Tag Archives: #99Stories

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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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.

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.

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