Tuesday Night Party Club #36

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Gallery – The Black Seal #1

I did my first RPG illustration work for The Black Seal back in 2001. AOL has purged all the archives of their inactive accounts so I can’t check the sequence of communications that led me to contribute. I remember being contacted by John Turner first. He’d seen my illustrations on the Delta Green website and asked if I would be interested in submitting illustrations to a new fanzine of modern day Call of Cthulhu (and specifically Delta Green related) adventures in Britain. I emailed back a positive response and was soon working with Adam Crossingham, the editor, doing illustrations for the first issue of The Black Seal. 

The Black Seal was named for an Arthur Machen story “The Novel of the Black Seal” about a hidden civilization secreted in the wilderness in Wales. The magazine’s focus was to be on material about PISCES, the UK’s Mythos fighting equivalent of Delta Green. I provided specific illustrations for a few articles and some random simple spot illustrations to be used as needed. I didn’t know what print quality TBS would have so I mostly did straight black and white work. I did spend a lot of time doing Photoshop effects on the second illustration in this gallery. I was still very inexperienced with the program and was figuring it out as I went along.

 

The Black Seal saw three issues printed between 2002 and 2004. I did illustrations in each issue and provided material for a couple issues that may see print someday. Work on TBS got me started doing Call of Cthulhu related illustrations. I’ll be showing some of that in future newsletters.

Story Seed #55
A Conspiracy of Squirrels

Most animal attack stories focus on large predators. Sharks. Bears. Wolves. Small varmints are primarily represented by rats. But rats hide in dark places. You usually don’t see them during the day. Squirrels? If you live in a town with trees you see them constantly. They’re everywhere.

Spying.
Plotting.
Organizing.

They only look cute until there are hundreds of them out for your blood.

Recommendation

This week I recommend How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctrow. Doctrow is a writer and activist with a focus on the benefits and dangers of modern technologies, particularly the internet. This is his latest book, free to read online.

Local News

I spent more time on my Redbubble store than my Zazzle store this week. Redbubble’s set up makes it easier to position on image on multiple products so it’s made it easier to feel like I’m getting more done. Mostly I’m importing images that I created to show off here at Skookworks in recent years but I’m beginning to create some images just for Zazzle and Redbubble. My favorites have been expansions of some designs I originally did as bandanas for Dagon Industries. The images are on most of the products in my Redbubble store. Since Zazzle’s focus is on individual products I’ve started by putting the design on the square puzzles.

This Cthulhu design is meant to be displayed as a diamond but Zazzle doesn’t offer that option. Just turn your head to the left a bit.

Great Cthulhu Glow Green Jigsaw Puzzle

Great Cthulhu Glow Green Jigsaw Puzzle

by Skookworks

That’s it for this week. I appreciate the visit. I hope that you’ve got people around you who keep you amused and make you feel loved. If you do, thank them! They’ll only get more amusing and loving.

Tuesday Night Party Club #35

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Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches #151-182

Thirty sketches in one convenient gallery. Cheers!

Story Seed #54
A New Spell for Utopia

Magic exists. Stories are spells, wishes in long form. And, as The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs illustrates, the wish one makes is rarely the results one receives. For more than the last fifty years we’ve been telling tales of apocalypse and dystopia. This is most noticeable in our movies and television. Watching a film is a more social activity than reading a book. We all see the same images running at the same speed. Groups can experience the same story all at once.

Most tellers of tales of terrible futures will tell you that their stories are meant as warnings, not predictions. That’s assuming they’ve thought about their premises in any ways other than exciting settings for adventures. The thing about magic is that it’s tricky. Warnings are part of the spell, often the spark that burns up the normal world. Ask Adam and Eve. Ask Orpheus. As Oedipus. As those dumb kids who who went to Crystal Lake. The Gods know that the best way to make something happen is tell human beings not to do something.

So we’ve been casting spells to avoid apocalypse and all we’re doing is calling it up. The Gods are laughing.

We are all magicians because we all tell stories. Some of us have larger audiences but we all shape the world. Imagine putting power into creating a world that we want to live into, a world for our children’s children’s children. It would mean learning to tell different stories in different ways. The vision of a horrible future is not banished just because the story ends on a note of hope. Hope is nice but it’s not a roadmap. Once we’ve lived through the End, how do we live then? Or better, how can we live well, period.

Weave your spells, magicians. What does a good world look like? How do we live in it?

Recommendation
Toren Atkinson’s Post-Apocalyptic Movie Guide

Toren Atkinson has a list of a Post-Apocalyptic movies. It’s not complete. It doesn’t include zombie apocalypse films. But it’s a good overview. He helpfully includes a notice on whether each film ends on a positive note for those who want to enjoy a story set after most of humanity has died without getting too depressed.

Local News

I started last week feeling frustrated and unmoored. I’m writing on this on Tuesday morning feeling simply unmoored.

The day job is a chunk of time that I wade through that leaves me with only a small amount of time to create new art. I’ve got two shops (Zazzle, Redbubble) that I’m having fun working on each morning but they’re online stores. Despite what my spam comments suggest, people don’t end up on websites by accident. You can’t walk past an online store and decide to go in and browse. Either you know it exists or a search engine shows it to you. And in order for a search engine to show you something it has to know the something exists. So I’m trying to figure out how tag my stores in such a way that search engines direct people to them.

Basically I’m learning to write summoning spells.

It was recognizing that I was trying to work magic that helped to change my attitude. Google gives the definition of magic as “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.

In order to get someone to come to my stores I need to make them search engine friendly. Right? I need to somehow include words and tags that match up with what my potential audience is putting into said search engines. Oz? Cthulhu? Frankenstein? Thousands of results show up. Mighty Nizz? That wild child shows up on the first page. David Ingersoll? Using Bing I don’t appear for a few pages even though I own davidingersoll.com. Using Google my website shows up on the first page but I do occasional searches for myself on Google and Google’s algorithms are designed to give you more of what you’ve searched for in the past.

