Tag Archives: Tuesday Night Party Club

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 #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 #20

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Gallery: Morgo the Mighty

Morgo the Mighty was a pulp serial by Sean O’Larkin. You can find my essay about the novel (and download it to read) at that link. The story is fun but not a classic. It reads like the author had read enough fantasy pulp adventures to know the formula but wasn’t in love with the genre enough to go crazy. I look at the story as a not bad first draft that needs a more imaginative rewrite. Doing that rewrite is one of my many “someday” projects.

In the meantime I’ve done a few illustrations inspired by the book. Most of these are visuals for The Surrilana Depths, my imagined  “second draft”. Someday. Someday.

Story Seed #43
The New Hollow Earth

Morgo the Mighty was set in a gigantic cave system under the Himalayas. It’s part of the Hollow Earth genre of pulp fantasy. The most famous examples are probably Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne and At the Earth’s Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Most examples of subterranean adventure stories follow closer to Verne’s example than Burroughs’ – they take place in caverns and tunnels. That makes sense. The earth is riddled with caverns and humans (and other critters) are good at making tunnels. Caverns and tunnels are more plausible than an actual Hollow Earth. Hell, even when Burroughs wrote At the Earth’s Core the idea of a vast, inhabitable inner Earth was considered a fantasy. That didn’t stop Burroughs from writing seven novels set in Pellucidar.

The idea of Hollow Earth filled with prehistoric survivors, lost civilizations and other weird menaces is free for anyone to use. The first two Pellucidar novels are in public domain so one could set a story there. So far as I know, existing Hollow Earth fiction and games set their stories no later than WW2. It’s easier to believe in an impossible place when the stories are period pieces. Technology was less advanced. The world seemed to have so much undiscovered space.

Imagine someone discovering the Hollow Earth in 2020. I’m less interested in how such a place could exist (Alternate dimensions? Atlantean construct? Elder Thing project? Extraterrestrial pocket universe? Intelligent dinosaur asteroid survival strategy?) than in how modern humanity would react to finding an entire world beneath their feet. Suddenly there’s a world of untapped resources available that doesn’t require space travel to reach.

Is the Hollow Earth inhabited by intelligent creatures? If not, we’re likely to have Surface nations competing for territory and resources. If there are intelligent but low tech Hollow societies they’re going to be faced with the same challenges that indigenous Surface people have dealt with for hundreds of years.

What if the Hollow Earth already has a materialist civilization using up its resources? In that case the Hollows might be looking at our surface world as a source of new materials. And workers. Slaves. Consumers.

Or perhaps the Hollows have figured out a workable civilization and contact with the Surfaces threatens to destabilize it. Or … what if discovering that our planet was inhabited by a workable, sustainable civilization caused us to (further) destabilize ours?

Does the Hollow Earth have dinosaurs? Has time stopped there? Has life followed a different evolutionary path? The Hollow Earth is empty. How would you fill it?

Recommendation

Field Notes is a newsletter by Christopher Brown. He writes about encounters with animals and nature in urban spaces. I’m fascinated by the way the rest of the inhabitants of the environment adapt to the sprawl of the human species. I consider human civilization as natural as termite mounds or ant colonies. Human civilization is toxic to much of the rest of environment because we’re better at creating it than we are at creating limitations for it. Brown describes his explorations and observations of the “wild” surviving in “civilization”.

Local News

I’ve been off work since Friday. I’m on one of my annual vacations. I’m primarily focusing on getting art done. I hadn’t made plans to travel anywhere so the shutdown hasn’t created any disappointment. I had thought about taking a road trip to see friends but I hadn’t done more than thought about it.

I had been enthusiastic about rearranging my studio so my wife could have a closer workspace but that was weeks ago. I managed some spring cleaning then, did some organizing and got rid of some things but the longer the shutdown lasts the less energy I’ve got for big changes. That feels weird because we’re less affected by the shutdown than most.

