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Tuesday Night Party Club #10

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Artstuff

My big project, at least for the first half of 2020, will be finishing the illustrations for The Lovecraft Country Holidays Collection. It’s an anthology of role-playing game scenarios written by Oscar Rios featuring a sextet of adolescent cousins living in (H.P.) Lovecraft Country i.e. legend haunted parts of New England featured in the Cthulhu Mythos. The project was successfully kickstarted in the fall of 2019 and I’ve been working images ever since.

Before it could run on Kickstarter, we needed promo art – a cover illustration and four interior illustrations. I did the cover first. Mark Shireman worked his design magic to create two great book covers. Above is the cover for the RPG collection. Golden Goblin’s publishing strategy is to publish fiction companions to go with its RPG collections. Below is the cover for the fiction collection. For the fun of it I’d done a monotone version of the cover illustration in the style of “olde tyme” photographs. Mark and Oscar went with it for the fiction anthology.
I like seeing process videos by other artists as they produce their work. I don’t yet have the ability to make an actual video of my work process but I thought it would be fun to put together a gif of some of the stages in making this illustration. The results are below.

Story Seed #34

A sequel needn’t be a rerun: Terminator

The Terminator was released was released in 1984. It tells the story of Sarah Connor, a woman who is destined to give birth to John Connor, the savior of humanity. A Terminator has been sent back from the future to kill her and prevent that birth. A soldier from that future has followed the Terminator in order to save Sarah.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day arrived in 1991. John Connor is 10 years old. Another, more advanced, Terminator has been sent back from the future to kill him. A reprogrammed Schwartzenegger style Terminator is sent back to stop save him. This film cements the pattern for the franchise – a killer robot time travels back from the future to kill a crucial human and someone else time travels back to stop it from succeeding.

One of the things I liked about The Terminator is that the time travel element is a closed loop. Skynet, the future computer system running the Terminators and other machines, has been defeated. It sends the Terminator back as a last ditch effort to save itself. Ultimately its effort to destroy John Connor ends up creating him. Time paradoxes are minimal. History is not rewritten.

Most of the Terminator sequels follow this formula – a Terminator comes back from the future to kill someone and someone else follows the Terminator to prevent it from carrying out its mission. The more times this formula is repeated, the more the flaws show. Both Skynet nor the human rebels act defensively. Skynet could simply send a Terminator back to establish itself sooner, to unlease a plague to wipe out humanity, or otherwise start its war before humanity has a defense. Killing single humans is inefficient. One would think an AI would have more imagination than that. Conversely, the future humans could send back agents with better operating systems to give Skynet a benevolent focus rather than a genocidal one. If they can reprogram Terminators they can reprogram Skynet, especially if they do it before Skynet launches.

To me, all the back-from-the-future stuff gets tiresome. If the future is not set, neither is the present. Skynet and the humans can keep creating new timelines but the conflict never really gets resolved. So, consider a sequel to The Terminator that doesn’t feature time travel.

Terminators takes place in 1997. John Connor is twelve years old. Unlike the John in T2 this John is a true believer. Sarah has taught him well. He’s well trained, he’s charismatic, he’s ready to be the savior of humanity. He’s ready enough that he wonders if it’s possible to stop Judgment Day. Kyle Reese told Sarah that Skynet would launch its attach on August 29, 1997. Sarah tries to convince him that the future is set. Trying to stop Judgment Day is pointless. John created himself by sending Reese back to save her.

John convinces Sarah to try. John and Sarah research Cyberdine, the corporation behind Skynet. They hack into its systems and discover that Cyberdine has already created Terminators by reverse engineering the model that tried to kill Sarah back in 1984. John insists that if Terminators already exist then the future is not certain and it might be possible to prevent Judgment Day. When Sarah remains unsure John sets out to take down Cyberdine on his own. Sarah pursues him.

From there? Well, this is a story seed, not a plot diagram. Perhaps the new Terminators have a plan to wipe out humanity in a less infrastructurally destructive way than a thermonuclear war. Perhaps the new Terminators are simply tools of the Cyberdine corporation and Cyberdine has its own plans for world domination. Perhaps John has been trained too ruthlessly by Sarah and is sort of a human terminator, willing to kill anyone who gets between him and his objectives. Sarah must deal with the human monster she has created. Perhaps Judgment Day is prevented. Perhaps it happens anyway.

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Karavansara is the website of Davide Mana. Mana is a working writer (that is, he pays his bills with his writings) living in Italy. He writes in both English and Italian in a variety of genres. He also blogs about his projects, movies he’s watched, books he’s read, odd bits of history and politics, and many other fascinating things on a daily basis. He’s currently in a part of Italy that’s under quarantine for the Corona virus. Yuck.

If his blogging entertains you I’m sure he’d appreciate you supporting him via his Patreon.

Lifestuff

And speaking of the Corona virus – it mostly exists as background noise in my world. I’m not downplaying it and I’m not ignoring it. I live in Seattle. There are outbreaks and deaths as a result of the disease but no one I know has been infected. I’ve had to work more overtime that I planned because more carriers that usual have been calling in sick. Staying home when sick is more encouraged than usual. Most of our work is done solo but we are all in one place when we’re putting our routes together in the morning.

Whether or not I’m scared or cautious of danger depends on my statistical awareness of that danger. I spend a lot of time driving. I’m more likely to be in an auto accident than to catch Corona. I walk a lot. I’m more likely to be bitten by a dog than catch Corona. People who are elderly or have weak immune systems are in danger of infection from just about everything. I’m basically healthy.

