanks, Alaska on Tuesday afternoon. I have a friend up there who is living with cancer. I went up to help her sort stuff of hers that had been languishing in boxes as the result of a couple moves. We got through a lot of boxes. I also helped her with meals and shopping and doctor visits. My presence didn’t cure her cancer. Her life is hard right now. And there’s no way I can fix that. I don’t have the resources.

If I lived in Fairbanks or she lived in Seattle I’d be able to give her at least an hour a day of help. If …

I feel weird writing about this because I think it might look like I’m trying to put a spotlight on myself. But I’m fine. She’s not. I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m numb. My feelings are blank. Being angry wouldn’t help. Being sad seems premature and rude. She’s still alive. Being happy seems even ruder.

She started hospice on Wednesday. She tells me that the hospice folks have been helpful and responsive. She sounded more relaxed than I’ve heard in a while. I’m glad of that.

Sketches

Between my trip north and prepping for the Billi 99 Kickstarter I’ve only had a little time to do my own art. I’m just doing sketches right now. I’d rather not work on anything complex because I don’t want to have to set it aside once I get started. I’ve still got the next Mighty Nizz story to finish. The story after that is planned out. I’ve got many more design ideas for my POD stores. I’ve been missing drawing. Sketching eases that itch.

I hope that your week has been a good one.

See you in seven!

It’s Friday!

That’s assuming you’re reading this on the day this newsletter appears in your email and posts on my website. I’m actually writing this week’s newsletter a few days in advance. So I’m taking advantage of the extra time to write –

Tips from a Mail Carrier (in No Particular Order) –

Keep your dog inside during delivery hours.
The rule is: do not deliver if a dog is in the yard. Ever. Even if you know the dog and you’re sure it’s a big cuddlewumpus. When I started as a mail carrier I went into yards and onto porches regardless of the appearance of a dog. I was going to make sure the mail got through – no matter what! With the passing of time, and my body telling me that not everything that breaks ever really heals, I’m less determined. We’ve had quite a few carriers getting bitten while delivering and I’ve had to fend off a few with my mail bag. I will still go into yards if the dog doesn’t bark and it wiggles while its tail wags. Those dogs are only dangerous from being overly friendly.

Include your apartment/unit number in all your correspondence.
Every time you fill out a form, every time you write your return address, every time you order something. Your regular mail carrier might recognize your name and figure out in which box to place your mail or which door to deliver your parcel. But if you’ve just moved into your building, chances are your carrier will mark the item IA (insufficient address) and send it back. The carriers who fill in on your regular carrier’s day off might set mail aside for the regular carrier to figure out or they might mark the items IA and send them back.

When moving, fill out a change of address for every person and every variation of the names of the people that are moving.
I know that seems like a pain in the ass but I often get mail for people that’s being sent to their maiden names. That mail won’t get forwarded. If your last name has weird spellings, fill out COAs for those spellings too.

Collect your mail at least once a week.
Your carrier can only jam so much mail into your box. Have a heart. Clear out your mail frequently. Even if all you expect is “junk”. If your mail box doesn’t lock, clear it out daily. We’re getting more people stealing mail these days. An unlocked box will get cleared out by a thief if you don’t clear it out yourself.

Have an obvious place to hide parcels.
Porch pirates abound. If a parcel is easily seen from the street it’s tempting prey for the nefariously minded. I stash parcels behind furniture and planters when I can but if there’s nothing on a porch your carrier will have nothing to use for concealment. A lot of my customers have large containers specifically so I and UPS and FedEx and Amazon and anyone else can put deliveries out of sight.

You do not have to sign for certified mail if you don’t want to.
My least favorite type of delivery is a certified letter. Partly because it requires me to spend extra time either getting a signature or, if the customer is not there, spend extra time to fill out a form to let the customer know that a certified letter is waiting for them at the post office. Partly because an awful lot of certified letters are bad news – divorce papers, collection notices and other legal threats. I hate delivering bad news and I hate asking people to legally acknowledge that they have received said bad news. A lot of people don’t realize that they can refuse to sign for certified mail. Refusing to sign won’t stop legal proceedings but it may slow things down a bit. (Also, these days, a lot of people just aren’t ready for visitors. They come to door in their pajamas or their underwear or sometimes just wearing nothing.)

