Today is Friday the 12th. A day of good luck. Jason Voorhees is off in the woods knitting sweaters for his mother’s corpse. All the black cats are taking naps somewhere quiet and cozy. Ladders have been left on the ground so they can only be walked over, not under. Mirrors only bend today.

So live it up!

These Days …

It’s been a sunny week. It’s amazing how much sunshine affects my mood. I do the same work as usual but I do it more easily and cheerfully.

Today is the first day of my Long Weekend – the time when my days off line up and I get three in a row. This will be followed by my Long Week – the time when I work six days in a row. I will not think about the Long Week today. I will relax and enjoy myself.

Tomorrow is the annual Letter Carriers Food Drive. If you can spare some, please put a bag of non-perishable food by your mail box for your carrier to pick up. Volunteers will collect the bags at the station and distribute the food to local food banks. Thank you!

This is the first time since I joined the Post Office that I will not work a Food Drive. I feel a little lame for having the day off. The Food Drive is one of the days I most feel like I’m doing something useful as a letter carrier. I’m considering dropping in at the station to help unload trucks. Or maybe run my route and collect bags to lighten the loads of working carriers. No promises.

The End of the War

Below are the last of the illustrations I did for that never to see print Call of Cthulhu RPG World War One scenario collection. These are actually the first illustrations I did. They were intended for a preview PDF. The book itself was to be printed in black and white. I did simple color versions of each illustration in case the publisher wanted to put out the PDF in color. Color costs more to print. Color costs no more in a PDF. This scenario featured aerial encounters with Byahkee who woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

Thank you for visiting. And reading. And looking at stuff. I hope your week was a good one. I hope the coming week is filled with good luck and sunny days. With comfortable breezes. Can’t forget that.

See you in seven!

Hello and greetings from the Pacific Northwest! We have rain and snow and warm sunshine. Occasionally on the same day.

Weather. What would we discuss with strangers without it?

I suppose we could talk about our health but usually one discusses that with acquaintances and friends.

These Days …

My health is fine. My computer’s health might be fine but it’s hard for me to check right now. My monitor and my computer don’t seem to want to speak to each other. I’ve checked the cords. I’ve changed monitors. The computer is working. The monitor seems to start but won’t connect to either of my computer or Sarah’s.

When the problem first occurred on Tuesday morning I was cranky about it. By Wednesday morning I was still a little cranky about it but I’d also come to realize that I was mostly using my computer to scroll social media. Again. Not writing. Not doing art. I have read some online articles and essays but in that distracted way that happens when I have a hard time concentrating on anything specific.

So, on Wednesday morning I read a library book as I drank my coffee to wake up. I own a ridiculous number of books but I borrow more from the library. On Wednesday evening, after getting home from work (and having dinner and chatting with Sarah) I sketched.

Thursday was a scheduled day off. I was a cranky person. There are a lot of things that are out of my control right now. Friends and family are ill. We’re waiting on others to finish some tasks so we can move forward on the Billi 99 Kickstarter. New rules have been handed down at the Post Office on how we’re supposed to do our jobs. Sarah, kind soul that she is, put up with me. I did a little sketching.

I finally ran errands for a family member who has been stuck in the hospital. The hospital is, like so many other places these days, very short staffed so everything is taking longer than expected. We’d thought I’d be able to taxi her home yesterday but the hospital hasn’t been able to process some of the tests they run and they don’t want to let her go home until they get the results. Liability issues.

I’m going to try to refuse overtime  today so I can get my family member home. Ideally I’ll be able to work a short shift.

I’m putting off dealing with my monitor until Sunday. I’m writing this newsletter on Sarah’s computer. I do need a working monitor to be able to use my computer and I need my computer as part of my creative work process. But I’ve lived without it for a few days and can live without it for a few more.

More From the War

This week’s gallery features more illustrations from that Call of Cthulhu WW1 set RPG book that will never see print. The first two images are from a scenario involving an Elder Thing on a refugee ship. The other images are solo illustrations set in different theatres of the Great War. The book’s author asked me to do ‘flavor” illustrations that showed the variety and scope of the conflict – especially places and peoples that weren’t featured in any of the actual scenarios.

If you’re reading this newsletter in your email and the images look weird try checking them out on the Skookworks website. I’ve been told that some email programs are having problems displaying the jpegs.

I hope your week has gone well. That your weather has been good and that your health is giving you nothing but joy. See you in seven!

Friday comes but once a week yet the dream of Friday lives in us every day.

These Days …

Hospitals. I’m glad they exist. I haven’t been sick but I’ve had multiple family members spending time in them in the last week. More visits are expected. Bleah.

Cancer. Heart failure. Asthma. Infections. Everyone is still alive. Some of them are feeling much better now. So far, so good.

Terror in the Alps

Enough words. This week’s pictures are illustrations from a Call of Cthulhu RPG scenario set during WW1. Some unlucky Italian soldiers encounter Chaugnar Faugn related shenanigans while checking an observation post in the Alps. I did these for a book that will likely never see print.

I thought the image of the Brother  would look good on … something … so I colored it and  it’s available on schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Death of a Sorcerer

These images are from the same unpublished book of WW1 era Call of Cthulhu scenarios. This one involved the mystery of a dead sorcerer and the horror that his passing unleashed.

I liked the image of the dueling sorcerers so much I colored it and made it available on schtuff.

I hope the last seven days have been good to you and the next seven are even better. I will keep a Friday in my thoughts for you until I see again.

Cheers!

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!