So far. So good.

May you stay healthy. Take care of yourself and look after your friends. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #9

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Artstuff

In the summer of 2010 John L. Bell emailed to ask if I would be available to do illustrations for the next issue of Oziana. I enjoyed working on the 2006 issue and happily said yes. Above are the covers by Charnelle Pinkney (2009) and Tim McGloughlin (2010). This was a double issue of the magazine, produced in flipbook style, combining both the 2009 and 2010 editions. My illustrations seasoned the story “Invisible Fence” by John L. Bell. We’d originally planned for me to do more illustrations but 2010 turned out to be chaotic – I was laid off from my day job and went back to school for “retraining” as a computer programmer. That left me with less time than expected. Deadlines loomed. Fortunately, John was able to rearrange the issue’s layout so the illustrations spread out evenly and cut down on printing costs. A review of the story can be found on Eric Gjovaag’s Wonderful Blog of Oz.

Story Seed #33 

A sequel needn’t be a rerun: Alien 2

My previous story seeds featured story ideas that, basically, I’m giving away. If someone is inspired to grow a story from them they are wellcome to do so. No need to get my permission.

Using the ideas I’ll be mentioning in the next few weeks would require someone to get permission from the corporations that own the movies in question. The intellectual properties involved are not in public domain. All of these films have already had successful sequels. But part of the fun of having ideas is sharing them so …

Sequel (definition grabbed from Lexico): A published, broadcast, or recorded work that continues the story or develops the theme of an earlier one.

Alien. Terminator. Blade Runner. All three of these science fiction films had sequels. The sequels didn’t come immediately. They came years, even decades later. I enjoyed all the sequels as much, if not more, than the originals. That’s pretty rare. Most sequels are pale shadows of the originals. So my sequel ideas are suggestions, not of better stories, but of different directions the “franchises” could have taken.

Alien was released in 1979. It was the first released of the films I’m “sequeling” so I’ll write about it this week. It tells the story of the crew of the spaceship Nostromo, who are required to investigate a distress signal on an unknown world. They find an ancient spacecraft and pick up a deadly hitchhiker.

A sequel to Alien, Aliens was released seven years later. Ripley, the lone survivor of the Nostromo, accompanies a group of marines back to the planet of the alien ship and they must combat a nest of xenomorphs to escape. Like many sequels Aliens cements the pattern of the rest of the franchise. For Alien it’s humans vs. xenomorphs with a seasoning of corporate manipulation and evil. By focusing on the xenomorph, every Alien installment is a bug hunt. Part of what makes Alien such a great science fiction movie is that it suggests a much bigger world outside the confines of the story of the film. Space travel is common and a regular part of life. It’s not fast but it’s predictable. Android technology is good enough that human beings won’t be able to tell the difference between an android and another human. Extraterrestrial life has been encountered before. It’s not clear if humanity has met living extraterrestrial civilizations but the Nostromo’s crew doesn’t react as if evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations has never been found before.

Imagine if, in Alien 2, the story expanded out. Word of the space jockey’s ship has gotten out, either leaked by someone at Weyland-Yutani or because Ripley was found and told her story. Multiple expeditions have come to investigate the ship – a team from W-Y intent on officially staking their claim, a team from a rival corporation, and a contingent of military from a government enforcement arm. The jockey’s ship is ancient but it’s not dead and it contains more wonders and horrors than clutches of xenomorph eggs.

By focusing on the mysteries of the ship and the interaction between different human factions, Alien 2 could depict more of the big complicated universe suggested in Alien. The W-Y team would have more knowledge of the ship and the xenomorphs than the other teams. W-Y directed the Nostromo to the planet with the intention that it bring back a xenomorph or two, so clearly some other humans had found the ship in the past. Unfortunately (for them at least) their focus on the xenomorph will make them unprepared for other dangers and wonders presented by the ship.

H.R. Giger‘s designs for the xenomorph, the space jockey and the ship are some of the most alien looking depictions of extraterrestials to appear in the movies. Later designers were able to duplicate and extrapolate from those designs but no one surpassed them. They suggest completely non-terran biologies and non-human technologies. Why was the ship carrying all those xenomorph eggs? Where was it going? Are they weapons? Tools? A slave race? Lunch? The space jockey appears to have been killed by a birthing xenomorph. What went wrong?

If the xenomorphs are weapons, who or what were they meant to used against? Other space jockeys? Another alien race?

Does the space jockey’s civilization still exist? Have they advanced? Decayed?

The franchise did try to answer some of those questions in Prometheus, but by that time the xenomorph had become the toothy face of the series. It was too late to redirect the focus and, honestly, the answers the film presented were both uninteresting and didn’t make a lot of sense. The space jockey became just another humanoid ET who committed the ordinary human sin of creating the thing that would destroy it. More imagination was needed. Writers and designers who could think in cosmic terms should have been employed.

Imagine what the Alien franchise could have been if the alien xenomorph had been downplayed in the sequel and the focus had been on the alien space jockey and its alien ship instead. What wonders and terrors could we have experienced?

Other Newsletters

Technocult News by “Damien” focuses a lot on technology and, especially, how human prejudices and cultural blinders are incorporated into that technology. Damien gives me a regular reminder that technology is a created thing and its human creators build in flaws and dangers without realizing it. Our assumptions limit our thinking. Technology will always be used in ways we don’t consider so more consideration and inclusion of diverse designers and users when creating technology is ideal.