“Informed Delivery” is an inaccurate gage for receiving your mail.
“Informed Delivery” is a service whereby the customer gets photos of the mail that is supposedly going to be delivered in the next day or so. The trouble is, those photos are being taken as the mail is being processed at the plant. That letter could be get missorted or just plain lost before the carrier gets in their daily trays of mail to be delivered. This happens far more often than we’d like and it’s been happening more frequently since the current Postmaster General had sorting machines removed from a lot of our processing plants. Also, the program that sends those photos to the customer is not the same program that is sorting the mail. I discovered this when a customer asked about an important letter that ID had told her she would be receiving “shortly”. Thing is, that letter had the wrong zip code on it. ID somehow knew to send her the photo of the letter but the sorting software sent the actual letter to another post office in another zip code and a human being had to make the corrections to get the letter to me to get it to my customer.

Recycle your junk mail please.
This note is directed to the folks who live in apartments who put their unwanted catalogs, solicitations and, especially, Red Plums on top of their buildings CBUs (cluster box units). I like to keep the mail area neat and if I find that stuff on top of the CBU I will put it back in your mailbox.

“Resident” is you.
If the letter (or anything else) is addressed to resident anywhere on the label it’s meant for the person living at the address. It doesn’t matter if it also has the name of a previous resident in the address, you’re the current resident. Your mail carrier doesn’t want it back.

It’s not the “Wrong Address” if the address is your address.
I understand the thinking. You get a letter with the name of a stranger on it. Obviously that’s the wrong address for that person. But, if the rest of the address is correct, it’s not the wrong address. That person is NATA (not at this address). This is me being pedantic. I do appreciate people trying to help mail get to the correct person.

You can opt out of the Red Plum.
I hate delivering the thing even more than my customers hate getting it. That most of my customers hate is one of the reasons I hate it. If I had more customers who expressed a want for the thing I’d have more fondness for it. If you’re a person who hates the thing, you can opt out for five years. Use this link. It will take a few weeks for your address to be removed and you might still get a Red Plum now and then if the carrier isn’t looking closely at the addresses when delivering but you will get the thing a lot less frequently.

Mail carriers do not have keys to individual mailboxes.
I regularly run into this with customers who have individual locking mailboxes for the first time. They put outgoing mail in the box and put the flag up expecting the carrier to collect it. Every couple months I have to leave someone a note informing them that I need them to put the mail where I can grab it – usually on a clip on the inside of the door or lid of the box. Carriers do have keys that will let them enter buildings and open the fronts/sides/backs of CBUs but we’d never be able to carry all the keys we’d need if we opened each box individually.

If you want to read pet peeves from mail carriers – here’s a reddit thread. It will either have you sympathize with carriers or think a lot of them are assholes. Probably both.

These Days …

I did our taxes. With Skookworks now a business this is probably the last time I’ll be doing them on my own. Supposedly we’ll get a refund. The exact amount will probably not be the amount the forms suggested. It hasn’t been for the last few years. And the refund, whatever it turns out to be, might not arrive for months. Last year I filed at the beginning of April and the money took ’til midsummer to arrive.

Work continues on Billi 99. I reached out to the production folks at the company that’s planning to publish the trade paperback after the Kickstarter hardback is out. I got some good advice and a little useful critique of what I’ve done so far.

Enough Words … Have Some Pictures!

I’m on vacation this week. The tips at the beginning of this issue are the only postal work I’m doing. I took a few minutes to do some sketching. Thirty two faces.

That’s it for this week. I hope you’ve had some more good times than bad in the last week. I hope you have even more in the upcoming seven days.

See you next week!

Friday dawns here in the Pacific Northwest bright and comparatively warm. Hopefully. I won’t actually know what the dawn will look like until after this newsletter/post has gone live. Snow is not predicted.

I’ve been seeing ads in my Facebook feed for AI services that will write blog posts for me. I both understand and am bewildered by the idea of AI doing a person’s creative work. Humans are animals and animals are lazy. Work, especially the amount of work modern folks are expected to perform, is not something an animal seeks out. Ever since we’ve had labor saving technologies we’ve been promised easier, lazier lives. Having an AI do ones creative work is a no-brainer for folks who consider creative work to be just another product to be consumed. These folks are not artists (a lump term to cover everyone who takes an idea and develops it into something for an audience). Creative work is work. Using a prompt to get an AI to produce an image/essay/article/blog post isn’t work. It’s, at best, an idea. Ideas are easy. They’re not precious. I have more ideas in a week than I’ll be able execute in a lifetime.