Search engines and website feeds are more and more designed to give you more of what you’ve already shown interest in. Or to give you more of what has already been designated as popular. The more popular something is designated, the more it is fed to searchers and the more popular it becomes.

I could be discouraged. Oddly, I’m not. I’ve ignored “search engine optimization” for most of the time that I’ve had a website.I didn’t care much about increasing the traffic here. I’ve only got so much time to do individual illustrations. Having more people commissioning me for more illustrations is appealling but only to my ego. Unless I quit the Post Office I don’t have time to take much more work than I’m already taking.

The online stores are different. The work is already done. Each piece can be sold multiple times so the more people who see an image or product the more chances that some of those people will purchase it. So now I have to learn to ” influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces”.

Am I really performing magic?

It’s fun to think of it that way. I’ll be doing research and learning new skills and being boringly practical about everything but “have fun” is a primary motivation for me to do anything. I’m only feeling unmoored because there are so many directions I can look for information and so many new skills to aquire that I’m uncertain where to head first.

And that’s fine. To be unmoored is also to be in motion. Time to choose a direction to point my sails.

Thank you for dropping by. Remember that you are a magician. The daily slog is real but it’s also an illusion. Fight it when you can but, when you can, give power to the moments of joy and wonder that present themselves. Share those moments. Magic lasts longer when performed in collaboration.

See you next week!

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #34

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Gallery: Delta Green

Most of my RPG illustration work has been for Call of Cthulhu related projects. That’s the result of intention and good luck and accident.

The Intention part happened in the year 2000. I submitted some illustrations to the Delta Green website. Delta Green was a Call of Cthulhu RPG set in modern times – the late 199os. Most CoC games are set in the 1920s/1930s, the time the original stories were written and set. I discovered Delta Green in 1999 when I working at Half Price Books. I was the buyer when a customer sold us his collection of RPG manuals. In the buy was Delta Green and its sequel Delta Green: Countdown. I bought those books for myself. I loved the ideas behind the setting. It updated the Cthulhu Mythos for the late Twentieth Century in ways that surprised and delighted me. It created a means and a reason for investigators to, well, investigate the horrors from beyond.

I’d wanted to illustrate RPGs but didn’t have much of a portfolio of examples to show. I found the Delta Green site early the next year. I don’t think it had a way to send submissions and I don’t think they were asking for any. What it did have was a way to submit fan art and writing. So I worked up three illustrations (see the follow gallery) and submitted them. They got posted. No one from Delta Green contacted me.

Oh well.

Two years later those illustrations got me work at The Black Seal. But that’s another post.

The original photoshop files of these illustrations are, possibly, residing on an old back up drive. It’s formated for Mac and I currently use a PC so I haven’t tried plugging it in. A lot of the work I did in the first ten years of this century was done on a Mac. The art always started as graphite and ink on paper and then had photoshop magic applied to it. I’ve got the original drawings in big metal flat files but the art that got published looks different.

Earlier this year I realized that I’d sent most of those illustrations to the editors and publishers via email and I’ve never deleted any personal emails. So I’ve tracked down a lot of that older art and will be showing it in future galleries. I found the two black and white illustrations in the above gallery in my emails.

The first three images, however, I couldn’t locate in my gmail archive. AOL has long since deleted all my old emals. At first they didn’t appear to be on the current Delta Green site but, after doing some obsessive google searching and some sort of back door poking around on DG I found them in an archive. Huzzah!

Story Seed #53
The Time Line AntiDefense League

There are a lot of stories that feature some sort of organization whose mission is to defend the “correct” timeline, to make sure that history works itself out the way that it is “supposed to”. Bleah. How about an organization whose mission is to create timelines where history works itself out in the best ways for the most people?

Recommendation

Beeple. This person’s art started showing up in my tumblr feed, shared by other folks I followed. It was weird and creepy so I subscribed to his feed. He posts an image a day, every day.

Also, the Growing Up / Overnight Kickstarter concludes on the 30th. If you’ve been putting off backing it. please jump in.

Local News

Last week, in one of our stand up meetings at USPS, we were reminded that we, the letter carriers were not supposed to talk to the press. That if a member of the press attempted to engage us in conversation we were to refer him/her to management. Also, while we were in uniform, we were not to engage in political discussions with anyone lest they assume that our views represented those of the USPS. We were also to be careful not to express politcal opinions on social media in such a way as to lead people to believe that our views represented those of the USPS.

Sigh.

To be clear, anything I write here about my job at USPS is just my experience and my opinion. I like to assume that those of you who read these newsletters recognize this but, on the off chance you don’t, I AM NOT A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE POST OFFICE. I’m just a guy who works there. In my opinion, the USPS can’t actually have an opinion since it’s an organization. Organizations are not people. The people in charge of organizations may claim that their opinion represents the opinion of the organization but that’s just a fiction.

Anyway.

The most interesting part about the day job right now is that I have a new T6. USPS delivers mail six days a week. Regular carriers work and deliver theri route five days a week. A T6 is the person who delivers the route on the regular carrier’s day off. My last T6 had medical issues that prevented them from delivering my route on a regular basis. My new T6 is healthy and detail oriented. More detail oriented than I am, actually. And that’s good. It means I’m updating labels in mailboxes and doing maintenance on my route that I’d let slide. I keep most of my customer changes in my head. Having another person who has to regularly work my route reminds me that I should communicate customer changes in clear, written methods. It’s only polite.

We’ve also moved our start time from 7 am to 7:30 am. I’m not a fan but I’m adjusting.

I’ve left my alarm at 4 am. I get up. Drink coffee Write. Do computer art or make products in either my Zazzle or my Redbubble stores. I’ve updated my various websites to include a “store” page with links to each. This week I spent most of my store time working on an Oz Squad collection for Zazzle. Oz Squad is Steve Ahlquist’s creature but, as a fan and sometime collaborator, I try to find ways to keep the brand active.