I enjoy my own company. The creative work I do is mostly a solo thing. I need a quiet space when I write. My artwork is all my own work, no inkers or colorists. But I learned a long time ago that I need to physically interact with people in order to maintain sanity and a good mood. I need to see friends. I need to be in the same physical space and to touch them. Handshakes. Hugs. High fives. Basic monkey interactions. Phone calls, emails and Facebook are, for me, just gap fillers between the real moments. The longer real moments stay unavailable the less I’m interested in phone calls, emails and Facebook, the more an isolation loop forms.

I understand part of why folks are protesting the shutdown. It’s not really haircuts or going to bars. It’s isolation. Being alone for too long can be terrifying. Have you listened to your thoughts. Culture has clogged your thinking with so much horrible crap. The best way to get it out is to interact with another person, in person. I’m lucky. I’m friends with the monsters in my head. I don’t think my thoughts are orders or that unmet desires are signs of personal failure. But, damn, I get sick of listening to my thoughts.

Hmmm. I hadn’t planned to sign off on a downer note. I do know that this is just how I’m feeling as I’m writing this. The only constant in the world is change. I’m likely to feel different in a couple of hours. So, however, you’re managing yourself in these times, I do wish you well. We live in interesting times. The best way to navigate them is by being interested and interesting.

Tuesday Night Party Club #19

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Gallery: The Unspeakable and the Inhuman

Above is my 2007 cover design/illustration for a give away CD of recordings of The Unspeakable and the Inhuman. Unspeakabe was a comedy horror podcast serial produced that year. The series was written by Derek Fetters and Sam Stewart. It’s an original, very funny take on the Cthulhu Mythos. Derek handed out the CDs to interested folks at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival that year. He and I attended the Festival a few times before life got in the way.

Derek and Sam put together nine episodes of Unspeakable before, yeah, life got in the way. Those episodes are currently being hosted at 19 Nocturne Boulevard, a site that presents original adaptations of horror stories. Download and listen!

In 2008 a friend of Derek’s designed a website for the show and asked if I could contribute some art. That website is gone but the illustrations are below.

Story Seed #42
1-800-MAKEDIE

Posted in a less prominent place on one of those community bulletin boards often found in grocery stores and coffee shops and bars, a small flyer reads:
1-800-MAKEDIE
Call anytime. Leave a name. No explanation needed.
We’ll handle the rest.

The protagonist calls the number. Perhaps as a joke. Perhaps out of morbid curiousity. Perhaps in a moment of late night drunken justification. Leaves the name of someone they hate on the recording.

Possibilities:

  1. The person named is found dead, horribly murdered. The protagonist waits in agony and guilt for the other shoe to drop. Time passes. The murder goes unsolved. The case is forgotten. The protagonist calls the number again.
  2. The person named is found dead, horribly murdered. The protagonist waits in agony and guilt for the other shoe to drop. Time passes. The murder goes unsolved. The case is forgotten. As time passes the protagonist breaks down morally and mentally.
  3. The person named is found dead, horribly murdered. The protagonist waits in disbelief and guilt for the other shoe to drop. Time passes. The murder goes unsolved. The case is forgotten. The protagonist becomes obsessed with finding out who was behind the number and who committed the crime.
  4. The person named is found dead, horribly murdered. The protagonist waits in trepidation for the other shoe to drop. Time passes. The murder goes unsolved. The case is forgotten. The protagonist has saved the flyer. When a friend laments about a horrible person in their life, the protagonist gives them the number.
  5. The person named is found dead, cause unknown. The protagonist waits in agony and guilt for the other shoe to drop. Time passes. The protagonist questions whether they were responsible for the death or if it was just a weird coincidence.
  6. The person named is found dead, horribly murdered. The police arrest the protagonist and charge them with the crime. The protagonist was at home, asleep, during the time of the murder but has no witnesses and all evidence points to their guilt.
  7. The person named comes after the protagonist with murderous intent. Their family has been kidnapped and the ransom is to kill the protagonist.
  8. ….?