Lifestuff

A couple of weeks back my brother, Glenn, sent me a link to the proposed 42 words anthology. This week, instead of writing about my life like a good newsletterer, I wrote and submitted a story. It was an interesting exercise. First I wrote the shortest story I could think of based on my basic idea. Then I revised. And revised. The story had to be exactly 42 words. This paragraph is 74 words.

If the story gets accepted I’ll post about it. If it doesn’t I’ll post the story. I don’t have a time frame for either. After I submitted my entry I paid a little more attention to the rest of the blog and realized that submissions were first announced in July of 2018. As of February 8th they have accepted 483 stories. They are wanting 1764 stories. Only 1281 to go.

They’re accepting up to four stories per author. I may submit more. If you want to give writing a short short story a try, please do!

That’s if for this week. Enjoy each moment. If that’s not possible, enjoy as many moments as you can.

Tuesday Night Party Club #8

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Artstuff

Above is the cover of Oziana 2006, published in 2007. It’s a photo of a sculpture by Steve Larabee. It’s one of many winged monkeys that he has sculpted and placed around Burlington, Vermont.

In December of 2006 John L. Bell commented on my blog, asking if I would be interested in doing illustrations for the next issue of Oziana. Oziana is the creative magazine of the International Wizard of Oz Club. John was the editor that year. I emailed him back and took the assignment.

I illustrated one story: “The Axeman’s Arm”, and three poems. The story was about two Munchkin children who find the cast off meat arms of the Tin Woodman and the Tin Soldier. It’s a bit of sequel to The Tin Woodman of Oz, L. Frank Baum’s 12th Oz book. In the book the Tin Woodman meets the Tin Soldier, another man whose entire person has been replaced by tin parts. Together they find Chopfyt, a man created from a combination of their cast off body parts. Bell’s story concerned some of the body parts that didn’t get used to make Chopfyt.

“Rivals” a poem by Adrian Korpel focused on one of Dorothy’s original Wizard of Oz traveling companions. Since the theme of that issue of Oziana was “Dark Oz” the poem told less happy versions of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Lion’s experiences with Dot.

The Oz Club offers print on demand versions of its most recent issues but this issue doesn’t make the cut. Below is the table of contents taken from the Monkeys With Wings website. John L. Bell regularly writes about Oz (and other things) at his Oz and Ends blog.

Story Seed #32

Alternate History: What if the Mongol Empire had remained intact for centuries?

When I was in junior and high school, my World History classes covered primarily European history. We’d start with the Fertile Crescent, get into the Greeks and the Romans and then carry on with the squabbles of various royal idiots in England and France. I would look at maps of the world and think, “This is not the world. This is just a part of the world. I want to know about what happened on the rest of the map.”

The largest land empire in history was not European. It certainly wasn’t Greek or Roman. It was the Mongol Empire begun by Genghis Khan. Like most empires it had a short life – about a hundred years. It was birthed by Genghis’s ambitions and split due to his successors’ egos. I heard very little about it in school. Kublai Khan got mentioned because of Marco Polo’s visits to the Empire.

Fiction set in the Mongol Empire, written by western authors, is almost nonexistent. Alternate histories featuring a lasting empire are even more scant. So there’s lots of room to write if one wanted to put in the research.

Other Newsletters

Restricted Frequency is a newsletter by Ganzeer. I think it was the first newsletter I subscribed to based on a Warren Ellis recommendation. Ganzeer writes about his life as graphic novelist, designer and working artist.

Lifestuff

Lifestuff is also Artstuff-in-Progress. I’m steadily working my way through my illustration assignments for the Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection. I’ve got two more illustrations to complete for Horrors of War. I have a book cover to complete for the second Ikasa Spider novel. I have a portrait commission for the Panel Jumpers. My wife and I are collaborating on graphic novel. Busy busy.

Thank you for reading. I hope your days bring you some fun and some joy along with all the other nonsense. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #7

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Artstuff

Deanna Hagy, an longtime friend of mine, recently celebrated her 50th birthday. Her not-a-husband threw her a surprise party. I drew this portrait of her as a present and, since I scan almost everything I draw, I can share the portrait with y’all. Among other things, Deanna is a partner at Evening Star End-of-Life Doula Services. No, she does not have more than two arms. She just sometimes gives the impression that she does.

Story Seed #31

Alternate History: What if the Vikings had colonized North America?

Last week my story seed concerned someone besides Columbus, presumably another European, “discovering” America. Of course, another European already had. Five hundred years before Columbus, in about 1000 AD, Leif Erikson had led an expedition to North America from Greenland. Greenland itself had been recently colonized by followers of Leif’s father, Erik the Red. Unlike Columbus, Erikson didn’t proceed to rape and pillage and enslave the natives. He seems to have set up a few outposts, skirmished a bit with the folks who were already there and then didn’t give Vinland (the name given the place in the Sagas) much thought.

In order to write plausible alternate history it helps to know history. In order to write stories set in world where the Vikings had colonized (or regularly traded with) North America one has to consider why the Vikings didn’t pay much attention to North America in real history. The basic answer seems to be: North America wasn’t convenient or sufficiently profitable. Also ice. Lots of ice.

Columbus and the Europeans who followed him sailed across an open ocean. The main reason that Columbus was the first to cross the Atlantic is that most learned folks assumed that it was too big to be worth the trip. No contemporary European thought there was a continent (or two) out there to break up the distance. The Vikings had known but they’d forgotten about it. Hell, by 1492, Greenland had mostly been abandoned. The “Little Ice Age” had made for longer winters and harder travel.