In the evenings, once we’ve finished dinner and our spot of television, I work on physical art. Right now I’m doing pirate sketches. More about that when the project can be talked about publically.

Thank you for dropping by. Remember that life has always been insane. Look out for yourself and your friends. That’s where sanity and security dwells.

See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #33

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Gallery: 2019 Daily Sketches 121-150

Another thirty of last year’s Daily Half Hour Sketches, now in one handy gallery.

Story Seed #52
A Stone in the River

Most crime fighters and/or superheroes are reactive. Mostly they take action after a crime has been committed either to bring villains to justice or, on the more antihero side, get revenge for the victims. There are a few stories of characters or organizations that stop crimes before they occur, they catch criminals before they can become criminals, they punish the guilty before they can be guilty of a crime. Usually the organizations manage this by either having members with precognitive abilities or computers with the same abilities. Eunice Stone can’t see the future. She simply knows how to read people. If she spends enough time around someone she’ll be able to predict how that person is likely to react in any situation.

She doesn’t see good or bad people. Eunice sees life as a game. She sees human beings as mostly unaware entities trapped in massive systems, reacting to outside stimuli and stuck in lives that, too often, spiral further out of control. So, as a child, Eunice set out, not to fix the systems – she knew that was too big a task – but to redirect the people who are trapped in them. A suggestion here. A secret favor there. Redirecting an angry man’s attention at someone who deserves his wrath rather than the family he’s been taking it out on. Showing the unrepentant thief better targets than his neighbors.

Eunice becomes a fixer. The smarter and more aware people around her, both criminals and legitimate businesspeople, notice what she does and try to enlist her in improving their situations. And she does. Mostly to the advantage of everyone in a situation. She makes connections. She points out solutions. She goes around her clients selfish desires and finds points them at satisfying ends. Eunice knows that there is always a win win scenario.

And for those who refuse to play her way? Those who can only win by making someone lose? Eunice will take them out of the game.

Recommendation

The Kickstarter for Growing Up / Overnight ends on the 30th. Please support this project! Thank you!

Local News

Life at the Post Office has been tiring. Last week was my Long Week, six days in a row, every day with overtime. There are a lot of carriers on vacation at the moment so a lot of routes need coverage. I volunteer for a desired route at the beginning of my shift in order to avoid being mandated to carry a route I don’t particularly like. This will make for a larger paycheck but currently I’m only noticing a more tired body.

I’ve read the news about the Postmaster General’s sabotage of USPS. I haven’t noticed any unique new problems. Upper management is doing more micromanaging but they do that every few months anyway so, if I hadn’t been hearing about the new PMG, I’d just assume regular management stupidity. Being a letter carrier is a job. I’m past the point of feeling any particular loyalty to a job. Jobs don’t love the people who do them and upper management in most businesses will make decisions that poorly affect the people who have to follow the new directives. If upper management consulted the workers before implementing a new procedure that would be unusual.

So I do my best to put my emotional and creative energy into activities where I can have some fun and some control. This last week Sarah has been good at reminding me to get some drawing in after work, regardless of how tired I am. Just 15 minutes can improve my mood.

In the mornings I generally do computer work. Photoshop. Writing here. I have now have two online stores. One at Zazzle. Another at Redbubble.

The first week that I was putting together my Zazzle store I made a lot of products. Unfortunately they didn’t all become publically available quickly. My first 29 items appeared promptly enough. Then, from Saturday to Thursday, nothing loaded. I looked at the Zazzle forums and checked with customer service and got that slow load times during busy periods could be expected. By Wednesday I was feeling a bit itchy so I decided to check out the other POD sites that I’d seen recommended.

I started setting up a store at Redbubble. I’d only set up a profile but not loaded any art when Zazzle’s public links resolved and the 50 products I’d been waiting on became available. So I continued making stuff at Zazzle. I decided to just make one or two things a day. Partly so that they’d load in a timely fashion and partly so I would spend some time figuring out best marketing practices. And I got a commission to do illustrations for an RPG supplement about pirates.

Redbubble is persistent though. I got emails reminding me to finish setting up my store. So, what the hell, I figured I might as well have two stores, one Zazzler, one Redbubbler. Zazzle had been recommended as a general, less focussed site, Redbubble as an artist focused site. There’s definitely a difference between them.

With Zazzle, you choose a product – a cup, a t-shirt, a puzzle – upload an image and match it to the product. With Redbubble you start by uploading an image and the site helpfully puts it on EVERYTHING. For a few of their products that means you have to do some repositioning to make the image look good. Most of the time the fit is great. Zazzle seems to be the best platform for smaller images, the sort of things that I’ve been putting on cups and mugs. Redbubble seems to be a better platform for larger, more complicated images. So those are good reasons to maintain two stores.

Zazzle provides code that lets me post individual items or collections to this website or other social media sites. That’s cool.

Redbubble lets me put a sample store onto this website. Check it out –

Thank you for dropping by. I hope that your week provides you with more happy moments than otherwise. Look out for each other. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #32

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Gallery: The Cousins, Young and Older

The Kickstarter for the adult adventures of the Morgan Clan Cousins is now in its second week. Part of the job of running a kickstarter is the marketing the heck out of it. I’m not running the campaign but I am trying to help with said marketing. I had a great time illustrating the Eldritch New England Holiday Collection and its companion fiction anthology Children of the Lovecraft Country. The stories in An Eldritch Legacy take place about a decade after the stories in the first book.That first book is currently available as an ebook at the above link. It’s also available as an add-on in your preferred format at the Kickstarter.

To help with marketing I created these banners of the Morgan Clan Cousins and I’m posting them individulally, along with the synopsis of that character’s story on my various social medias. I’m posting them all here with the blurbs for their stories in the both the books/ 
Blood and the Deep Blue Sea  by Oscar Rios——Alice Sanders has a lot of questions in her life, mostly about the father she never got to meet. These are all questions her family just won’t answer until she’s “older”. Time moves slowly for a thirteen year old girl who’s in a hurry to grow up until one chaotic and bloody evening in Innsmouth, everything suddenly changes.