There’s an experience to be had in taking turning an idea into a story/painting/cartoon/play/etc. I write these newsletters every week to say hello to y’all, friends and strangers. The process of writing is valuable to me. The time spent is worthwhile to me. I hope that the time you spend reading them is at least entertaining.

I do get why someone who doesn’t value the creative experience would want to use AI to write their posts. I don’t get why they’d think anyone would want to read them.

Although …

I spent a chunk of time yesterday cleaning spam comments and contact letters out of the filters over at MightyNizz.com. I haven’t checked the site in over a month. There were over 1600 spam missives yearning for approval. I’m guessing that most of those missives were created by bots. Bots are not “self-learning”. AI is. So I understand. But sooner or later AI is going to be applied to spambots. AI will be used to write blogposts and articles and AI spambots will comment on those posts and articles. The original AIs will comment back. AI will talk to AI. The internet will belong to the machines.

A few people will still write and post. A few people will read and comment.

Hmmm. That was a ramble.

Not a lot of news to report. We’re still working out how and when to do the Billi 99 Kickstarter. Outside of delivering mail and managing day to day living, the Billi 99 Special Edition fills up most of my time. Hopefully we’ll be able to announce launch dates next week.

I did have some time to sit at my drawing board yesterday. I haven’t drawn in a few weeks so I need to sketch. You’ve patiently read my words, now here are some pictures. Thirty-two faces sketched in blue pencil and then defined with a B lead graphite pencil.

Thank you for spending some time with me. I hope your week was a good one and that the coming one will be even better.

See you in seven!

Happy Friday! Happy St. Patty’s Day! As far as I know, I’ve no Irish in my ancestry. I will be wearing green today – unintentionally. I grabbed a green shirt from the drawer when I got up this morning. That means I’m protected against pinching.

Do kids still pinch the kids who aren’t wearing green? I suppose I could google that but I think I’ll just wonder about it instead.

I now have a business license. I am dba Skookworks. I applied to the WA Department of Revenue a couple of weeks ago. I got the license and UBI number via email on Wednesday morning. I got a business checking account and debit card on Wednesday afternoon. The credit union representative who set me up had to ask me a lot of questions to confirm that my business was not in any way marijuana related. I assured her that the only way I warp the morality of my fellow citizens is by drawing weird pictures and publishing comic books.

No, I didn’t say that. I said I was an illustrator. She didn’t ask what sort of illustrations I created.

Skookworks is intended to handle the business part of getting Billi 99 published. Whether we just do a Kickstarter or we do a Kickstarter for a hardback and get the TPB put out by a prominent comics publisher, doing it all through Skookworks is a way to keep the finances of the project separate from our personal finances. I’ll be filing quarterly taxes and hiring an accountant and all sorts of adult stuff. Yay!

After Billi 99 is back in the world Skookworks will be the entity through which I’ll be selling original art and the schtuff I put the art on once we get a store set up on the website(s).

Above is the original version of Nizz saying hello to one of her neighbors in the Night Forest. Below is design with text added for folks who want words with their pictures.
The image only version is available in my Redbubble shop. The shop is still there and still active. The words’n’pictures version will have to wait until we get a new shop set up.

I hope your week has gone well. I hope you make it through the day without being pinched. Unless you’re into being pinched. If so, avoid green! And let everyone know about it!

See you in seven!

I called in sick to work yesterday. I’ve called in covid (as part of quarantine procedure, when I tested positive I never felt sick enough to stay home) and called in physically injured (knee, back) but I don’t remember the last time I called in sick. Usually if I’m feeling under the weather I just go and stagger through the day. On Wednesday I had chills and my digestive system was really not happy. Thursday morning I felt better but still sick enough that staying home seemed like a good idea.

I spent most of the day reading. Books. Something that wasn’t my computer. It was a good day.

I’m going back to work today. You can call in sick for a day without needing to justify it. Calling in sick for more than a day could require going to see a doctor and, when one is sick, that’s just another pain in the tuchus. I do feel better. I’d rather stay home and read but, let’s face it, I’d rather do that most days.

I’m continuing to work on the Billi page conversions. The two images bracketing this post are before (above) and after (below) versions of a two page spread in what was the fourth issue of the original miniseries. Staring at his work day after day has really driven home how talented and skilled Tim Sale was.

