Ow My Sanity

I Write on Sleeping Pills Sometimes

2012-01-26T21:43:00.000-08:00

I am on sleep aids. Sometimes I will take them while still doing some writing, then go to sleep when they kick in. Sometimes I just keep writing, then come back the next day, knowing full well what I thought I was writing.

I am usually wrong. Here is an example.

What I wrote:

“Your haven't scene this creed for my pokes, bow!” it spite, and look for the lair to try around the dray basic, snooping up morbid for the alligators. “I am your drought ton, again? You have cowed me, so do not complain about bringing your mighty fate!”

What I meant:

“You haven't seen the speed of my strikes, boy!” it spat, and took to the air to fly around the dry basin, scooping up mouthfuls of alligators. “I am your dragon, then! You have called me, so do not complain about what you think you might face!”

Sky People Like Fritos

2012-01-22T00:54:00.001-08:00

The race of Air who is said to have evolved solely from spirits, the Sky People resemble grayish white humanoid figures, having ankles but no feet, thick forearms with seemingly unfinished fingers, and a series of muscular folds for a neck. Their head is a round ball, dotted with symbols, with a single hole, inside which a blue light can be seen. They have a single eye, which is either human or reptilian; the muscular folds of their neck allow them to roll their head to angle the eye in any direction.

They have no mouth, and whisper through the blue light inside their hollow heads. They also feed through this "orifice," pressing food items into the light, where it's consumed as if by great heat. Much of the jewelry they wear appears to hang about them rather than on them. They are said to be Thunder's people, and live in his kingdom in the sky, which can be accessed through clouds; they can also pull metal from the clouds and shape it into tools and materials through processes that seem like human smelting.

Various ethnicities exist. They vary in height, weight, build, and over all color, from grey to white or soft blue. It's said that sky people can disguise themselves as human beings, and when they do, their voices buzz like speakers or bug lights. Three together can form a "foo fighter," a swiftly flying ball of light that allows them to quickly escape or travel from the ground to the sky.

Current Projects

2011-12-31T13:23:00.000-08:00

I got like five e-mails asking about what exactly it is I'm doing right now that's mentally hurtful. Here we go!

Folk Devil (Ten-Ghost part 2)
Lucy Alraune Greeble, Ten-Ghost Who Finished the Test Satisfactorily and Defies by Obeying has not only inherited a ridiculously long name, but also garnered a bit of a reputation for her ability to work quickly and cheaply. As a mandrake root taking on a mockery of human life, she can also survive situations that might kill real human beings. She wanders the roads, suffering the presence of her adopted son, until she gets a letter involving a contagion infecting the town of Hawiya. Upon arrival, she must pinpoint the source of the infection while dealing with three vicious cults that have sprung up: one worships a woman who claims to be able to heal with nothing but her touch, an impossibility, another group is devoted to a man who makes snake oil from tap water, and the children in town are wrapping themselves in cloaks and animal masks, painting their devotion to a mysterious woman in pink on the walls with the blood of those who stay out too late. Ten-Ghost herself is blamed for the inability of the established system to cure those who are infected, and if she remains in town to long, her own stolen life energy will cause more harm than good. She's on a time limit to find and remove the source of the illness.

This project is psychologically difficult, most notably because a vast majority of the Ten-Ghost books happen to be symbology for the psychological problems I face. Working on them is literally facing my own perceived inadequacies, fears, wants, and personal demons. This is what takes so long. Also it's why I expect them to never sell.

Sky Crossing (The Dreaming Land book 1)
Five teenagers are drawn from their normal lives on Earth to a place that seems at first an alien landscape, but familiarity creeps in to most bizarre places. Matt is left alone in the jungle where he must learn to work the world's magic just to survive both the predations of a trickster spirit and the tasks of an old storyteller who takes him on a journey across the countryside in a rusted-out shell of a car. Erika and Brad must learn to work together despite their differences in ideology, especially since Erika appears to have turned into some sort of ancestor spirit. Frank must come to terms with the fact that he now appears to be a local woman, and Hannah must learn that her place in the events that are about to unfold probably isn't the place she originally wanted. Through all this, the five must eventually face a black magician who wants to use their presence to destroy everything he feels is unfair with the world. Their journey will take the five of them across jungles, through post-apocalyptic googie wastelands, dinosaur-speckled fields, moderne subdivisions promising everything but delivering little, art deco cities swarming with airships, and perhaps even to Death's country itself.