Blood and the Turning of the Tide by Oscar Rios – Who would have thought escaping the federal raid on Innsmouth would be the easy part? For Alice, a young Deep One Hybrid leading a small group of Innsmouth refugees, things keep getting more complicated. While she established her band successfully in Port Jefferson, New York, keeping them safe is another matter. They struggle with learning to live among “normal” people. Federal agents still hunt for Innsmouth residents who escaped the raid. Then her Aunt Margie, kept in hiding in her attic, nears the end of her “Change.” A federal agent arrives in town asking questions, a member of her community asks permission to marry a Port Jefferson boy, and a local mechanic even asks her out to dinner! When just surviving isn’t enough and the refugees want more out of life, can her community’s secrets and their safety survive much longer?

Ghosts & Monsters by Peter Rawlik—Donald Sutton has a secret: his imaginary friend Simon isn’t imaginary at all. Simon is just one of many ghosts haunting Kingsport that Donald is somehow able to see. When the ghosts of Kingsport begin vanishing from their haunts, Donald discovers them trapped in the most unusual places. When Simon himself vanishes, Donald must work to free him, and accept help from a frightening source, with terrifying consequences.

Dreams and Nightmares by Peter Rawlik – Artist and gallery owner by day, secret paranormal investigator and spirit medium by night, Donald Sutton does his best to make sure these parts of his life are kept separate. After a particularly frightening investigation he decided to take a break from ghost hunting. He begins spending more and more time exploring the Dreamlands, a skill he learned as a child from his cousin Melba Sutton. However, when taking photographs at a Kingsport Congregational Hospital for their annual Christmas party, he encounters the beautiful and mysterious stranger, Ms. Aspinwall. Not only does she somehow know his secret work as a paranormal psychic but she desperately needs his help with a haunting in the hospital’s Mariner’s Ward. But the winter solstice is a dangerous time for spirit mediums, especially in Kingsport, because the veils between worlds and realities become perilously thin.

Luck be With You  by Brian M. Sammons—Edward Derby is not your average 12-year-old boy. Inquisitive and wise beyond his tender years, he started reading shorty after walking, has mastered Latin, and notices things others don’t (or choose to ignore). When he notices someone scribbling strange symbols across Arkham in places where soon after a mysterious death occurs, his curiosity is piqued. To prevent more such deaths Edward reluctantly takes it upon his slim shoulders to solve this mystery.

A Dark Legacy by Brian Sammons– Edward Derby, the youngest associate professor at Miskatonic University, was looking forward to catching up on reading during his first summer break as a member of the faculty. When he gets a call that a large house once owned by his birth father, Leon Derby, has been damaged in a storm, he’s called to Marblehead to deal with the repairs. Edward’s technically owned the house for years now, but has avoided visiting the property, afraid of what he might find. Leon Derby died before Edward was five years old, and the son has no real memories of his father. Edward does know that his father battled dark and unknowable forces, much as Edward, himself, does now. While exploring the house and beginning to learn its secrets, Edward discovers he has a lot in common with his late father. However, a long dormant evil begins to stir, and kill, forcing Edward to finish something his father started many years ago.
George Weedon and The Mystery of Emily Keane by Lee Clark Zumpe—According to authorities, little Emily Keane fell down a well one autumn afternoon, never to be seen again. On the fifth anniversary of her disappearance, George Weedon and a ragtag group of plucky Arkham kids try to find out what really happened to the girl.

George Weedon and the Secret of Infinite Horizons by Lee Clark Zumpe – Life is good for George Weedon, starting quarterback for the Pittsburg Pirates, living his dream of playing professional football. However, some things never change, and dark mysteries keep placing themselves in his path. This time he’s asked by his team’s owner and founder, “The Chief” Art Rooney, to track down some close friends who’ve gone missing while visiting their newly built vacation house in the Allegheny Mountain, a large but strange structure called Infinite Horizons. Expected to take years to build, it was completed it just 10 months, and the designer had a complete mental breakdown shortly afterwards and was committed to an asylum. So George sets off with a small party, the missing couple’s daughter, a boxer, and a professional baseball player to solve yet another mystery. Witchlights by Christine Morgan – Down in the woods, down in the hollow, pale and eerie lights appear. Nothing to worry about, Dunwichers say. Nothing to fear… Fireflies… Marsh gas… Foxfire… That’s all. But, if there’s nothing to fear, why do people warn their children to stay away? Why do those who ignore such warnings sometimes go missing? Little Gerdie Pope may only be ten, but she is determined to find out.

Separate Lives by Christine Morgan – After spending most of her life struggling with memories of past lifetimes, Gerdie Pope has learned to channel them into a gift allowing her to help people. Now a world renowned clairvoyant, she lives in Lily Dale, New York, a haven for mystics, psychics, and practitioners of folk magic. Then her peaceful life is interrupted by a challenging client and a visit from distant relations. Her client, a young girl with vivid “memories” of another life, one far stranger than any Gerdie has ever lived. The child’s parents are desperate for help, after doctors recommended she be committed to an asylum. But when relatives from her mother’s side of the family turn up, the degenerate side of the Whateley Clan, things quickly spiral out of control. They want her to return to Dunwich and use her gifts to continue her grandfather’s, the late Wizard Whateley, work. Dreams of Dunwich by Glynn Owen Barrass —A child of farming stock, Gordon Brewster lives a simple life, though life in Dunwich is often very far from simple. Darkness hangs over the decaying hamlet, spreading its insidious tentacles towards every soul in the vicinity… especially the innocent. Gordon has witnessed some of the worst terrors Dunwich has to offer, seen friends kidnapped and lost forever. If only those Dunwich Horrors were truly over. If only the nightmares that plagued him weren’t the harbingers of further doom.