Recommendation: Monster Brains

Monster Brains is a primarily visual blog from Aeron Alfrey. The blog is themed around fantasy illustration. Each post is spotlights a single subject. Sometimes it’s a run of covers from a specific publication. Sometimes it’s a collection of related images – VHS box art or book covers. Usually each post features the work of a different fantasy artist. Alfrey has been updating this blog for years so there are thousands and thousands of weird images to peruse. If you like what you see, add something to the tip jar.

Current Events 

I love how “unlimited data” becomes “we didn’t expect you to use this much data so we’re throttling your usage”. We get our cell phone service from Consumer Cellular. The Nephew spends most of his waking moments using his phone. On Friday I got a notice that we had reached the limit of our unlimited data plan. Kinda. Sorta. Consumer Cellular gives us 35G of shared data per month. “Unlimited”. Once we hit 35G we can use more data, they just throttle the speed that they provided that data. For an additional fee they will allow the data to be provided at high speed.

So Consumer Cellular has gone from being a company I’d recommend to being just another lying cell phone company. Their plans are still cheaper and easier to manage than the previous companies we’ve worked with. And if we didn’t have a Nephew our data usage would be much, much lower. I’m just not a fan of being lied to.

That I’m leading with complaints about our cell phone service tells you how exciting our life is right now.

Big Sister delivered another cooler full of wonderfulness – French Beef Burgundy Pie, Cuban Pork Ribs over Red Beans, and Thai Green Curry Chicken. We are lucky, luck people.

This week did demonstrate why I’m still more concerned about dog bites than about infectious diseases. One of my fellow carriers got her hand mauled by a dog. She’s the sixth carrier to get bitten in the last 12 months. I don’t know the exact circumstances of this bite. Like far too much news I heard about it via a post on Facebook. She included a photo of her bandaged hand. Dog bites happen more in sunny weather. Customers leave their dogs out in their yards or leave their front doors open to get some air in their house. They think that keeping their screen door closed with keep their dog in the house. And that works until the dog sees someone approaching that door.

I’ve had it happen a few times over the years. The dog leaps at the door (or window) and goes through the screen. Oftentimes the dog is surprised that the screen didn’t hold and pauses momentarily to process this new state of being. It had, after all, been throwing itself against the door (or window) on a regular basis and had never passed through it before. On a good day the dog’s owner will grab the mutt and pull it back it in. On a bad day someone gets bitten. On my route I’ve learned which houses are inadequately prepared for dog breakouts and I just don’t deliver on days when they’ve left door and windows open.

Things get trickier when delivering on other routes. You never know what ferocious beast might be lurking on the other side of a fence. Even the sweetest, friendliest dog has sharp teeth. A concientious carrier will include dog warnings for subs in their pulldowns but they can’t cover all the addresses all time. People dog sit. People have new dogs. People have dogs that the carriers don’t know about.

I end up appreciating the friendly, mellow dogs on my route even more. The ones that just look out the window at me and shrug. The ones who just don’t care. Those are my “good dogs”.

Hopefully your week has passed pleasantly. Hopefully your coming week has something worth looking forward to nestled amidst the chores and noise. Take care of yourself. Be good to your friends and family. Be kind to strangers. And if you have the opportunity to punch a Nazi be sure to wear gloves.

Tuesday Night Party Club #18

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Art Gallery: Thirty Years of the Heap

I’m a fan of swamp monsters. Over the years I’ve drawn a few versions of the first big name comic book swamp monster – The Heap. He’s a got a simple, interesting design and he’s in the public domain. It’s always more fun for me to draw my version of a public domain character than another version of some corporate possession. But, yes, one of those illustrations below does feature both Swamp Thing and Man-Thing. The final two images are swamp monster portraits I did for Jason Levine. The first is, again, yes, the Man-Thing, done in 2011. Both Jason and I love the Man-Thing’s design. The second is a pin-up I did of Jason’s character Mishmash and a random sewer monster back in 2006.

Story Seed

The Heap regains/retains Eric von Emmelman’s mind.