So, what would have made regular contact and settlement of North America attractive to the Vikings?

Possibility A: Lack of choice. Erik the Red, Leif Erickson’s father, had settled Greenland because he’d been temporarily banished from his estates in Oxney, England. He’d already been banished from Iceland. A permanent exile might have made him more interested in expanding his holdings west. As a good son, Leif might have shared his father’s ambitions.

Possibility B: Twist of fate. Erik the Red had planned to accompany his son, Leif, on his expedition to Vinland but he fell off his horse shortly on his way to the ship. Taking this as a bad omen, Erik stayed in Greenland and died in an epidemic the following winter. What if Erik had accompanied his son?

Possibility C: Other Vikings. This is actually a more likely (and probably easier) way to write an alternate history. There were plenty of Vikings who didn’t get make it into any Sagas and yet still lived interesting lives. Leif Erikson knew about Vinland because other Vikings had gotten blown off course and seen the place.  Hell, Erik the Red found Greenland because other Vikings had gotten blown off course and seen that place. Getting blown off course seems to have been a valid discovery technique among the Northlanders. If someone had gotten blown further south they could have discovered the east coast of North America – less ice, different natives, perhaps an easier place to set up a colony.

Possibility D: Flip the story. What if the North American natives had decided that the Vikings were something other than rude invaders? What kind of stories could be told from the Native perspectives? The Vikings had technology that the Natives didn’t. What if the Natives had adopted those technologies? What kind of world would they have created?

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Autumn Christian writes about a variety of things, much of it related to her own mental health and how she’s managed her own demons. She’s a good writer. If you’ve got demons to manage her advice might be useful. If you don’t … she’s a good writer.

Lifestuff

Unless you and only you have lived at an address for twenty years, there’s a good chance that you’ve received mail addressed to someone else. What are you supposed to do with it?

I’m glad you asked.

  1. If the address on the letter is not your address (say your address 1215 Whatever Street and the letter says 2290 Someplace Ave.) just drop it in outgoing mail and the post office will reroute it. There’s no need to write anything on the letter. The delivery was an accident. Chances are that envelope was stuck to the one above it and your carrier didn’t notice.
  2. If the address is your address but the person it is addressed to is not a resident, check to see if the letter is First Class or asks for some sort of address correction request on it. If it does, put it in outgoing mail with “Not at this address” or “this person doesn’t live here” written on it. Your carrier will either put it into the system to be forwarded or, if the carrier knows that there’s no active forward for that addressee they will properly endorse it so that it’s returned to the sender or the sender’s mailing list is updated.
  3. If the letter is address to a non-resident but is third class just recycle it. The sender isn’t paying for the post office to either forward it or correct their mailing list so putting it back in the system will just result in your carrier putting in it their UBBM.
  4. Do not write “Return to Sender” on the envelope. Especially if you’re a new resident. Chances are there’s a forward in effect. Let the post office figure out what to do with the letter. “Not at this Address” is more useful.

I deliver to over 700 active addresses. I do my best to only deliver mail to people that I know live at those addresses. In the five years that I’ve had my route, hundreds of people have moved. Most of the movees still get mail. Some of them, despite not living at an address for years, still get LOTS of mail. You think it’s annoying to get mail for some bozo who moved three years ago? Imagine having to handle mail for hundreds of bozos who don’t live at hundreds of addresses?

You’re welcome.

Tuesday Night Party Club #6

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Artstuff

Every few days I check to see how much traffic my posts are getting. I imagine most website and blog writers do that. I want to see if anyone is actually reading what I’m posting. One thing I’ve noticed is that, while visitors do drop by on a daily basis, very few folks go beyond the front page. I’ve got literally (and I mean literally not figuratively) thousands of images lurking on this site. So I’ll be using this newsletter to call some of that art back into the light.

This week’s gallery is a set of character designs I did back in 2012. This was for a proposed graphic novel. The basic idea was that, rather than atomic weapons, the Allies developed superheroes to win WW2. An original idea? No. But ideas are only seeds. It’s how they’re grown that makes the stories interesting.

This idea didn’t grow a story. The writer got interested in other ideas and we went on to develop those.

Story Seed #30

Alternate History: What if Columbus never made it across the Atlantic?

History is generally written, by Western historians anyway, by focusing on the acchievements of individuals. This fits with our cultural focus on individual success, individual happiness, individual opportunity, individual identity, etc. Admittedly, it’s easier to focus on the stories of individuals. Cultural context may be provided and important figures in their lives may also be described but, overall, the history we get taught in school is a simplification of reality. Often that history has been simplified in order to prop up current cultural myths.

Columbus discovering America is one of those myths. You’ve heard it – in the 1400s Europeans thought the world was flat. If you sailed too far you’d fall off. Brave Columbus convinced Queen Isabela and King Ferdinand of Spain to finance an expedition across the Atlantic. He planned to prove that India could be reached via the ocean and therefore circumvent the idiocincrasies of the Silk Road. Instead of reaching India, he discovered America!

By now you’ve also hopefully heard the debunkings. The Wikipedia article link above gives a more thorough version of Columbus’s story than I remember getting in school. It certainly includes more accounts of butchery, slavery, rape and genocide. Columbus was a horrible man. Unfortunately, horrible men don’t exist in isolation. They are supported by the horrible men who follow them and benefit from associating with them.