Warden of the Dark God by Glynn Owen Barass – The rolling hills of Dunwich have always been a mysterious, sometimes dangerous place. Every so often children go missing and when they do, Gordon Brewster is the one who sets out to find them. While still working on his family’s farm, he’s become an expert hunter, tracker, and a member of the Believers, a local collective of arcane practitioners dedicated to defending the people of Dunwich, and all mankind, from eldritch threats. However, things are coming to a head as an ancient evil, slumbering in alien ruins, begins to awaken with a need to sate its endless hunger. Donald gathers up a couple of allies and goes on the hunt once again, only this time the fate of every man, woman, and child in Dunwich hangs in the balance.

The Kickstarter ends on August 31st. Stretch goals include illustrations for both An Eldritch Legacy and Between Twilight and Dawn. I’d love to hang out with the Cousins one more time. I’d love to see the illustrations Ian MacLean would do for BTaD. So if the above summaries sound like stories you’d like to read, please back the campaign! Thank you!

Story Seed #51
Atlantis Rises

Atlantis. Lemuria. Mu. The Deep Ones. Every culture that has lived by the sea had stories of people who lived under the sea. There has been plenty of fiction about Atlantis and other underwater civilizations. Comics have given us both Aquaman and the Sub-Mariner. The basic premise is that there are powerful people (or creatures) down in the deep.

Oddly, those powerful underwater people seem to be okay with us land people dumping our trash all ower their homeland and stripping the fish and minerals out of their seas. A century ago our poking around in the ocean might have been just annoying. Now? It’s catastrophic.

The sea people haven’t responded because they’ve been waiting. They are a deeply religious people who follow the signs of their gods. And their gods are real. And they have finally spoken. Take back your world.

Recommendation

A Christmas Witch’s Candy Cookbook by Meredith McClaren is currently Kickstarting. It’s probably a bad idea to recommend another Kickstarter while I’m participating in one but I love McClaren’s illustrations. The book is also already fully funded so, YAY!

Local News

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I’ve spent a lot of time creating products for my Zazzle store. I’ve currently got over 75 different items available. That part was fun. I’ve sold a few things to friends who came over from Facebook. (Thank you friends!) The less fun part is getting those products in front of complete strangers so they might be inspired to purchase some of them. It’s marketing but it’s not actually marketing to human beings. I can write entertaining and enticing copy for human beings. The thing I now have to learn is how to title and tag items in such a way that my products show up in searches both at Zazzle and through internet search engines. That’s a whole other skill set. I’ll learn it but it will take time. I’m going to keep making things but I’m limiting myself to one or two new products a day.

Beyond the need to learn key word stuff I’ve also got another book illustration project on my plate. This one involves pirates and the Cthulhu Mythos. It’s in the development stages so I can’t say much more than that. I spent a good chunk of Friday just doing bad sketches. That’s a stage I have to go through with every new project. I have to get my imagination to switch gears from whatever the last project was and make room for the new one. Everything I try to draw at this stage looks like crap to me. I’m used it. I just keep drawing. Eventually the work starts to look serviceable and I can start thinking of doing actual illustrations.

Thank you for dropping by. I hope your week has gone well. I hope the coming week looks even better. Be sure to reach out to friends whether you think you need to or not. Because you do. You’re a social monkey. The monkeys that tough it alone are all crazy.

Tuesday Night Party Club #31

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Gallery: Pulp Action Cousins

I finished illustrating the Lovecraft Country … oops … The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection a few weeks ago. Our book has had a title change in order avoid confusion with a certain HBO series called Lovecraft Country. The series is based on a book of the same title. Confusion wasn’t expected when it was just the book out there but TV series tend to be more noticed than books. The studios that produce them also tend to have lawyers on hand to make sure that no one can profit on a property, even accidentally, without proper payment and licensing. Our book is only related to TV show in that they are both inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft but who wants to deal with lawyers when a simple title change can let you avoid them?

The final illustration is of the Cousins as grown ups. Oscar wrote two versions of them. The first was as “regular” adults, at least as regular as the Cousins were likely to manage. Those versions of the Cousins appear on the cover of An Eldritch Legacy. That book is kickstarting now.

The versions of the Cousins below are the Pulp Action versions for folks who want to play characters who are more rough and tumble. One thing I like about working with Oscar is his willingness to roll with some of the stuff I put in the illustrations. When I showed him the sketch I suggested that the Cousins were fighting Serpent People. When he posted it online he included this description – “On the Island of Blood, the cousins are ambushed by the Dino-Sapiens, transported here from a parallel universe by the Thule Society! The Eldritch New England Cousins as adults for Pulp Cthulhu.”

Oscar asked me to do this illustration in black and white to evoke the look of an old Saturday matinee serial from the 1930s.


I like how the illustration came out but I’d visualized it in lurid color as the cover of a pulp fiction magazine. So, for the fun of it and to satisfy my itch to see it closer to how I’d originally imagined it, I did a quick color job on it and added a title.


Story Seed #50

Take the cover above. Forget everything you know about the Cousins. Who are the Abnaturalists? How did they get together? What sort of adventures do they have? Many a pulp magazine was started with a spare cover that the publisher had laying around and then had stories written to fit it.

Recommendation

This week I’ve done very little reading of newsletters or watching of youtube videos. The reason is below.

Local News

I spent most of my non-postal time in the last week working on my Zazzle shop. I did some research to see if Zazzle was actually the best place for me to establish a shop and the answer was … probably. There are print on demand sites that have more focus but, of the comparisons I read, Zazzle is as likely to work for me as Red Bubble or Society 6 or … They all require me to market myself. They all require me to create and add products. So what the hell, I’m starting with Zazzle. I’ve made individual products from the site in the past and was happy with the results.