I plan to do 3-5 of these. It's basically an American version of the old "kids go to and save a wacky fantasy world" tripe. And yes, I meant "tripe" not "trope." It's actually fun to write and I get to have atomic roboshaman3000 say cool things.

This Patchwork Everywhen
A collection of myths and short stories that I will probably never finish but am moving forward on, anyway.

Ow My Sanity
Doing layouts and the worst sketches in the world. Right now it is on low burner because I am trying to get the above projects done, since they are potentially paying. If someone like Toren Atkinson tells me to get off my ass about it, I'll drop one or more of the above projects and get back to serious on it work immediately.

Ow My Sanity Part the 2
The erstwhile narrator joins Delta Green and helps deal with (spoiler removed). Doing abstract scripts.

State of the Everything

2011-12-25T10:26:00.001-08:00

I have two novels in the works. One is psychologically harmful to work on, but will help me in the long run. It will never sell. The other is tripe, fun to work on, and not very good at all. I think it has a great opportunity to sell.

I am still doing plotting, scripting, and layouts for OMS. I just don't have the time to actually try to draw them, which I am shitty at, anyway.

I've gone back to therapy in order to work out the issues I'm having with life in general, and am on sleep aids now. A lot of this has to do with finally confronting a wide variety of problems I've had re growing up, going outside, and so on.

Sandwiches

2011-10-05T14:05:00.001-07:00

Perhaps no type of food is loved more than the sandwich. Often overshadowed by its siblings “soup” (its big brother) and “salad” (its little sister, and which is one of my more favorites dishes, but I won't get into that here, but it goes to show you how much personal taste goes into something like this) the sandwich was still one of the favorites of many people, most of whom nervously agreed that it was an excellent all-around kind of food. Sandwiches, as you most likely know, are made from pressing foodstuffs between two pieces of “bread,” which is counter-intuitive to the way most non-sandwich food items are created (such as just throwing everything into a bowl without regard for its nutritional value or taste). However, I will endeavor to review the aspects of the sandwich as best as possible.

The sandwich as a food item appears to be much cleaner than most other varieties thereof on this Earth. I believe this is because it is counter-intuitive in its nature. The “bread” shell, which can be made of flat pieces of bread, flimsy pieces of bread curled up, or long pieces of bread with a hole cut down the middle, soaks up a majority of the more liquid bits of internal consistency common to the sandwich. It is my belief that primitive humans on this Earth, bereft of food which came to them and squealed happily as it was being devoured, or of fruit trees that literally threw their edibility at them, required a method to construct a food item that contained all their daily nutritional values in one place. I can't vouch for the reasoning behind setting meat on fire and calling that “food,” but I've been told since that meat is not necessary for a good sandwich (I beg to differ, but I also don't believe it should be set on fire to have a place in our food).

Sushi, our friend from the Orient, is practically a sandwich in its own right; wrapped in nori, a friendly and well-mannered algae common in the Pacific Ocean, rather than bread, it might be scarcely possible to call it a sandwich, but it is as clean and contains as much nutritional power as any sandwich, and is an excellent example of why burning meat to simply add it to a sandwich is not necessary.

Returning to the cleanliness issue, sandwiches are also handy when you don't wish to be forced to use both hands to eat. One can, for example, write an article though hunt-and-pecking while greedily stuffing your face with the latest creation of Jim at the City of Gyros without getting liquid on your keyboard (which I'm told is bad). They also appear to be designed with some nod towards flavor and succulence, with a high degree of texture and taste mixtures that work well together. Even so, not all components prefer to remain trapped. The bread, for example, separates easily into smaller, more difficult to handle granules that only tease at their flavor, and not all liquid or semi-liquid components are content to rest within the cage they have been given, and have a tendency to be unkind to one's clothing. All in all, while there are still some obvious bugs to work out with the sandwich, I prefer it to most varieties of other foods, and eagerly await sandwich 2.0! Get to work, engineers!