If Columbus hadn’t made his voyage, hadn’t “discovered” the New World, another European would have. Europeans explorers and merchants were looking for new sources of treasure and trade goods. In our current history, it was Columbus’s voyages that lead other explorers across the Atlantic. What if he had failed to get financing or if his ships had failed to return?

Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places but there’s surprisingly little alternate history fiction inspired by this idea. What little I’ve seen seems more interested in presenting alternative (often magical) versions of the Americas rather than alternate explorers and explorations. How long would it have been before someone else crossed the Atlantic? Would the results have been better or worse for the natives? What if these new explorers landed on the North American continent instead of one of the islands?

If nothing else, without Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci wouldn’t have made his voyages and so the Americas would have different names.

Lifestuff

I draw almost every day. Some days I only manage a half an hour. Most days I try to get in more than that. On days when I’m not delivering mail I usually get in more than two hours. That doesn’t sound like much. I am often surprised by how much I manage to accomplish in those small amounts of time. I used to set a timer to keep myself in place. Until recently, having that device ticking away was a necessary part of getting the work done. I was often so tired from the day job that doing anything other than eating and staring at an episode of some tv show seemed like too much effort. But I’d set the timer and go to work. And I always felt better for having done it.

I rarely need the timer these days. I seem to have built the habit. Art gets done.

The habit I’m currently working on is writing every day. That one is harder than drawing. I can draw in noisy room. It’s really difficult for me to write in one. I can set a timer and design a sketch to be done in the time alotted. I never really know how long it’s going to take me to write something. These newsletters are getting done in the morning before the rest of the house wakes up. The process is clunky. I delete a lot of what I write. But I’m building the habit with the intent of applying that habit to things beyond this space.

Other Newsletters

This week I’m recommending BIG, a newsletter written by Matt Stoller. Stoller is the author of Goliath, the 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. His newsletter focuses on the way monopolies function and how they destroy competion, innovation and the world. I’m being only slightly facetious.

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To get the subscription link, click on “Home” in the menu bar under the site banner. A whole list of links and nonsense will appear on the right. The subscription link will be under the search field at the top.

Tuesday Night Party Club #5

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Artstuff

I’m currently working on illustrations for The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection. This book of four Call of Cthulhu RPG scenarios was successfully kickstarted last year. One of the stretch goals that we didn’t reach was a fifth scenario: The Mystery of April Snow. We did get close enough that Oscar Rios, the engine behind Golden Goblin Press, decided to offer the scenario as an add-on. Separate projects need separate covers so:

This is a scan of the physical black and white art. I guess you’d say it’s “mixed media”. It’s a combination of pencil, brush, Micron pens and Copic markers.

This is my finished art. Photoshop got used and abused.

And above is the finished version. Mark Shireman worked his design magic to turn a fairly simple image of a girl’s creepy stare into a compelling book cover.

Story Seed #29
What if the Martians hadn’t accidentally been killed by Earth germs?

A lot of folks have written sequels to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. As far as I can tell they’ve all worked from the same premise – the Martian’s initial invasion was a failure. The Martians’ first set of invadors died due to exposure to Earth’s diseases. The sequels are usually about a second invasion from Mars. A few of them are about Earth forces taking the war to the Red Planet.

But … what if the Martians expected to die from exposure to our germs? They had interstellar travel. They presumably were scientifically advanced enough to expect and prepare for infection. What if those first Martians brought their own diseases with them – on purpose? What if they were here less to beat us by blunt force than to begin transforming our world with their native biology? They’re observed draining humans of their blood. They plant the red weed.

In Well’s novel, the Martians are cyphers. We don’t know how they think. We don’t know their politics or religions. We don’t know if they consider themselves individuals. What if, once the technological warfare ceased, the biological warfare continued? At the time of publication, germ theory was commonly accepted but even the most medically advanced countries were unprepared to deal with epidemics from another world.

Other Newsletters

SCIOPS – this newsletter by Max Anton Brewer is often about how fucked up our technology and our economic systems are making us. I think about that stuff all the time. But Brewer has a different perspective about reality than I do and I find that useful. He has different understandings of the whys of the fuckedupedness. I need different understandings of the world to make navigating it more tolerable and to help me continue to be compassionate with my fellow humans.Give a few issues a read. Maybe his perspecitves will be useful to you as well.

Lifestuff

Most days at work we have what we call “stand-ups”. These are meetings where all the carriers gather together and the supervisors give us safety talks and pass on relevant information from upper management or the outside world. Most of what gets said has been said many times before.

Last Friday I got to be the subject of the safety talk. An hour earlier I had been walking through the station on my way to do my daily vehicle check and my feet got tangled in one of those plastic straps that are used to hold together bundles of magazines. Down I went.

I got up quickly because embarrassment is a more poweful motivator than pain. My right hand hurt from trying to brace my fall. My left thigh hurt a lot more. The concrete floor had slammed the phone and wallet in my pocket into my leg. I seemed functional and didn’t think anything was broken but I reported the accident to my supervisor and got the necessary paperwork just in case. Our station manager talked about the accident in our stand up and repeated (for the umpteenth time) the need to pick up those damned strap.

I delivered my route as usual. Mostly. My hand got more sore as the day went on. Sorting the mail wasn’t a big deal. Turning the key in the starter, using the gear shift, putting on seat belt, closing the truck’s door – all that hurt more as time passed. My leg also hurt more. The pain lessened every time I did a walking part of my route but the leg would stiffen up during the driving parts. Getting out of the truck got less fun by the hour.