So far it’s both a little fun and a little frustrating and a little weird. The fun part is taking art I created years ago and putting it on … something. A t-shirt. A coffee mug. Leggings. The frustrating part is adjusting the images to fit some of the products. I did a lot of illustrations at a 5×7 aspect ratio. That ratio works well for greeting cards. I did a lot of others at a 6×9 ratio. That  ratio works for comic books and trade paperbacks. Neither of those ratios work as well for posters or puzzles. 8×10. 11×14.

But it’s more fun than not. I’ve posted links to Facebook and sold a few items. Yay!

Beyond the creation of products I need to figure out how to market them to people who have never met me.

The links above should take you to the store. Once I’ve gotten used the process I should be able to set up a store page here at Skookworks that will link directly to the Zazzle one. Please check it out. Let me know if there are certain types of products or images on which you’d like me to focus. Thank you!

I hope your week has gone well. Thank you for stopping by. Stay safe. Stay cool. Remember to drink a lot of water. And wear a mask!

Tuesday Night Party Club #30

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Gallery: 2019 Daily Sketches 91-120

This week’s gallery is another collection of the daily sketches I did in 2019. This is the fourth gallery.

Story Seed #49
Write Like An Animal

Watership Down. Duncton Wood. Tailchaser’s Song. These are novels that feature animals as protagonists. Specifically, these stories feature anthropomorphic animal societies that keep more to the “natural” versions of the featured animals rather than human societies in animal drag i.e. Wind in the Willows or the Redwall series. Watership Down is a survival adventure story starring rabbits. Duncton Wood is a mythic fantasy featuring moles. Tailchaser’s Song is a claw and sorcery tale starring cats. These are the books that come to mind because I’ve read them. There are many others.

Animals are social creatures. They all have some sort of society, a way of interacting with each other. So pick a species and tell a tale. Mice? Bears? Elephants? Possums? What sort of cultures would these critters have? What kind of adventures (or romances or domestic dramas) would they experience?

I find that thinking like an animal often helps me to understand and sympathize with my fellow humans. Despite some of our fellows’ claims to contrary, humans are animals. Animals are people. And people have stories.

Recommendation : Charles Stross

Charles Stross is a writer based in Scotland. He’s known for a couple of series – The Laundry Files (horror/espionage)  and The Merchant Princes (science fiction/space opera). His blog is a good source of commentary on the business of writing and the political scene in the UK.

Local News

I think of myself as having three jobs. The first and most time consuming job is as a mail carrier. That’s the one that gives me income to pay my bills and look after my family. The second job is as a “creative person”. Mostly that’s creating illustrations and cartoons. Sometimes that’s doing designwork or writing stories. It’s a job that both brings in some extra income and keeps me sane. I do it more for the sanity keeping than for the extra income. The process of drawing is mostly relaxing and mostly quiets my mind even if the rest of the day has been filled with stupidity. On those occasions when drawing is frustrating, when I’m trying to draw something unfamiliar or really complicated, the process still takes quiets my mind and focuses it on a specific task.

My third job is marketing my second job. It’s the job for which I have the least time. Marketing can be sending out announcements about one’s skills and talents. Marketing can be a more direct process of contacting potential clients and flashing your portfolio at them. As much as possible I combine both my second and third job. Last year I posted a drawing a day here. This year I’m writing this newsletter. The drawing/writing of random things is a pleasant activity. Regular posting keeps eyes on this site and makes me more visible to search engines. So I hear anyway.

I finished my last illustration for The Lovecraft County Holiday Collection a couple of weeks ago. It’s a week until the Growing Up / Overnight Kickstarter launches. The campaign will last 30 days. Assuming it funds at the correct stretch goal, I’ll have some more illustrations to do.

In the meantime I’m working on concept art for Kaiju Weather, a graphic novel that I’m writing with my wife. The concept art is to help her see the world of the story the way I see it. It’s a huge project. Finishing it will take a few years. I will post the concept art when there’s enough of it (and we’re farther along in the rest of book) over at our Kaiju Weather page. I’m currently expecting to start doing that in January, 2022. Yeah, I’m thinking long term.

I’m also in the process of putting together a Zazzle shop. I’ll provide a link when there’s something to sell. Right now I’m working on designs and figuring out products. That means I have to think and learn. I love thinking and learning! I just wish I didn’t need solitary, quiet time to do it. I don’t have a lot of that. Still, I should have some merchandise available before the end of this summer.

Thank you for dropping by. It’s a chaotic world out there. Keep yourself safe and reach out to your friends. We’ll make it if we hang togehter.

Tuesday Night Party Club #29

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Gallery: Coloring An Inner Darkness

An Inner Darkness is one of Golden Goblin Press’s supplements for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. The scenarios deal as much with real, historical human evil as they do with the spectres of the Cthulhu Mythos. The book is profusely illustrated by Reuben Dodd. As production on the book neared completion, I was asked to color one of the illustrations in each scenario for a total of six. Mr. Dodd does fine color work but he’d already moved on to other projects. The editor, Oscar Rios, sent me tifs of the chosen illustrations and I set to work.
This is the first time I’ve colored anyone else’s artwork.The illustrations are clearly designed to be in black and white. So the trick was to add color without having that color clash with the linework – enhance not compete. For this specific illustration I started by chosing a set of flat colors that I thought emphasized the depressing nature of the situation – yellows, greys and sickly green. Once the main colors were chosen I added light greytones to indicate shadow and contour. I used the orignal linework as a guide for my light source. I’m happy with the results. I’m even happier that Reuben liked them too.

Story Seed #48
This Face Knows Your Secrets

A wealthy businessman turns himself in to the authorities. He’s come to confess his involvement in a money laundering scheme. It had started out simply, just cooking books, some shady investments, but it grew to covering up greater crimes including kidnapping and murder. The businessman is terrified. Not of his partners. They’re scary people but they’re just people. He’s afraid of the Face he sees in every reflective surface. The Face that stares at him knowingly from the windows of the building across the street. The Face that mouths truths to him before he can look away. The Face that no one else sees. 