We’ve commissioned José Villarubia to color a cover for the book. We’ve also commissioned him to color a couple of pages as examples of what a colored Billi edition might look like. This is for the Kickstarter. The Kickstarter that we’re still figuring out. Given that we’ve never run a Kickstarter before I imagine we’ll be figuring it out until it’s over. That’s assuming we run a Kickstarter. We’re still waiting to hear back from the publisher as to whether they think a Kickstarter for a hardback edition would cause a problem with them putting out a trade paperback.

This is the schedule I’m looking at for 2023 –
March – finish clean up of the original Billi pages. Work out budget for all tiers of Kickstarter.
April – Solicit artists for bonus art in the kickstarter edition. Solicit famous folk for blurbs for advertising – get cover colored.
May – Build mailing list. Figure out timeline for Kickstarter – when will backers get their book? Prep solicitation for the TPB.
June – Pre-kickstarter publicity. Send out PDFs for reviews.
July – Kickstarter.
August – Send print files to publisher. Solicit for the TPB.
September – Communicate with fans, reviewers whatever.
October – More communication. Maybe the Special Edition is released?
November – Billi TPB comes out.
December – Sleep.

The sleep part is a fantasy. December is the Christmas mess at USPS.

Busy, busy. I might be able to get some art of my own done after I’ve finished cleaning up the Billi pages.

I hope life is treating you well. Treat life well in return.

See you in seven!

These Days –

I deliver a lot of so-called junk mail. There’d be very little mail without it and I wouldn’t have a job so I don’t hate the stuff. What I don’t like is badly managed junk mail. Most of the time I just deliver it and forget about it but this week I felt compelled to contact the sender so they could hopefully improve their return rate. This was my email –

I got a thank you back from the dental office. I don’t enjoy going to the dentist but these folks make the experience as tolerable as possible.

Billi 99

I seem to be making good progress on updating the Billi 99 pages. Some of that has been fun. I’m finding out how to do things in Photoshop that I’d never thought of doing. I’ve learned how to make Actions to streamline the work. I got a lot done on Sunday. That felt great. Sarah got contact information and production guidelines from the publisher. I now have an idea what they expect and people to talk to when I have questions.

As I wrote last week, Tim Sale did the original Billi illustrations on Duoshade art board. Doing comics using Duoshade was popular for a time in the late Eighties and early Nineties. I used it myself when I did Misspent Youths. The fellow who had been the designer for this book had told me that once we figured out the moire issues on the Billi pages we could use the technique to do a nice reprint of Misspent Youths. While I appreciate the thought, it wouldn’t work. Tim used the smallest hatch pattern available. That’s probably why we’re getting the moire pattern. I used a larger hatch pattern for Misspent Youths that doesn’t seem to moire when I reproduce it. But that’s an aside.

Duoshade was designed to be used for illustrations printed on newsprint. Before comic artists rediscovered it during the black and white boom it got a lot of use in newspaper illustrations and comic strips. The board has a hatch patern printed on it that becomes visible when painted with a developer. When it’s printed the result is a graytone, or a couple of graytones, depending on the type of board. The actual illustrations have a brown cast to them. Below is my scan of page 27 of the 4th issue of Billi 99.

This page, when printed, came out with hatching patterns that register as shades of gray for most people.

The moire pattern is barely noticeable on this page. Most people reading the book wouldn’t think twice about it. Our previous designer was much more OCD (that’s a good thing in a designer) and he looked for ways to diminish or, better yet, eliminate it. One solution would be to simply rescan all the original pages. We’ve got a few pages but, unfortunately, the rest of the art is scattered to the far corners of comic book fandom.

Below is my first pass at revising the art. I was inspired by the warm quality of physical Duoshade art. Billi 99 takes place in a sort of retro future and giving the illustrations a sepia tint seemed to work.

Each individual page is being converted. Then I’m going over every page to make sure the borders and gutters are white. There are a few pages with weird artifacts inserted when they were originally scanned that need to be corrected. A few of the pages are much darker than the others. That will need to be corrected for.

I also need to figure out a way to convert the lettering from its current raster state to a vector one and make sure it’s all solid black. Tim did all the lettering himself directly on the page. These days the vast majority of comics are lettered digitally. The publisher who will be putting out Billi wants the lettering their books to be done as vector art on a separate layer from the rest of the illustrations. Frank Cvetkovic extracted the lettering and put it on its own layer. Tim had a font designed of his own lettering (based on his Billi lettering) but it’s … standardized. We could use that to replace his Billi work. But the Billi lettering is a bit more organic and eccentric than what the font provides. We want to preserve that.