I woke up stiff and sore on Saturday. My hand had some weird bruising. Disappointingly, my thigh looked fine. For the amount that it hurt I felt like I should have a glorious purple bruise. I drove down to Portland and back for a friend’s surprise birthday party. Three hours driving south, three hours sitting in a restaurant, three hours driving north. My leg really hurt by the time I lurched into bed.

Sunday I slept in. For me that was staying under the covers until 7:30. My leg hurt less. I’d taken some tylenol before I went to sleep. That probably helped. The bruising on my hand was a little more colorful but really only noticeable in good light. Sarah and I went out for a late breakfast and them mostly stayed at home.

Monday I was back at work. I expected my leg to hurt more as the day progressed but it stayed mostly a low throb with occasional “ow! ow!” moments when I had to bend it tighter than 90 degrees. I did a little overtime on my own route due to mail volume.

I’m writing this before 5 am on Tuesday. Both my leg and hand are sore but they’re feeling much improved. I expect to do a regular workday. Still no bruising on the leg. That’s disappointing. I’ve found bruises on myself plenty of times in the past and couldn’t remember what I’d done to get them. The discomfort of the last few days seems like it should be heralded by vivid purple and green. Ah well.

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That’s it for this week. Do something kind for someone who doesn’t expect it. Thank you for reading.

Tuesday Night Party Club #4

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Artstuff

In my first newsletter I mentioned wanting to create more physical things. Like books. Tails of Valor and Tails of Terror are currently available at the Golden Goblin website. I spent a good part of 2018 and 2019 working on the illustrations for these volumes. Tails of Valor is a collection of role-playing game scenarios for the Call of Cthulhu setting/rule set. It’s a sequel of sorts to Cathulhu, from Sixtystone Press. Cathulhu is a version of CoC that allows players to role-play as cats. Cats deal with the horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos differently than puny humans.

Tails of Valor features three scenarios –

Triumphus Felis Ferae (set in 41 C.E. Rome) by Jeffrey Moeller

Shadow Harvest (set in 5th Dynasty Egypt) by Stuart Boon

The Undesirables (set in Dark Ages France) by Oscar Rios

Tails of Terror is an anthology of sixteen horror stories featuring cats as protagonists. I provided title page illustrations for each story. A sampling of those illustrations are below. I’m not going to say which illustration goes to which story. That’s a surprise for folks who purchase the book.

Tails of Terror was edited by Brian Sammons and features these stories –

  • Brown Jenkin’s Reckoning by Edward M. Erdelac
  • Derpyfoot by Christine Morgan
  • The Cat in the Pall by Pete Rawlik
  • Ghost Story by Brian M. Sammons
  • Palest of Humans by Don Webb
  • Bats in the Belfry by William Meikle
  • Satisfaction Brought Him Back by Glynn Owen Barrass
  • The Bastet Society by Sam Stone
  • The Veil of Dreams by Stephen Mark Rainey
  • The Quest of Pumpkin the Brave by Oscar Rios
  • The Cats of the Rue d’Auseil by Neil Baker
  • The Knowledge of the Lost Master by Andi Newton
  • The Ruins of an Endless City by Lee Clark Zumpe
  • A Glint in the Eyes by D.A. Madigan
  • A Field Guide to Wanderlust Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
  • In the End there is a Drain by Tim Waggoner

My thanks go to Jeffrey Moeller for requesting me as illustrator for Tails of Valor. Big thanks also to Oscar Rios for taking a chance on me. It was great to get back to work. I’d been passing on commissions for a few years because my postal job had taken up so much time and physical energy. This project was an important part of helping me get some sanity and peace of mind again. Thanks also to Mark Shireman for his design work on both the books. They look fabulous.

Story Seed #28
Looking through a photo album you see that some of the photos have changed, they depict events differently than they used to. 

There’s your uncle, laughing and smiling at a family picnic that he didn’t attend. There’s your mom and dad holding hands in a Christmas photo. You know they were fighting that year. You know you hadn’t been able to catch them in the same room together. There’s your best friend casting a mooning look at the girl who never noticed her. The girl is returning the look.

These aren’t new photos. These aren’t digital things that could be altered in Photoshop. These are prints that have been sitting in these albums for years. What happens when you show them to other people – the people in the photos? Will they remember the same events, the same life?

Lifestuff

Letter carriers advance in their careers mostly by seniority. The longer I’m with the post office the more personal and sick days I accrue. I get regular, scheduled raises rather than having to ask for them. When a route becomes available the person with the most seniority will beat out other bidders to claim said route.

Last Wednesday I senioritied into a parking space. Our station is located at the Westwood Mall in West Seattle. I’ve needed to park in the Mall’s parking lot since I started with USPS. Our station has a fenced parking lot for our delivery trucks. There are parking spaces for employees along the western edge of the lot. I didn’t get a spot in there. I got a spot along the drive into that parking lot. I got the second spot from the entrance.

I was notified about my new status last Tuesday by other carriers who had seen our new parking chart. On my own I wouldn’t have looked at the chart. I’ve been assuming that I wouldn’t have an assigned spot for years yet.

It’s a little satisfying to have lasted this long. I’m not going to get used to it. If carriers with greater seniority transfer in I’ll be back out in the mall lot. It’s nice for now though.