The Face was a crime fighter from the early days of comic books. From 1940 to 1946, reporter Terry Trent would put on a fright mask and go beat up bad guys. Other than a scary disguise, Trent had no super powers. Due to the vagaries of copyright The Face is a public domain character.

I’m suggesting a couple different new versions:

  1. The Face is an actual supernatural entity. It appears before evildoers and torments them until they, out of fear and greed and their own stupidity, are undone. Sometimes they turn themselves in. Sometimes they destroy themselves trying to escape the Face. The Face rarely appears physically. Mostly it manifests as shadow or a reflection where there should be neither. Sometimes it’s a voice telling secrets. Perhaps it has been summoned by one of the evildoers victims. Perhaps it picks its targets on its own.
  2. The Face is the creation of a team of actors, hackers, make-up and special effects artists who use it to bring justice to those too rich and powerful for the law to successfully prosecute. Perhaps they originally created the character to get revenge on one untouchable man and then, once they succeeded, they decided to go after other targets. Their M.O. is similar to the supernatural version of the Face, they work to get evildoers to undo themselves.

Recommendation – Zebragirl

Zebragirl by Joe England is/was one of the first webcomics I followed. It tells the tale of Sandra Eastlake after her accidental transformation into a demon thing. The series ran from 2000-2018. The early strips are crude in comparison to the later ones but I find the evolution of the art interesting to watch. The story is now complete although England still adds the occasional postscript strips.

Local News – Postal Slang

A lot of jobs have their own slang, a jargon that only makes sense to people who do that job. I work for the Post Office as a letter carrier. These are some of the words and phrases that are otherwise nonsense to civilians.

Throwing Parcels
This is what the clerks do at the beginning of the day. Pallets loaded with parcels come in. The clerks bring the pallets into the station and center them in the middle of an network of hampers, one hamper for each route. They scan each parcel to indicate that it’s been received and then literally throw the parcel into its appropriate hamper.

Hot Case
There’s a case in the center of the station with cubbies for each route. The carrier put missorted mail into large general cubbies and the clerks sort that mail into the proper route cubbies. The carriers are supposed to empty our cubbies before we pull down our routes.

Pull Down
Each route has its own a case – a couple of racks with slots labeled for each address on the route. At the beginning of the day we sort mail into those slots. When we’re done sorting we pull down each swing and put into a tray. The trays go out to our trucks.

Swing
A swing is, generally, a block of mail. That is, it’s the mail for a block on a street. Usually it takes 15 minutes to deliver a swing. Usually. Time varies depending on whether the swing is mounted, a cbu, or a park and loop.

Park and Loop
A Park and Loop is a swing that is delivered on foot. The carrier generally parks their truck at one end of the block and then delivers up one side of the street and down the other in a “loop”.

Mounted
Mounted deliveries are those that can be done without leaving the truck. The carrier drives along a street and delivers to mail boxes at the side of the road. In some areas, all the routes are mounted.

CBU
A CBU is a Cluster Box Unit – a set of mailboxes that can be opened with a single USPS proprietary key. The carrier opens a single door and is able to deliver to all the boxes that are part of the unit.

Car Hop
A Car Hop is a delivery that is usually separate from other deliveries – a single address on a street,. Sometimes a swing consists of a series of car hops, single deliveries down one side of a street.

Deadhead
A Deadhead is a street with addresses on one side that is delivered on foot. The carrier parks the mail truck, delivers to the addresses on foot and then walks back past those addresses to return to the truck.

Long Week (Iron Week)
Postal employees have rotating days off. One week a carrier might have Monday off. The next week Tuesday. Then Wednesday and so forth. The Long Week is our six day work week from Monday to Saturday.

Long Weekend
The Long Weekend is the one where our scheduled Friday off and our scheduled Saturday off and our scheduled Sunday off happen consecutively and we get three days off in a row.

CCA
CIty Carrier Assistant. These are the folks who are delivering mail while waiting to become “career” i.e. permanent employees. They’re the carriers in training. The substitutes. They deliver whatever route needs delivering. They work overtime whether they want it or not. They work Sundays delivering packages for Amazon. They have no consistent day off. I was a CCA for about a year and a half before I made “career”.

Office Time
Office Time is the time a carrier spends sorting mail, setting up and pulling down their route. Management has a series of metrics that they believe reflect that amount of time that a carrier should use as “office time”. Those metrics are accurate so long as the mail arrives on time and in proper order, there are no emergencies and the carrier remember to clock to street time whenever they are not doing office time things.

Street Time
Street Time is the time spent sorting parcels into the truck, loading mail into the truck,  and then delivering the mail. Street time is more fungible than office time.

DPS
The DPS is the mail – letters and postcards and small flyers – that comes from the local mail sorting plant. The DPS should be sorted for line-of-travel and therefore the carriers shouldn’t need to sort it before taking it out to our trucks. I have about 170 active delivery addresses and I average about 1400 pieces of DPS for my route. Since the coronapocalypse the DPS numbers have gone way done. I’ve had a couple of days when I had less than 325 pieces of DPS.

LIne of Travel
The line of travel is the order in which a route is delivered. 

Nixies
I don’t remember what Nixie is an abreviattion for. A Nixie is a piece of mail that we can’t deliver on our route. Maybe that letter belongs on another route. Maybe it”s addressed to someone who doesn’t live at the address on letter. Maybe the address doesn’t exist. We bring the undeliverable mail back to the station and put in the clerk’s throwback case for sorting.

____

Stay safe. Be smart. Look after each other. Remember to dance.

Tuesday Night Party Club #28

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Gallery – 2019 Daily Sketches 61-90

Here are another thirty of the sketches that I posted on a daily schedule last year, now in a convenient gallery so you don’t have to scroll through posts day by day.