Cleanliness: 43/50
Breadiness: 50/50
Setting Meat on Fire: -10/50
Tastiness: Varies
Note: Makes your throat dry if you don't have water nearby.

The Bugs - I'm Not Dead

2011-08-21T11:54:00.001-07:00

There used to be a man who could fly up at the abbey. That was Wilkins Abbey, an old church built back in the 19th century or something that sat up on the river like an obsidian edifice through which the light shone, the hill taking on the gape and shoulders of a grinning giant whenever the sun would set behind it. We'd always look up at it and watch him come and go, his big wings unfolding like a forgotten statue, and he'd take to the air.

He always seemed so happy, even though he was crying when he would fly by all of us, he would always wave and laugh. Sometimes he would ask if we wanted to join him in the air, but we always said that no, we couldn't fly because we didn't have wings. He would tell us that having wings is great, and we should try it sometime, even though it would make him sad to realize we didn't have them.

Sometimes we would see lights coming from inside, and the flying man would tell us that they were people made of blue light or fog or something, that there were men and women who would come and give him food or change the channels on his television or leave plates of sandwiches out where he could get them. They would leave toys or books for him every once in a while, and he would come give them to us because a flying man has no use for peripheral things, he said.

We saw a blue woman at the market one day, and she was like he said, made of blue light or hard fog and only her robe was real. Her eyes were just limpid pools made of shining crystal that slowly rotated underneath her eyelids, and to leave she just faded away before her robe caught on the wind. She looked at us sternly when she saw us using the toys the flying man had given us.

The flying man had to go through the sewers to get home, though. There were bugs in the sewers, and he would give them his tears and let them run all over him and he sang openly to them. We would hear piping and deep thrumming coming from beneath the town at night when we were trying to sleep and we knew he was singing to the cockroaches and the worms.

There's charcoal people in town. They'd fight us over the books and toys and their fingers were always scratchy and rough. They have red pupils and their whites are cracked and easy to see in dim evenings. Thick coats and hats made of the same dust drape over them, and at night they used to look at the abbey and hold their hats in their hands in awe. They asked us if we wanted wings, too, and when we told them that the man who had them kept telling us to grow some of our own, the charcoal men would shake their heads and cluck and tell us that people couldn't do that by themselves.

They kept trying to get into the abbey, but they couldn't get near the blue people, who would come and go randomly, but always seemed to know when a charcoal man was coming. You had to be able to fly to get to the parts of the abbey the winged man lived in, but the charcoal men could break apart into dust and just blow there if they had to. They kept coming and going at his house, leaving behind their smears and trying to talk to the flying man outside of the abbey, but he wouldn't talk to them for very long. They kept telling him he was selfish for not giving his wings to anyone else, and he'd tell them he was just waiting for other people to grow their own, thinking that if enough people watched him fly, they would want to fly, too.

But really only it was the bugs who cared about him; the blue people, he said, only kept the charcoal men away. The things they left were incidental, or something like that. One day, though, we found the winged man not flying, but standing in the woods next to the culvert where he could get into the rivers under the hill that he could follow into the abbey holding a steel mask surrounded by triangles like a sun mask or something.

He said the bugs had found it, and they gave it to him. After that, he'd carried it everywhere, strapped to his back between his wings. Our storyteller said that there used to be a metal man with roots like muscles under the metal in his body who lived up at the abbey before the man with wings, and the blue people would come and give him things. He would keep his toys and give the food to the villagers, and the charcoal men came after him, too. She said that he was also tired and lonely, but kept telling everyone about how wonderful trees were, and they should grow some around here.

There's a forest west of town, covered in bugs and creeper vines. We went out there with the flying man and found pieces of metal all over the place and put together an armor-man from them and the steel mask over the course of several weeks. The man with wings spent days and days sitting on a log looking at it and frowning.

We saw him at the bar the next day, he was reading a storybook from the library about how the man made of metal had seeds inside his body, and told the bugs to take them all and run out into the empty field and grow a forest for everyone. He was crying that day, but he wasn't happy like he used to be. He left to go into the sewers that night and we never saw him again. The charcoal men came down the next morning and said the abbey was empty now.

