Tag Archives: Midnight Echo

Skook WiP #62

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Greetings!

Today is not the Apocalypse. It might feel like it but it’s not. At least, it’s not the one pop culture keeps insisting that it is.

From Wikipedia:
Apocalypse has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation.[7] It has been defined by John J Collins as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, in that it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”[15] Collins later refined his definition by adding that apocalypse “is intended to interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of the supernatural world and of the future, and to influence both the understanding and the behaviour of the audience by means of divine authority.”[15]

The divine sends messages. Whether we get them depends on whether we’re tuned to listen.

These Days ...

Wake up around 3 am. Drink two cups of coffee while internet scrolling/uploading designs/completing designs in Photoshop/doing marketing stuff. Wake up the house. Make and eat breakfast. Get into the uniform. Drive to work. Sort mail. Deliver mail. Have lunch. Go back to delivering mail. Return to the station and sort the undeliverable mail. Shop on the way home. Have dinner while watching something entertaining. Work on art. Get ready for bed. Sleep.

Repeat.

There are variations each day. I work on different designs. We have different meals. On days off I cook or spend more time on art or we run errands together. There are doctor visits and trips to Costco and. lately, trips to sell books at Half Price Books.

The routine could be comforting. It could be boring. It’s both. Of course. Life is rarely just one thing or another.

I think about Apocalypses regularly because our culture seems to be obsessed with them. Mostly it seems to be obsessed with the end of the world version. Pop culture has been feeding us different varieties of doom for decades. At least one of our dominant religions thrives on reminding us that we are in the End Times. The pandemic continues. Russia invades Ukraine. The song says, “No one can convince me we aren’t gluttons for our doom”.

But …

People still have children. People still make plans. Start businesses. Go out in the sun. Fall in love. Engage in life as if life will go on. That’s one of the harder things for me pay attention to when I’m feeling/thinking like I’m stuck. Life is not black and white, either/or, good/bad. It’s a mix. It’s a continuum. Once upon a time, realizing this was an epiphany. Now it’s something of which I have to remind myself.

Stories of doom and hubris and failure and survival are valuable. They’re also easy. A story, we are told, requires conflict. It’s not a story unless someone is disagreeing with someone else. Nonsense. I do think we need more stories of cooperation and caring and carrying on. We model ourselves on what we can see. We follow the examples we are shown. Or we resist them. Or, most often, we do a little of both.

What am I talking about?

Mostly I’m reminding myself, again, that life is complicated. The thoughts that my brain feeds my consciousness are only as good as the inputs my brain is getting. If most of what l I’m seeing is tedious doom then most of my thoughts will circle around that doom. Different perspectives are needed. It might be time to see the world as a cat does. Or a bird. Or a tree. Or as another human does. Preferable a human who isn’t stuck in the same spiral I am.

The divine sends messages. “We are complicated. Our lessons are complicated. Be at peace with complication. Remember to dance.”

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features two things everyone loves – pirates and pandas. I’d like to think that I was the first person to think of combining these two flavors but, after I’d finished this design I took a look online and, wow, there are a lot of other versions of the idea. I do like my version the best.

This design is available on mugs in my Zazzle store and all sort of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Colors Out of Space

Below are the second and third illustrations I did as page fillers for Midnight Echo #6. The black and white version is what appeared in the magazine. The color version are new and can found on schtuff in my stores.

That’s it for this week.

May your apocalypse be epiphany.

May you find joy in complexity.

Remember to dance.

Skook WiP #61

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Greetings! Salutations! Hello!

Another Friday. Another collection of words and images delivered to your inbox. Or experienced at my regular website. Either way, thank you taking the time to read.

These Days

I had a lucky confluence of scheduling so I ended up with three days “off” in a row. Sundays are days off for regular carriers, Monday was a federal holiday, and Tuesday was my scheduled day off this week. I put off in quotation marks because it was a busy three days. We’re in the process of planning for retirement and preparing to move to a smaller apartment. I’m not elligible for retirement for a few years and we don’t intend to move this year but we’re getting ourselves as ready as we can for both. And both situations probably mean relocating. Seattle is an expensive city. We love our current apartment and we get along great with our landlord so I’m hoping we can manage to stay here until I do actually retire. A move, however, will come. When it does I want it to be simple. That means having a minimum of stuff to move.

Our stuff is mostly my stuff. Books. Magazines. Comics. Artwork. Right now we’re expecting the art to move with us. The books, magazines, and comics? Some of it will come. Most of it is being sorted for other destinations. I’m starting with the books because they’re already out on shelves and therefore easier to sort. The process of sorting the books involves a lot of detachment on my part. I love books. I’ve loved having a big library. I’ve also been expecting to need to rehome most of the library at some point. I’d rather do it myself than leave it for someone else.I took nine boxes to Half Price Books on Monday and another nine on Tuesday. Nine boxes is their limit for a drop in sale.

I’ve worked at both Half Price Books and Powells Books so I have low expectations about what I will be paid for the books. If I wanted to get the “full value” of a book I’d need to set up an ebay shop and sell it directly to a customer. That’s an investment of time that I’m not willing to put in. With the pandemic and booming online sales there’s a better chance that what I bring to HPB will find another home. When I worked at HPB back in the 20th Century they didn’t have a computerized inventory. The only way to know if a book was in the store was to look on the shelf. The only way to know if a book was in another HPB was call that store. Estimating what to pay for book was as much art as science.

Currently HPB has their entire inventory of all their books in all their stores online and searchable. I have friends who still work for the company so I know a bit about how they do things now. When one of their employees buys books their offer is generated by the computer based on inventory and previous sales. They still have to look up weird one off stuff but there’s a lot less art and guesstimating.

The closest HPB to our place is in Southcenter. When I was accepting the buy offer on Tuesday one of the employees asked if I had worked for the company. I admitted that I had – twenty years ago. He said that they still get mail with my name on. My legacy. Heh.

Besides planning for the future I’m still dealing with health issues. On Tuesday, I had an MRI done on my right knee. I’ve got an appointment this morning with my orthopedist to go over the results, talk about treatment and, hopefully, get paperwork sorted with Workman’s Comp.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is sort of fan art of the Yellow Submarine. The recent release fo the new Beatles documentary reminded me of how much I enjoyed their music in general and that movie in particular. At first I planned to draw a yellow submarine but I decided it would be more fun (and less likely to trigger copyright infringement takedown notices) to design a new suhmarine of a different color.

This design can be found on mugs in my Zazzle shop and all sorts of other schtuff in my Redbubble store.

The Color of Space

The illustration below was originally done for the sixth issue of Midnight Echo, an Australian horror fiction magazine. It was published in 2011. It was a science fiction special. David Conyers, the editor of that issue, had asked me to do three illustrations to be used as placeholders throughtout the magazine. None of the images were attached to any of the selected stories. They seem to have been used to in lieu of commissioning specific illustrations for individual stories.

In my quest to make all of my art available on schtuff I’m coloring all of the Midnight Echo illustration and putting the colorized versions in my shops.

I will post the before and after versions of the other two illustrations in the next couple of weeks.

May today be a good day for you. May the days following be even better.

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!