Story Seed #47
Music of Mystery

A couple has purchased a big house. It had previously been a rental with multiple tenants. Not all the tenants took their stuff with them when they moved out so the couple is having to clear out the abandoned belongings as they move in. They find a box with a couple dozen cassette tapes. The cases are labeled with a list of the songs on each tape. The couple doesn’t recognize any of the songs. Out of curiosity they decide to play the tapes to find out what the music sounds like.

From there the story can go many directions –

  1. The tapes are filled with amazing songs and the couple are compelled to track down the original albums that the music came from.
  2. The songs listed aren’t actually songs. They’re weird interviews that reveal secrets that the couple wishes that did not now know.
  3. The songs alter the couples thoughts and moods, slowly driving thiem insane and/or sparking epiphanies that lead them to enlightenment.
  4. The music on the tapes is strange and obscure. The couple is inspired to track down the original albums and, in the process, they discover hidden worlds and forgotten histories.
  5. Every time one of the tapes is played, something changes in the house. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes for worse. Sometimes simply for strange.
  6. ????

Recommendation

My brother, Glenn, used to blog regularly. Him starting a blog is what inspired me to start blogging. He’s got two blogs: Lovesettlement and Dare I Read? In recent years he’s left them quiet. Until the coronapocalypse and the California Lockdown. What’s been bad for “normal life” has sparked him to do more posting. He uses Lovesettlement to post about his poetry. Dare I Read? is where he posts a wider range of thoughts.

He’s been called back to work so the blogs have been quiet again but there’s enough interesting stuff up that visting is worthwhile.

Local News

A good way to start thinking of all the ways I might be screwing up at my job is to have the boss say as she walks by my case,  “Come see me in the office before you leave today”. That happened to me on Wednesday. And I spent a bunch of time trying to think of what I might have done wrong. Too many u-turns? Too much office time? My delivery time isn’t matching the metrics that corporate thinks it should?

Nah.

Turns out she wanted to give a me a certificate of appreciation for the extra work I do beyond delivering my own route. With mail volumes down I often have undertime available and I volunteer to carry parts of other routes in that undertime. It was a pleasant surprise to get acknowledged for that.

On Thursday the boss gave out small gift certificates to those carriers who had scanned 100% of their packages in the last month and slightly smaller certificates to those who had managed 99% scans. I’m a 99%er.

On Saturday we were given new procedures for how and when we’re supposed to sort our mail and parcels. I’m not going to try to explain the details. Mostly it’s an attempt by management to get the carriers to do our “office time” work during a designated “office time” and everything else during “street time”. I have to compliment our stations managers for actually taking carrier complaints into account and restructuring the way the clerks sort parcels to try to accomodate the new mandates. Past managers have have heard the same complaints and just shrugged.

On Sunday I finished the last illustration for the Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection. Now the clock is ticking until the Growing Up / Overnight Kickstarter launches on August 1st. I will have more to say about that as the date approaches.

Today is my day off. I made a batch of bacon bits – 1 pound pork bacon plus 2 pounds turkey bacon, chopped and baked for a couple hours at 375 degrees. I’ll use those as a garnish for the next couple weeks. I also made a huge lasagna. Five layers of noodles and homemade sauce and five types of cheese. That’s lunch for the next ten days.

And that’s another week gone. I hope yours had more high points than low ones. And I hope that the coming week looks bright. There’s a lot of nonsense happening in the world right now but there’s also a lot of beauty and brilliance. We’re all in this together and when we remember that, we thrive.

Tuesday Night Party Club #27

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Gallery: Fantomah Hates You
Let’s be very clear about this. Fantomah hates you. And you. And you. Fantomah hates y’all.
You know what I love about Fantomah? She’s angry and horrible and not at all nice. To the right people.

Story Seed #46
Number 17

The Shock Artist has unveiled a new “installation”. Every 28 days, on the night of the new moon, somewhere in America, the body of a young woman is found. The corpse is incorporated into a bizarre sculpture, the sort of avante garde creation that would look good in a modern art museum were a dead woman not part of it. Coroner’s report indicate that each woman had been killed the previous day. Each woman’s face is obscured beneath a hood. On the front of the hood is printed a photo of the face of the Shock Artist’s next victim, a victim who has already been kidnapped. This latest installation is found in the underground parking lot of a mall in San Francisco. The face of the next victim is Sharla Donner, daughter of Georgia’s Senator Alexandra Donner.

The FBI assures Senator Donner that they will catch the Shock Arist before he can make her daughter into his next installation. Senator Donner nods and assure them that she will cooperate in any way she can. She doesn’t expect them to succeed. They’ve already failed sixteen times. Senator Donner serves on the House Intelligence Committee. She knows of a man who has been able to go where no one else thought possible to kill “impossible” targets, a highly paid international assassin code named Mr. White. Mr. White is credited with sixteen assassinations. Senator Donner reaches out and offers to pay his multimillion dollar fee if he will rescue her daughter and kill the Shock Artist.

She doesn’t expect a reply. If she does get a reply she doesn’t expect a yes. Mr. White is an assassin, not an extraction expert. She isn’t really sure that Mr. White exists. He might simply be a fiction, a myth among spies.

But reply he does. And agree he does. One boogeyman sets out to hunt another.

Recommendations

This week’s recommendation is Beau of the Fifth Column. Beau posts videos on an almost daily basis. He comments on current American political news. He’s well informed and articulate. And, since his videos are just him talking, I can put them on in the background while I draw. His Youtube channel is here.

Local News

I’m writing this on Monday afternoon. It’s the third day of a three day weekend. I’ve gotten art done. I’m working on the last two illustrations for the Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection. I continue to be tired, more mentally and emotionally than physically but physical tiredness follows the mental and emotional.

I’m not complaining. Just reporting. I never expect my feelings to be a permanent state.

Hopefully your week went well. Hopefully your coming week has bright spots planned. And if everything looks like a slog, you have my sympathy. There are better days coming.