Everyone's back hurt a lot, and the charcoal men came and took down the library to make mining tools to carve up the inside of the mountain. They said they were going to fix the abbey so the blue people never come back and no other strange men, like men whose heads are made of light or men who have stars in their hair, ever come by the abbey again to show off how much more amazing they are than anyone else.

They came instead and brought people to pretend to be men and women with stars in their hair and have coats made of the winter because that was better for all of us. They said they didn't know what happened to the man with wings, but they were glad he was gone, because he was making everyone want things that they couldn't have on their own.

We knew what happened, though. We heard it in the sewers. He went down and sang to the bugs, to the cockroach kings and the lady worms. He told them that because they were the only ones who cared, they could all have a little piece of him, like the metal man ho made the promise to throw his seeds to the west of town to grow a forest, to give everyone in town a feather. He let them flow into him, to hide inside him, he let their caring joy and love consume him, and the next morning everyone woke up with a feather on their backs.

Now everyone in town has little wings, about as long as our arms, and the charcoal men live in the abbey. We haven't seen a blue person in years. None of us can fly though, but we all try. We all come outside and look at the abbey and flap our little wings and sing, we smell the sweet summer air, and nothing happens, then we all go back inside and talk like we really did go flying.

More Drafts! Chapter 4.

2011-07-23T11:55:00.001-07:00

“Oh, you'll like this,” Loses said, dragging in a box with the Office of Disease Management symbol on it, a coiling snake with feathery wings and broad antlers. “You remember the stuff that came out two years ago, the mana ping gizmo that they were using to track people trapped in earthquakes and damaged buildings, right?”

She nodded. He flipped the switches on the box, unlocking it and revealing foam padding holding a set of dark green goggles. There were lenses folder over each other, and her first instinct was to think the device was set up to attach to a helmet. Someone had added a strap to the back.

“They fixed that technology,” he said. “Someone thought to put a string on it and combine it with the features of the Wilson tent. It's got to seal over your eyes, and you shouldn't wear it more than a few hours at most. But it's long enough for surgery, a short operation, or what you need to do. Say hello. Range is terrible. ”

He handed them over; they must have weighed three pounds.

“Hello,” she said, and they warmed in her hands.

She put them to her eyes and pulled the strap over her ears. Feeling Loses tighten it and then flick the switch, she hissed when her eyes screamed in hot pain from the spray of incense.

“It uses these cartridges,” he said, even as the world gone black erupted into a cacophony of hues. She could see him, a swirl of mana in him and his clothes, strong in his fingers where he performed his work, the press of his feet on the floor, and a small battery-shaped cylinder in his fingers that hummed the deep violet color of algonkin incense. The room was a faded grainy circle; her vision felt restricted. She looked at her hands, seeing the dark veins of stolen mana nestled in the earth that made up her fingers and palms, the tiny bits she siphoned off people nearby, and the stains of darkness, like spatters of blood, where she had walked into the room.

“You're seeing the world like an elemental magus. There's even articles in Science and Physics Monthly about the company plans for adding reactive crystal to earmuffs so you can hear like a magus, too.”

She swiveled her head around.

“It seems restricted. I've got no peripheral vision, and I can't see more than maybe twenty feet down the hall. It all turns black,” she said. “Even so. I like it.”

Aesca, Mana, and Self-Mutilation

2011-04-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

I had someone ask me a question in regards to self-mutilation as it pertains to shamanic practices in Aesca, at least in regards to Ten-Ghost. The question was, if I recall it correctly, “How come Ten-Ghost can sew a finger back on, but my character can't make a prosthetic eye for a shaman I know?” The first part of the answer could be summed up as “Your character isn't one of kudjoojoo bird's children,” but there's more to it than that.