I have the three volume collection of the original Hillman Comics adventures of The Heap. The fact that the Heap was born from the body of Baron Eric von Emmelman, a WW1 fighter pilot, makes little difference in most of the stories. He could just as well have been born from the body of Vladmir the plumber or Olga the shopkeeper. The Heap doesn’t speak and so far as the reader knows, he doesn’r quite think. The Heap never really remembers who he was. In some stories he encounters former family members and helps them out but neither he nor they know why. In other stories he follows an American boy because the kid carries around a model biplane. Mostly he wanders the globe and acts as deux ex monstrum to take down evil doers and monsters.

Two possibilities:

  1. Stories set during WW2, the era when the original Hillman Comics were published. When the Heap rises out of that Polish swamp he awakes with the mind and memories of Eric von Emmelman. It’s 1942. How does a former German aristocrat react to the Nazis?
  2. Stories set in modern day. Perhaps the Heap regrows von Emmelman’s memories. Perhaps he is granted (or cursed with) those memories by an outside force. One hundred years have passed since his death. How does a man from 1918 deal with the world of 2020?

In both versions von Emmelman must interact with the world in the form of a huge swamp monster. Chances are he won’t be able to speak. There’s no guaranty that either version of the new Heap will be heroic. In life, von Emmelman doesn’t seem to have been a bad guy but the original comic stories are short and light on details about his character. Waking up as an inhuman pile of vegetation might have toxic effects on his attitude toward humanity.

Recommendations

Mythcreants is a website for creators of speculative fiction. It features a host of posts looking at SF cliches and tropes and suggesting ways to address or remove sid cliches and tropes. I’m a nerd. I both love SF and I love endlessly examining what makes (or doesn’t make) a good SF story so I’ve happily gotten lost for hours on this site.

Current Events

Let’s see –

My Big Sister dropped off another cooler full of amazing, ready-to-cook dinners. I think this is cooler #7. This week’s menu is:
Broccoli mushroom stir fry and shrimp/pork pot stickers with dipping sauces
Large cherry tomato, bacon, shallot, mushroom, garlic, pepper tart with fig tartlettes
Lamb tagine with couscous.
Avocado/bacon snack toast using Sea Wolf sourdough bread.

Of course she delivered the latest the day after I’d stocked up the fridge with supplies from Costco and Trader Joes and I’d baked two large lasagnas. No chance of starving this week.

I got my copy of An Inner Darkness from Golden Goblin Press. I’d backed the project on Kickstarter and then Oscar Rios commissioned me to color some of Reuben Dodd’s black and white illustrations. The work looked good on my computer screen and it looks good on the printed page. That’s not a given. Kudos to Mark Shireman for his excellent production work. I’ll be posting one or two these pieces in a future newsletter. The book is available for purchase here.

I got word from the 42 word anthology folks that my story had been accepted. I’ve no idea when that story will see print (or other form of publication). They’re still accepting new work. They also rejected my brother’s story. That says something about their taste. I don’t mean that as a dig. I think he’s a brilliant writer. Not everyone likes my stuff. Tastes vary. I just think, given their goal of 1764 stories and they are still looking for stories after almost two years, perhaps broader tastes are needed.

Work at USPS continues, same as ever. I wear a mask and gloves while sorting mail and packages in the station. I mostly don’t while I’m delivering since that part of the job is a solo affair. Mail volumes are still down. Parcel volumes are up.

I’m grateful that life is pretty much the same as last week and the week before. I’m lucky. For those of you whose lives are seriously impacted, you have my sympathy. If I can do anything to help out, please let me know.

 

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #17

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Artstuff: Scenes from Haunted Places

In 2018 I was commissioned to do a series of illustrations for the website of a horror comics writer. We’d discussed doing a dozen pieces and tossed back and forth more than a couple dozen image ideas. I finished four drawings before the writer decided to cancel the series. He liked the work but it wasn’t really related to the stories he was writing. With his permission I’m posting the work now.