NewsletterStuff

I was inspired to (re)start writing a newsletter because I’ve subscribed to a number of newsletters and getting them in my inbox over the week helps me get outside the bubble that my version of the internet wants to keep me trapped within. Facebook shows me more of what I already “like”. Amazon shows me more of what I already “like”. Youtube shows me videos similar to the ones I’ve already watched. Google shows me more of what I’ve already searched for. Getting more of what I’ve already gotten makes me dull and stupid.

The newsletters send me places I wouldn’t go on my own and make me think about things I don’t automatically think about. This week I’m linking to Orbital Operations, from Warren Ellis. I’ve found a lot of the other newsletters I read via his newsletter. He’s a writer of comics and television and novels and other things who, when he has time, writes about science and the future. When he’s short on time he writes about his current projects and links to interesting things.

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That’s it for this week. Be as good as you can. Forgive yourself when you screw up. Make amends when necessary. See you next Tuesday!

Tuesday Night Party Club #3

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Artstuff

Why the Tuesday Night Party Club? Other than because I’m posting these on Tuesday evenings?

Back in the day, when I was young and immortal and found sleep more annoying than desirable, I spent a lot of partying with friends. One of those friends had a job in a liquor store. If I remember correctly, his weekend started on Tuesday night. So he’d get a bottle from the store and few of us would head out to the beach and help him drink it. We named ourselves the Tuesday Night Party Club and continued our meetings for a few months until he headed off to college.

I’m still friends with most of the folks in the Club though I live in Seattle and most of them still live in northern California. This week’s artwork is a portrait I did of the Club’s founder for his 50th birthday. He’s the madman behind Evil Genius Racing, a race car builder/tuner and metal fabrication shop in northern California. I’ve done portraits of some of the other members but, unfortunately I don’t have scans of any of those.

That didn’t answer the question, did it?

Story Seed #27
Your reflection in the mirror doesn’t match up.

You’re looking in the mirror. Maybe you’re shaving. Maybe you’re putting on makeup. You notice that your reflection is different in small ways than you are. Maybe it has a mole that you don’t. Or it doesn’t have one that you do. Or it has a tattoo on its shoulder and you’ve never gotten a tattoo.

You check other mirrors in the house. In your car. Yes, your reflection consistently doesn’t match you. It does the same things you’re doing. It has the same baffled expression that you know you’re making. But it doesn’t match.

What do you do?

Lifestuff

The snowpocalypse threatened last week was a pleasant(ish) disappointment, at least in my neighborhood. Other parts of Seattle did get enough snow to cause complaints and inconveniences. Heck, some other routes from my station required chains on their trucks in order to deliver them. The snow and ice was minimal on my route and I left off the chains. On Wednesday the snow gave us a lovely afternoon show of fluffy flakes for about an hour and then stepped aside for more familiar wind and rain.

Rain I’m used to. Rain is one of the reasons I moved to Seattle. It keeps this place green. I grew up in northern California. That place would get brown in April. The last few years the brown has been red (and then black) from rampant wildfires.

The biggest complaint I have about the rain, in relation to delivering mail, is that, after decades of service, USPS hasn’t figured out a way to keep mail dry while delivering a walking route. A carrier delivers each swing (generally up one side of a block and down the other) by balancing a bundle of flats (magazines, catalogs and other miscellania) in the crook of their left arm while holding a bundle of letters in left hand. That method doesn’t protect the mail from rain. Our official waterproof pith helmets provide a little cover but not much. By the end of a swing a lot of the mail is embarrassingly soggy.

Rain can arrive at any part of the year. Snow has usually only made a brief annual appearance. Hopefully this was it for Winter 2019/2020.

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Stay warm. Toast your loved ones with whatever makes your taste buds happy. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #2

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Artstuff

One of my nephews (technically my wife’s mother’s brother’s daughter’s son but that’s too long to write every time) asked me to draw him a Tiefling. This was the result.
I’d recently joined a Richard Corben fan group on Facebook and folks there had been posting photos of some of Corben’s original art. That gave me a chance to better look at his techniques. I tried to apply some of those to this drawing.

Story Seeds #26

The last human on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door ...

Actually, that’s the story. I’ve added two letters to it as a modernization. It was originally written by Fredric Brown in the 1940s. His original short story reads –
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door…

He went on to expand this short-short into the story Knock. Brown was a brilliant writer but his work, while often ahead of its time, is also a product of its time. In the 1940s most readers would assume that the last man on earth is a heterosexual, middle class person of European descent. In other words, a straight white guy.

By changing “man” to “human” the possibilities open up as to who is sitting in that room and how they might respond to the person(?) knocking on the door.

I read quite a bit of Brown’s work when I was kid. My favorite was his novel Martians Go Home. The Martians (little green men, of course) come to Earth, not to conquer, but to be as annoying as possible. It’s one of those books I prefer not to read again in case I don’t find it as hilarious as I did when I first read it.

Speaking of Richard Corben, he illustrated a cover for a collection of Fredric Brown short stories so I’ll close with that image – Lifestuff

We – the faithfull letter carriers of the Westwood station – have been warned of an upcoming snowpocalypse since November of last year. Management has passed out tire chains for our vehicles and slip on cleats for our shoes. Seattle rarely gets snow. Because of that we don’t deal with it well. Last year we had a week of it and the mail got backed up something awful.