Mana is inherent spiritual potential, something like a cross between potential energy, devotion, and honor, memetically speaking. Mana is generated in several ways. One such method is the natural way that it flows from mana realms into three-dimensional space, where it is translated into actions, energy, and objects. Deliberate manipulation of those actions can cause changes in the amount of mana and manifestation of it in the world. One of the ways to dramatically increase one's own mana and the power inherent in it is through acknowledgment of your own suffering by spirits (there are other ways, but most of these are highly ritualized). There are several ways to do this, and one of the fastest and easiest is chopping off parts of yourself or cutting yourself; the more it hurts, the more mana is behind your action or favor (there are even drugs to help enhance the pain and practiced torturers that spellcasters can hire, if they so choose). Normally, when someone cuts off parts of themselves, these things don't grow back, and prosthetic technology is hard to come by (though it is possible). Even so, cutting off a part and replacing it is only liable to get you the mana from just cutting it off, which is less than cutting it off and leaving it that way, causing some spirits to retroactively remove mana, getting you sick, undoing what you had done, or causing some other curse or terrible misfortune to befall the practitioner.

In the case of Ten-Ghost, she doesn't even feel pain the same way as a human does, instead feeling it as a cold pinch. It's mental suffering, in a way, and she performs rather dramatic acts to a human (chopping off a finger for a human would help pour mana into an object or item, or even start a rainstorm or cause a small earthquake, but for Lucy, all it does, with ritual songs and bribes to back it up, is help one person pass on peacefully). The mana she creates in this case isn't a lot from the pain it causes, but a good chunk from the suffering she goes through in putting up a front of socially acceptable action and behavior.

I think that covers the answer.

Thickets!

2011-03-21T23:06:00.000-07:00

The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets have a new video for their song Twenty Minutes of Oxygen. It's great that the budget to do these sorts of things exists now.

Love the frog stamps on the astronaut's shoulder.

Folk Devil Prologue Draft

2011-03-11T09:53:00.000-08:00

He was digging where he buried the body.

He'd been at the thick, black mud for maybe four hours now, switching from shovel to trowel, chopping away an odd root or two with his axe. He'd wondered for awhile if there had been enough time for roots to grow over it, but he wasn't sure, now. He wasn't sure of much of anything, his eyes clouded as they were by tears and rain. Every hole he dug, every time he got six feet down, every time it wasn't there, he'd panic, the trowel would go into the four inches of water and mud at the bottom, and he'd frantically push around his hands in the soil, finding nothing.

That wasn't to say he hadn't found anything at all. An old necklace, a lost ring, coins, even a maize-cutter's mouth knife. That one had worried him; he hoped that they hadn't come and found the body. He heard they eat corpses, but he'd also heard they could walk through walls and smell hatred. Even so, he'd been on the lookout for them, watching for those distinctive two and a half toed footprints or the cut marks on the trees where they'd been climbing or leaving messages to each other.

Of course, the rain had to kick up then, coming down in horrible, blinding, sideways sheets, kicking off the rainy season. That was a good thing; it meant any investigations in town would be slow, or at least they wouldn't send any teams from the government. There wouldn't be any roads for some time, and they wouldn't risk sending an airship through those winds and these kinds of storms. Even so, he cursed his current near-blindness.

His hands struck something, and he jumped, fishing through the water only to find a curved bit of stone and not the pelvis he thought he'd run across. He took in a sharp breath between his teeth, then spat as bitter water cleared its way across his tongue. Collapsing against the wall, he fished around in the mud again for his trowel and shovel, and threw them over the edge of the pit, using roots and slick handholds to pull himself back out.

He fell into leaves and sticks covered in dirt, and started to crawl halfway again, and a hand gripped his wrist, tightly enough he almost felt bruised, and pulled. Suddenly afraid, but not wanting to draw suspicion, though a man digging what looked like a grave out in the jungle certainly was, he allowed himself to be helped partially up, and he rolled to a position on all fours before looking.

She was crouched like a vulture, smiling gently like a jungle hunter, waiting like cattle on the chopping block, her face wet in the rain, and she had her hair all up in an old chongo hairstyle, with thick feathers now soggy folded down over her forehead, wide rings and necklaces of white bone and gold teeth hanging from her neck and shoulders, and a heavy corn silk cloak over her body, with a white raven sitting on her shoulder, its head and beak pressed up against her ear. He thought for a moment he could hear it yammering on, but in the rain, he couldn't tell much. Her hands couldn't be seen, and for the most part, she was just a cloak in yellow with black diamond sewed into it with a face. She looked left at his pile of findings and the three or four other holes he'd dug, and right at the six over there, and back at him, all very slowly, and the sounds of the rain and even the flashing lightning stopped entirely, as if to allow her to speak clearly.