Story Seed #41

Four story seeds. Pick any one of the four images above. Write a story.

Or pick them all and write a story that connects them.

Your version will be the true one. All your versions.

Send me the story. I’ll publish it in a future newsletter.

Recommended: Ink & Snow

Ink & Snow is the blog of Jamie Smith, an Alaskan cartoonist. Among other projects he does the strip Nuggets for the Fairbanks News-Miner. I was born in Alaska and lived there until I was five. I’ve still got family up there. While I prefer my current place of residence, I have a lot of affection for the state.

It’s said that if you have to explain a joke it ceases to be funny. Smith’s blog is him writing about his cartoons and showing off preliminary sketches. I enjoy seeing other artists’ processes so I appreciated the background material. And his cartoons are still funny.

Lifestuff

Sabe has been tolerating his electrolyte injections pretty well. He’s not fond of having a bigass needle jabbed in his neck skin but he hunkers down while the electrolytes go in. We’ve put the electrolyte bag in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes before we inject him and that seems to help. A nurse once told me that injections hurt less when the material being injected is at least room temperature. It’s not the needle that causes the pain so much as the cold material going into the body.

I’ve finished all the illustrations for The Mystery of April Snow, the add on scenario for The Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection. Work continues on the illustrations for the rest of the book.

And the mail continues to be delivered. Customers have been asking “How are you?” recently and are actually interested in the answer. It’s a little weird. I’d gotten used to “How are you?” being the equivalent of “Hi!”. Not a question, just a greeting made in passing. Lately though, folks are waiting for me to reply and asking questions. It’s nice.

I am, so far, healthy. By this time in the season I’ve usually caught my spring cold, mostly recovered and am suffering through the three weeks of coughing that follow the initial sickness. No spring cold so far. I wear a mask and gloves while sorting mail at the beginning of the day. From 9 am until I finish delivery I’m mostly by myself. When I do talk to customers we both keep our distance. Apparently precautions against C-19 work for other viruses and bacteria as well. Who knew?

I hope this finds you well, mentally and physically. If you haven’t been doing anything productive or useful – congratulations! Too much emphasis is put on us being good cogs. It’s okay to be a bad cog. There’s a machine that needs crashing and we can all play a part in bringing it down.

 

Tuesday Night Party Club #15

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Artstuff: Panel Jumper
Behold the Panel Jumpers – Cole Hornaday and Ben Laurance. They produce a series of videos and podcasts focusing on comics and comics history. Cole is generally the face in front of the camera and voice behind the microphone. Their videos are minimovies that both educate and entertain. Besides the youtube channel they also do a live show called, not surprisingly, Panel Jumper Live. For each of the PJLs they commission a local artist to do their portraits. I was honored to be asked to create their portraits for their upcoming June 22nd show.

Above is a scan of my original black and white drawing. Cole and Ben are both fans of the Mad Max series so I put them in post-apocalyptic gear. After the apocalypse the survivors with have fabulous outfits and fascinating hair styles. It’s true.

The image below is my first finished color portrait.

I did a second version after Cole asked me to make the Panel Jumper logo red. A perfectly reasonable request. That’s the color it normally is. I had gone with blue because I thought it worked better with the background.

With a red logo I adjusted some ot the other colors and the image below is the final result.
At this writing no one is sure if the scheduled PJL will happen. Plagues mess up all kinds of plans. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Story Seed #39: Alternate H & Ws

African American Holmes and Watson
Korean Holmes and Watson
Congolese Holmes and Watson
Cyberpunk Holmes and Watson
Wild West Holmes and Watson
Medieval China Holmes and Watson
1950s Noir Female Holmes and Watson
Anytime/Anywhere Holmes and Watson

Arthur Conan Doyle created a solid story formula in his Sherlock Holmes adventures. A genius detective and loyal friend solve mysterious crimes. The detective is kind of misanthropic and weird, the friend is more normal and relateable to the general reader. Add in the Baker Street Irregulars, Detective LeStrade, Mrs. Hudson the long suffering housekeeper, Mycroft the spymaster, the Woman and arch nemesis Professor Moriarty and you have a template for a series of mystery suspense stories.

