Tag Archives: Joshua Samuel Brown

Skook Words (and Pictures) #14

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Good morning!

I hope your week has gone well. You deserve a good week. Heck, you deserve a good and happy life. I hope you’ve been having that.

Boosting the Signal

Speaking of things we deserve –

Back in 2020 I did the cover illustration for Spinning Karma, humorous novel by Joshua Samuel Brown. It’s a funny, well written book. You don’t have to believe me, here’s a review.


Joshua is not only an amusing writer, he’s also a friend. I got an email from him yesterday with his publisher’s sales figures for the book in 2020. According to them, no copies had been sold, period, last year. I understand that sales of novels by anyone who isn’t a brand name are way down but, dang, that’s worse than I thought. The book deserves more attention than that!

So, here’s a link to purchase the book via its publisher and another to purchase it via Amazon. It’s a good way to spend a few hours.

While you’re at it –


How Not to Avoid Jet Lag is Joshua’s collection of mostly true short stories. Each story features an illustration by moi. It’s currently only available as an ebook through Amazon. I like physical books so I’m going to have to convince him to put out a print on demand version. But, until then, the ebook version is light and easily carried.

Joshua started his writing career doing travel books. These are worth checking out whether or not you plan to visit the destinations described.

These Days …

I’m back at work delivering mail. Not much changed on my route while I was gone. One customer put a fence around her house so I no longer can walk across her tiny front yard to get to the next delivery.

We continue to be short handed. Yesterday we “rolled” three routes – that is, we only delivered the parcels for those routes. The mail stayed at the station to be delivered today. Next week, when more carriers have vacations scheduled, we’re expecting things to be worse. Our lack of staff has had one possible benefit: upper management called off the route adjustments that were scheduled to begin at our station this month. Upper management didn’t actually give a reason for calling off the route adjustments but trying to get an accurate count of how long it takes to deliver a route is hard to achieve when so many routes are getting split up and delivered by different people every day.

If you know anyone who is physically fit and ready to work 14 hour days (time and a half after eight hours, double time after ten), send them our way!

War and Recovery

I failed to scan the small amount of sketching I managed to get done this week. In lieu of new art, here is a gallery of illustrations from one of the scenarios from an unlikely to ever to be published Call of Cthulhu manual set during World War One. This adventure was set at a hospital for the recovering wounded. The poor bastards have gotten the attentions of both Nodens and Nyarlathotep focused on them. Things won’t go well.

And that’s it for this week. Take care of yourself. Spend some time with friends. Pet a squirrel and chat with a raven.

See you in seven!

Tuesday Night Party Club #46

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Gallery – Strange Aeons

Ah, Strange Aeons 2. The project that launched my most read blog post. If I’d had had sense this either would have been my last project with Chaosium or I would have insisted on being paid upfront from then on. If I had had sense …

Chaosium’s assignments were always fun and they gave no significant editorial oversight so I accepted further commissions. And had to deal with further late payments. Silly me.

Strange Aeons 2 was a collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios by different authors set in different time periods in different parts of the world published in 2010. The variety made the project fun. My complaints only occurred after I’d done the work.

Story Seed #95
The Price of Redemption

How does a monster find redemption? I’m not referriing to nonhuman monsters – King Kong, dragons,giant ants, whathaveyou. Forces of nature don’t have sins that need absolving. They can smash a city in one story and save humanity from alien invasion in the next without causing a lot of cognitive dissonance in the audience. Human monsters, villains, shouldn’t get such an easy pass. For people, hurting others is a choice. Choices are conscious decisions.

Fiction, especially the adventure genre, is filled with villains. A good villain makes the story more interesting. With series (novels, comics, television, movies) the hero usually faces a different antagonist each episode with a few “archvillains” making repeat appearances. In horror fiction, the “villain” is often the most interesting part of th story. Whole movie series are built around the villain with the hero rotating out with each new installment. Villains become “anti-heroes”.

A bad guy who becomes popular often has their sharp edges shaved off. They get a tragic back story that explains why they’re driven to do bad things. We might learn that their victims were also bad people – perhaps worse than our popular bad guy. Our bad guy might start acting more decently. The really horrible things they did when they were first introduced aren’t mentioned. Those actions get forgotten. Our bad guy “reforms”.

Except that’s not really reforming. The popular bad guy gets a pass for his bad actions because now he has fans. They themselves don’t address their own past actions. They don’t come to terms with the damage they’ve caused. “I tortured and ate your family? Oops. I don’t do that now. I only kill evil people these days. Get over it.”

There are stories to be told of how a human monster comes to terms with their past and makes restitution to, if not their victims, then to greater society. Stories less about how they are forgiven than about how they become forgiveable.

Recommendation

Yes, I did the cover illustration for this book. Buy it for that reason if you like. I’m recommending the book because it’s well written and very funny. For more info and a chance to pre-order, click here.

Local News

The cold and the wet has returned to the Pacific Northwest. Our station manager managed to get our start time moved back to 7 am from the 7:30 we’d been stuck with for the past few months. Maybe I’m getting a cold. Maybe my body is just complaining.