Often when I deliver in bad weather a customer will quote that “Neither rain nor sleet nor snow…” poem. I will nod and smile. That poem isn’t actually the motto of the post office. It was written at a time before freeways, safety belts and child labor laws. The post office has no official motto. Most of us carriers have the motto – “Deliver the mail, deliver it right and come back home in one piece.” So, during the snow last year, a lot of mail to side streets and hilly neighborhoods didn’t get delivered for a few days. Seattle doesn’t have a lot of snow plows. That means only the main thoroughfares get plowed. USPS mail trucks are not good for adventures. They don’t have a lot of power. They aren’t four-wheel drives. A lot of mail went out, came back, got sorted into the next day’s mail, went out again, came back again, got resorted … But it did get delivered eventually.

Yesterday we actually got a dusting of snow. It started in the morning. I rearranged my route so I delivered the hilly parts early in the day. Snow really only stuck on lawns and shady places, nothing on the roads or sidewalks. I did work 13 hours but that was because of a heavy mail volume (and volunteering to carry part of a route whose carrier called in sick) rather than because of the weather. I’m writing this note in the morning. We did get more snow overnight but the roads appear to be clear.

Weather.com says we’ll have more snow today. I’d ask you to wish me luck but I should be home by the time you read this. I’m not planning to volunteer to carry extra today.

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Last issue I requested that folks subscribe to this newsletter. Unfortunately the instructions I gave were faulty. Anyone following the link from Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook arrives at this specific blog post and there’s no subscription link on the individual blog posts.

To get the subscription link, click on “Home” is menu bar under the site banner. A whole list of links and nonsense will appear on the right. The subscription link will be under the search field at the top.

Thank you for reading! Stay warm! I’ll be back next week.

Tuesday Night Party Club #1

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Welcome to the first official post/newsletter of 2020. As of this writing I have 193 subscribers. A few of you folks are subscribed directly from this website. The rest of you follow my posts on Tumblr and Twitter. At least, that’s what WordPress tells me.Quite a few of you are probably Russian bots. Welcome anyway. The basic format of these posts will be a little art and a bit of writing.

Artstuff

In my first unofficial post on New Year’s Day I said that I’d made new image banners for this site. I made a dozen of them. They load randomly whenever you refresh a page or move to a new page. Rather than ask you to reload the site a ridiculous number of times to see them, I’m posting them all here –

Back in 2013 I tried to do something with my twitter account by posting story ideas. With twitter’s word limits it seemed like a good use for the site – idea summary with a longer commentary at a blog I called Storythinking. I posted 24 ideas before I got distracted by other things. That blog got rolled into this website and I collected the “story seeds” onto a page here called #99Stories. This newsletter seems like a good spot to release some new ideas into the wild. If any of these ideas spark something for you, feel free to take them.

Story Seed #25
Little Nemo in the Dreamlands

I’ve looked and, so far as I’ve been able to find, no one has mashed up Winsor McCay and H.P. Lovecraft. I’m kind of surprised.

Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay is one of the greatest comic strips of all time. It’s also kind of boring. Yes, it’s visually stunning and inventive. But the strip’s formula means that nothing of consequence happens. Each strip ends with Nemo waking up. Storylines and adventures may carry over from strip to strip but that beat of Nemo walking kills suspense and reminds me that he’s just dreaming. I know that I’m reading the strip differently than it was intended. It was meant to be read once a week not sequencially in a book or online.

But it’s 2020. Daily comic strips have mostly been simple gags for decades. The Sunday installments are only slightly more complex. In 2014 Locust Moon Press kickstarted Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, a massive collection of new one-off Nemo strips by over 100 different artists. Little Nemo was again revived as a graphic novel by Eric Shanower and Gabriel Rodriguez in 2016. Both of those projects were beautiful.

My dreams are mostly pretty boring. My imagination seems most active when I’m awake. Asleep it tends to send me wandering through endless corridors or driving around delivering mail. Lots of other creative folks have very vivid dreamlives. H.P. Lovecraft was one of those folks. His Dreamlands stories (as well as many of his other writings) were inspired directly by his dreams.

Both McCay’s and Lovecraft’s works are in the public domain. How would Little Nemo fare in the more hostile environs of the Dreamlands? How would it work if he couldn’t wake up every time danger loomed? Would King Morpheus send help? The strip could be charming and funny and childfriendly – Nemo meeting more benign versions of Lovecraft’s horrors. Or it could be raw and terrifying and adultsonly – Nemo barely escaping and going gibbering mad. Or a perhaps one could come up with a middle ground.

For added flavor one could blend other dream worlds into the mix – Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland comes to mind. What adventures could Alice and Nemo have together, especially when pursued by Night Gaunts?

Perhaps it’s a 21st Century Nemo trapped in a technologically advanced Dreamlands? Steampunk ghouls? Industrialized Celephaïs? Slumberland, Wonderland and the Dreamlands are rooted in the early 20th Century. What we imagine and dream evolves with our culture. What would these places be like today?

Lifestuff

It’s 2020. New Year. I’m not one for resolutions. I try to make changes as needed rather throughout the year rather than in one big push. The one change that seems necessary this year is cleaning up and moving my studio from one part of the house to another. Entropy has claimed far too much of the current space and only a move will create new order.

At USPS (my day job), the big change I expected is apparently only happening to other carriers. Our station covers four zip codes – 98146, 98136, 98126 and 98106. I have route 0633. Last year management did route inspections on all the routes in the 06 zip code with the intention of eliminating one of those routes. That was a bad idea. Fortunately, they figured out that a better idea would be to more fairly distribute the work load of the current routes. So the routes in my zone are getting adjusted so that, on the average, it takes a carrier eight hours to prep and deliver a route. My route is the one route that’s staying unchanged. I can keep doing it in my sleep.

Fine by me.

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