The formula has been used many, many, many times by many, many authors over the years. Some folks have just changed a few details and given the characters new names. Others have gotten permission from the Doyle estate and written new adventures. Some versions have modernized the setting. Some have tweaked the characters ages or relationships. Generally the new versions don’t stray too far from the original. Sherlock Holmes stays male and stays British.

But the formula doesn’t require the genius detective and the loyal friend to be British or male or to take place in Victorian England. The brilliance and resiliance of the formula is that an author could pick any setting and with a few adjustments make the formula fit. It’s been done a few times. Watson & Holmes. Miss Sherlock. Baker Street. There’s room for a lot more takes.

Pick a setting. Start playing.

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Nothing Here is a newsletter spearheaded by author, Corey J. White. He has regular and guest contributors and a wide focus discussing and linking to various articles, podcasts, videos, newsletters and other interesting things. I like this newsletter for the variety and for originating out of Australia. I think better when I get perspectives from outside the US.

Lifestuff: Coronapocalypse Days

Unlike cinematic apocalypses, fashion during the Coronapocalypse is pretty staid. Mask and gloves on top of whatever you’d normally wear.

Functional. Hopefully.

I spent Sunday doing some spring cleaning and organizing. I’ve been letting things pile up for years. I can ignore stacks of books or art or paperwork for long periods of time. Last week I had taken time to clean off the top of one of our flat file cabinets. I’d expected that job to take longer than it did and was relieved at how quickly it had gone. I’d uncovered some art that I’d forgotten that I’d done. That’s always entertaining.

I’ve got plans for reorganizing our library/studio space but it’s a big job that will involve moving hefty pieces of furniture. I’m not ready for that yet. I tackled smaller jobs. Took out the recycling. Packed up the old Mac Mini. Set aside the two backup hard drives. Cleaned off the table that the Mac had been occupying. Covered the table again with art and art supplies that had been on the floor in the spare room. Recycled some process art – blueline and reference images. Stirred up a lot of dust.

Emptied the shelves in the pantry. Checked the “best by” dates on various cans and boxes. Looked online for evidence whether the food in some of those containers would still be edible. Kept the stuff that was only two years past the date. Five year and older got opened and dumped in compost. Returned to shelves the remaining items. Hey! I can walk around in the pantry now!

Monday, yesterday, Sabe went to the vet for blood tests. Hopefully we’ll get good news. He’s been suffering his own fashion crises lately. We got him a sweater because he’s lost weight and also taken to sleeping behind Sarah’s nephews gaming machine. Where it’s warm. He’s adapted to the new garment with grace. In the midst of the above (and other more mundane activity) I’ve continured to work on illustrations. I’ll post the commissioned work when appropriate and the practice work in between the archived stuff I’ve been finding.

I hope things are going well for all y’all out there. I make it through the hours by remembering that change is the constant of life. Sometimes I can direct the change. Sometimes I just need to ride things out. Feel free to write. I’ll do my best to answer. Take care!

Tuesday Night Party Club #11

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Artstuff

In the summer of 2010 I was contacted by Lee Williams and Norman Fenlason, inquiring if I’d be interested in providing illustrations for a new editon of the Dark Conspiracy RPG. Dark Conspiracy is set in a dystopian, near future America devastated by the “Greater Depression” and the appearance of a host of monsters. Of course I said yes.

Below is a gallery of the work I did for the main rulebook – a couple of banners (in right and left side page versions) to adorn pages that were mostly text, four interior illustrations and my cover illustration in both the original black and white and the final color version.

I also illustrated two scenarios for Dark Conspiracy – Detour and Acute Care. I’ll post those later. The scenarios got published first, as PDFs available through drivethruRPG.com. The rulebook was made available in 2012, also as a PDF. Unfortunately 3Hombres, Lee and Norm’s company, no longer exists so the PDFs are no longer available. There are used book stores but there’s no such thing as a used PDF shop.