When I started working at USPS I Ididn’t have time for much other than the job. I did very little art. I put a hold on commissions because I had no idea when I’d be able to finish them. I didn’t post here for a year. As I got used to the job I started working on black and white images to get used to drawing again. Quite a few of those featured the Mighty Nizz aka Little Red.

I’m currently adding color to those illustrations and adding them to my portfolio at Redbubble. They are a bit of an odd size. When I originally did them I was thinking about getting art done not where that art might end up.

This:

Becomes this:

This:

Becomes this:

I’ve got another half dozen in process. I will post them as I finish.

Thank you for dropping by. May you have good books to read, good food to eat and good friends to keep you company – even if you can’t see them in person. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #40

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Gallery – Illustrating Mr. Conyers

Adam Crossingham at Sixtystone Press got me started (and continues to have me) illustrating RPGs. I thank him for that. I’ve had a lot of fun.

David Conyers got me started working for Chaosium. In 2006 he contacted me asking if I’d be interested in doing the cover illustration for Secrets of Kenya, a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook that he had written. David and I had both work published in The Black Seal. I said yes. The resulting cover is still one of my favorite color CoC illustrations.

The following year Conyers asked me to do the cover illustration for his and John Sunseri‘s collection The Spiraling Worm. That was my second job for Chaosium and more work (some of it illustrating more of Mr. Conyers writings)  followed. I thank him for that.

The last job David sent my way, in 2011, was a series of spot illustrations for The Midnight Echo #6, an issue of the magazine of the Australasian Horror Writers Association. I don’t think I ever got a physical copy of the issue. I’d actually forgotten that I’d done the job. I have forgotten having done a lot of illustrations. I tend to focus on what I’m doing next far more than what I’ve already done. Fortunately I rarely delete emails. I found the Midnight Echo pieces while doing a search in my old correspondences.

David is still actively writing. Harrison Peel, his protagonist in The Spiraling Worm, has starred in a series of novels, facing down the horrors of the Mythos and remaining somewhat sane and mostly alive.

During my email archive search I found progress images for Secrets of Kenya that I had sent to David. Here’s a gif of the illustration from inks to final colors.

Story Seed #59
Message in a Bottle

A man is walking on the beach. He sees a sealed bottle being washed back and forth with the tide. He picks it up. There’s a rolled up paper inside. He opens the bottle and takes out the message.

It reads – Thank you for finding this message. Please return it to the bottle and throw the bottle back into the sea. Whatever you do, don’t turn around.

Recommendation

ReplyAll is a podcast kinda sorta about technology. It’s about that, told in interviews and stories and therefore, it’s about the stories of technology and the people who create it and use (and misuse) it. The first ‘cast I listened to was a history of the QAnon conspiracy, how it got started and who is probably continuing it. There are currently 168 episodes to help you lose a few hours.

Local News

Mail volumes may be down but parcel volumes are definitely up. Every morning a supervisor goes around the station and asks each carrrier to estimate when they will be getting back from delivery. There have been days when, based on the count of letters and flats (magazines, catalogs, large envelopes), I would guess I’d be able to deliver my route in undertime. And I’d be wrong. I would have multiple large parcels that, being too large to fit in my satchel, I would have to deliver individually. Or the number of small parcels would be high enough that scanning them during the delivery process would increase my overall delivery time.

We’ve also been short carriers on many days so the rest of us have been having to carry extra even if we’re not on the Overtime Desired List. I’ve been of the ODL for a year now and I’m still doing a lot of overtime. The larger paychecks are handy but I got off the ODL in order to do more art and have more time to hang out with my wife.

Sigh.

I’m currently working my way through a couple of projects. One is a series of character illustrations for a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook set during the 1700s. The other is a cover illustration for a novel by Joshua Samuel Brown. I have previously done a couple of spot illustrations for Formosa Moon, his travelogue/dialogue with Stephanie Huffman, and multiple illustrations for How Not to Avoid Jet Lag, his book of travel stories.

I’ve also been thinking ahead to how to best spend my art time in 2021. I’ve been kept busy the last couple of years doing commissions. That’s been fun. I love adding to new books to my biblography. I’ve started a shop at Zazzle and another one at Redbubble. I’ve had a few sales. The commissioned work pays once. I can include it in my portfolio but most of the pieces don’t have much use outside of the projects for which they were commissioned. The stores have a potential for multiple sales on multiple products. I haven’t had to look for the commissioned work. I have enough folks who like my stuff to keep my schedule full. The stores are going to require a lot of marketing before they start to generate enough income to compensate for the time I spend on them. So far very few people know they exist.

I currently have commissions to fill my time until mid November. Then the Christmas crush will hit at USPS and I won’t be expecting to be able to get much, if any, art done. And then?

Do I continue to accept new assignments? Do I focus on new designs and doing marketing for my stores? Do I continue to try to do both? Decisions, decisions.

I’m happy to hear your opinions.

Thank you for stopping by. Remember to vote. Hug folks if you can (and they like that sort of thing). Be kind to yourself and others. See you next week!