Kickstarter?

On Wednesday we went to a meet-up with Oriana Leckert, Kickstarter’s comics advisor. She was in town for Emerald City Comic Con and Rob Salkowitz had arranged a dinner for a few folks before the con. We’ve had a number of people advise us to run a Kickstarter to fund the Billi Special Edition. None of those people have actually run a Kickstarter so we wanted to talk to someone who was more involved in the process.

Oriana was very encouraging. Rob was encouraging. We came away with a lot of ideas for what we could offer to supporters of a Billi Kickstarter. Because we were up late for the meeting and then I worked yesterday we haven’t really had a chance to talk out the pros and cons. We’ll be doing that this weekend. I’ll let y’all know what we decide next week.

I hope your week is a good one with as much rest or excitement as you need. Balance is everything!

See you in seven!

Humans plan. God laughs. So it’s been said.

We’re working on a new collected edition of Billi 99. It looked easy. We’ve got scans of the original art. We had someone who had enthusiastically volunteered to design the book. And then …

Tim Sale’s artwork was done on Duoshade board. The stuff is no longer made. Digital technology killed off the market. The scans were made back in the early nineties. When printed they have a slight moire pattern. The designer was trying to figure out ways to make the moire go away and was having some success.

Then he got sick and dropped out the project with the work undone. I wish him well.

We could go ahead and print from the original scans. The TPB printed in 2002 did that. The moire is mostly only noticeable to folks with a bit of OCD. Still, we’d like this collection to be an improvement on the previous one.

So I’m taking on the job of making the corrections. And, for the moment, designing the book. That’s a lot of work. That means all the other creative projects I was working on are getting pushed back. Billi needs to have priority.

The cover at the top of this newsletter is a mock-up I did for fun last year using a sketch that Tim had done in 2020. I can’t put out a newsletter without some sort of image, can I? The actual cover will feature a different illustration and a different design. We’re aiming to have the book available toward the end of this year. In order for that to happen all the work needs to be done before June.

Fun. Fun. Fun!

I hope your week has gone well and your plans are coming together like clockwork.

See you in seven!

Hunh. I was about to start writing today’s newsletter and I wondered – “Why Friday?”
More specifically, I wondered – “Why are there seven days in the week? It’s not like seven is favorite number. I mean, yeah, in some cultures seven is a magic number and it’s a prime but three and five are generally more popular. Why are there weeks?”

I probably learned the reason that we humans follow our current calendar but, given that I haven’t needed that knowledge lately, I forgot. So I used the internet to look it up and it turns out that the seven day week has been around for over 2000 years. Since Babylon. Seven day for the seven planets that they were able to observe. Other cultures had shorter and longer weeks but, eventually (and in large part because of the spread of the Roman empire that is the basis for Western culture) everybody adopted the seven day week.

The weekend is a modern invention. Thanking God that it’s Friday is definitely a modern sentiment. Given that I work most Saturdays and only have two days off in a row in two out of six weeks “weekend” isn’t really a thing for me. I’m more of a TGIS sort of guy. S being Sunday. That’s the only day that the Post Office doesn’t deliver mail. We do deliver parcels for Amazon. I have enough seniority that I don’t have work Sundays. So TGIS(eniority) and TGF(or)U(nions).

But I digress.

My postal truck, that is, the truck that is assigned to my route, has been out of commission for the past week. I came to work last Thursday and it didn’t start. I’ve had to borrow other routes’ trucks to deliver each day. If you every took a ride in my personal car you’d probably think I’m a slob. I wouldn’t argue with you. I’m not a general slob. I’m a slob in specific places. My car is one of those places. My postal truck is not. I keep my postal truck clean and neat. I can’t say that no other carriers do the same but none of the trucks I borrowed this week were close to clean and neat.

My truck started yesterday morning. I assumed that vehicle maintenance had fixed whatever was wrong with it. I drove it for most of the day yesterday and was surprised at how minimalist I keep it. No rubber bands on the gear shifts. No paperwork and postal forms and trash and pens and gooey keys on the dashboard. No empty water bottles and fast food wrappers under the mail platform. No piles of leaves around the brake and gas pedals.

It died again two swings before the end of my route. I was able to deliver the last of my mail on foot while I waited for a supervisor to come and check out the truck. He wasn’t able to fix it any more than I was so he called a tow truck and gave me a ride back to the station. I have today off so it’s possible that my truck will be fixed in time for me to drive it tomorrow. Possible but unlikely. Last year I was without my truck for over two months. Maintenance subcontracted its repair to the Pep Boys and then forgot about it.