Story Seed #35

A sequel need not be a rerun: Blade Runner

Blade Runner was released in 1982. It tells the story of Deckard’s last case. Deckard is a man who hunts Replicants i.e. a “Blade Runner”. Peplicants are artificial people, slaves with short life spans. They apparently rebel often enough that there’s a profession dedicated to “retiring”, killing, them.

Blade Runner was not a financial success on release but it built up enough of a following that a sequel, Blade Runner 2049, was finally released in 2017. It tells the story of K’s last case. K is a replicant employed as a Blade Runner – a slave who hunts and kills slaves. As part of the case K attempts to find Deckard, long missing since the events of Blade Runner.

Both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 are lovely films. They do what the best science fiction films do – they suggest larger worlds beyond what is presented in their stories. Both films focus on hunters of Replicants. Fine. But that means we’re asked to simpathize with the killers of slaves. Replicants are not robots. They are living biological creations with memories and a desire to stay alive.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Roy Batty, the lead Replicant, says this just after saving Deckard from a deadly fall, just before his life runs out. Batty proves better able to change than Deckard. Batty saves Deckard’s life. Deckard retires and runs away from his life as a licensed murderer. Screw Deckard. Screw the Blade Runners. Consider a sequel that focuses on the Replicants.

Replicant tells that story of another model of Roy Batty. Because of course there are other models of Batty. If artificial people can be made then multiple versions of the same model will be made. That’s efficient. That’s profitable. This Batty doesn’t know that he’s a Replicant. He’s a soldier out in space, fighting some corporate war. He’s pulled off the line by agents of the Tyrrell corporation. They’re “retiring” all the Batty models because if one can go rogue, all of them can. Batty escapes and sets out to find other versions of himself. If possible he hopes to expand his own lifespan.

If one Batty can learn compassion, can learn empathy, so can another. Replicant is the story of how Batty learns to be human in the face of human inhumanity. It would be an opportunity to show the world beyond LA, beyond the dying Earth. To see things we wouldn’t believe.

Other Newsletters

Municipal Archive is an irregular newsletter by Kio Stark. Each issue tells the story of an encounter – on the street, on a bus – exchanges between people in the midst of the busy-ness that we’ve taken to be normal life.

Lifestuff

A good friend celebrated her birthday last Friday. Her kids arranged a surprise party with a 60s theme. It’s always fun to see someone’s face when “Surprise!” is yelled. She had a blast. We had a blast. I couldn’t stay long because I had to work the next day.

And I’m still working. Most of my job is done solo. I spend a couple hours in the morning sorting mail and parcels at the station and then I’m on my own delivering. I have half a dozen customers who come out when they see me coming. Otherwise I only have direct contact with folks when I need them to sign for a parcel or a certified letter.

Last week we had enough sick calls that everyone was being required to work some overtime to cover all the routes. Will I be jinxing things if I say I hope things improve this week?

Yesterday was a long one but that’s not surprising. Mondays usually are. Mail and parcels get backed up over the weekend. I needed to start my day with a parcel run to deliver nine cases of toilet paper to a building maintenance company. The cases completely filled my truck. The company’s owner was concerned that the buildings she serviced would be closed and she wouldn’t have work. So that TP may just sit in storage.

The rest of the day was pretty basic. I only had my own route to manage. I didn’t have to carry part of any other route. We had enough CCAs and Overtime Listers to cover the empties. There was a census letter coverage in the mail that meant I delivered something to every address and there were a lot of large parcels that needed to wrangled up to porches. But it was sunny while still being cool enough that a workout was pleasant.

Today I’ll be delivering Red Plums. And whatever else gets tossed at my case and in my hamper. Work starts at 7 am. This newsletter posts at 6 pm. I expect I will get home before that but I probably won’t have the energy to do an update.

I hope y’all are well and healthy. Hopefully you’ve got plenty of books to read and friends to call when you need to chat. Stay safe! See you next week.

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