But enough words. Here’s a picture –

And here’s the picture with words.

This will be in the Mighty Nizz store whenever I get that established.

And that’s it for this week. Thank you for reading.

See you in seven!

Friday snuck up on me. One minute it was Sunday and I was making an enormous lasagna for my lunches (and breakfasts and occasional dinners) and then it was today! In between we’ve been working to organize a bunch of different projects and, as is often the case when one is trying to multitask, not seeming to get a lot done.

I’m helping Sarah bring Billi 99 back into print. My role is minor, mostly listening to her and her designer talk about what needs to be done.

The Old Cat is adjusting to having the New Cat in his life and we’re adjusting to having two fur people making demands instead of just one. The New Cat came with some infections and so we’re having to give him nose drops and stuff meds down his throat. He’s no more fond of taking meds than any other cat I’ve ever met. Fortunately, the oral meds are liquid and we can administer them with a syringe.

Having the New Cat is helping keep the Old Cat off my drawing board – somewhat. He’s spending more time running around the house after the New Cat so he’s sleeping more when I’m trying to draw. But he still likes visiting my drawing board more than I’d like. But I am getting more drawing time in and making progress on the next Mighty Nizz comic.

I’m in the process of adding words to a number of my older images/designs. I like designs  that are just images. From what I see, on t-shirts out in the wild, most people like designs that include words. So ….

Below is the design prior to text –

Here is Nizz and Mimi in an expanded image with a garland of words –

The first version is still available in my Redbubble store.
The second version will be available in the Mighty Nizz store when we get it set up. We’re still in process with that.

I hope your week was good one and that your next is even better. If time passes slowly I hope it’s because you’ve got a host of lovely moments to savor! If time is running away from you – catch it in a net and feed it cookies until it’s ready to settle down.

See you in seven!

These Days

We have a new cat. Kemo, our old cat (who isn’t old just the cat that has been living with us) is a social critter and we thought he would benefit from having another feline to hang with. We’re doing the “keep them apart so they get used to the idea that there’s another cat in the house” stuff. Kemo clearly wants to hang out with the new guy. The new guy, currently named Flame but that may change, isn’t ready for that yet. He’s a cuddly guy with me and Sarah, a hissy guy with Kemo.

It’s my selfish hope that Kemo will enjoying hanging with New Guy so much he’ll forget about knocking my pens and pencils off my drawing table and demanding that I play catch with him after work. But it will be a couple of days before we can let them be alone unsupervised.

Thoughts About

“If you build it, they will come.”

I’m guessing y’all know the quote from Field of Dreams. It’s my mantra for creative work. The unspoken part of this mantra is: “If you’ve built nothing, no one has a place to come to”. That’s a more awkward, less inspirational phrase. But you can’t watch a movie that hasn’t been filmed, listen to a song that isn’t being sung, read a novel that hasn’t been written, study a painting that hasn’t been … you get the picture. I know folks who don’t finish their projects or, if they do finish them, don’t make them available because they worry that what they have created isn’t perfect. I know my work isn’t perfect. Perfection doesn’t exist. What one person loves, another will hate.

The tricky part for creative folks is the next thing – “If no one knows it exists, no one will visit.”

Getting attention is a different skill than … I was going to write “creative work” but finding an audience is creative work. It’s work that involves asking for attention. I’m quite comfortable receiving attention. Asking for attention is something more foreign. One of the justifications for being on social media is that you’ll generate interest in your creative work. But the more time you spend on social media the less time you’ll have for creative work.

There are folks who generate interest and support in a project before they start – “If you want it, I’ll build it” types.

I’m … rambling because it’s Friday and it’s newsletter time and lately I’ve been waking up tired and staying kinda brain dead regardless of the amount of coffee I’m drinking. This probably means I need to get more sleep or take naps but …

There should be a new post over at my Ko-Fi account. Writing about writing the Surrilana Depths. I scheduled it to go live the same time as this newsletter.

Process GIF

This week’s process GIF is of The Pile. I did this portrait of him for the All the Works membership tier at Ko-Fi.

Speaking of social media – I’m now on Mastodon. I have no idea how active I will be.

And now I need to get in my uniform and go deliver mail.

Thank you for reading. See you in seven!