“Find anything interesting?” she asked.

Bracing for It

2011-03-03T20:59:00.000-08:00

I've had a pretty good week, despite the fact that I've had barely any time to do anything, or any time for myself. On the plus side, I have a name for the Ten-Ghost sequel. It's Folk Devil, and I think the name sums up the content quite nicely, or at least, the self-perceived content. I've dug out my draft papers and gone over them with Opabinia, who likes it very much. I also got to meet with the cover artist today, who is agush with how awesome his work looks in print.

Anyway, this decision. It was a painful one to make, and it still is. Continuing, however, was a lot more painful. I reach a point in almost anything I write where I spend months on end antagonizing over every detail to the point where I find myself sobbing in a corner holding shredded pieces of paper. After trying several times to start this next chapter and suffering a complete mental breakdown each time, I'm taking a break. I will be back, probably after the summer, depending on how far I get with the next novel (and whether or not I actually take some art classes in the meantime), and I will still be updating this space with my mental and physical progress.

The Steak Restaurant at the End of Florida

2011-02-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who stops by on the weekends to hang out with myself and my roommate (also we drive across town and ~~pretend to~~ hate on elves or else run away from cyclopean monstrosities). He's a laser technician, which fits right in with our fantasy writer and helicopter pilot/five star chef/martial artist/son of a Hawaiian stripper ninja princess (I'm not freaking kidding; my roommate is nuts). Anyway, it so happens that said friend sometimes gets a horrible hankering for steak. I am not a steak fan. In fact, I am not a beef fan, but hey, some people like that sort of thing and more power to them. I prefer to keep my Thaxtonian colon as intact as I can in preparation for its eventual attempts to strangulate me with misshapen clumps of cancerous cells.

This particular evening, he wants steak. Not having any, we proceed to hit every steak restaurant in town. We traveled to about four, all of whom were out of steak, before I started to have a panic attack. They're also all full up on a forty minute wait at most, and I can't wait in a restaurant. I've got horrible autism issues in regards to that sort of thing (you should see what happens when I have to go to a gas station I've never been to before). He motions with his hand and says it's find, we'll go out tomorrow, but no. In my autistic brain, I promised steak, and that means a fucking steak place. I run through the roster and suddenly remember one (Do not be fooled by the photography).

I head down towards the 417 and past the junk dealer, beyond the warehouse church, and instead of diving towards Oviedo, I veer off the road to a place where street lights do not shine. In the deep shadows I cruise, my car clattering with the sound of insects off the windshield and the roar of loose dirt beneath it. Both of my passengers begin to get worried. It's been ten years, but I still remember the way. We pass by trailers and decaying orange groves, flashing through a tunnel of swirling Spanish moss so thick it resembles bleak polyps in the depths of some ancient terror's digestive tract.

I turn at the airboat ride sign and plunge into a parking lot half buried in swamp. The dim light of the restaurant cuts through the night. We get out, and there is a lake off to the side, and what surrounds us is the very depth of Florida. He's got to get out carefully, but gets pushed out by my roommate. He staggers around for a moment, almost in awe and rage.

“This is it!” he shouts, waving his arms, “This is the end!”

“The end of what?” my roommate asks.

“The end of Florida! You've taken me to the Steak Restaurant at the End of Florida,” he screams again, and motions to the lake, “that is the edge of reality, the end of civilization. Over that way, right there, on the map, they'll have written 'Here Be Dragons!'”

I turn my head around. He's pointing at the gator pen, which he can't see from where he's at.

“You're gesturing at the gator pen, you know,” I respond.

“And that's my point!” he shouts again.

I want to tell him that this isn't the Steak Restaurant at the End of Florida, since that honor belongs to the Miccosukee restaurant, but we approach the entrance anyway. There's a brief moment of fear, since the glass windows are covered in so many midges it looks like gray carpet curtains from a distance, and the porch functions like an airlock to keep them out. We get inside, sit down, and wait for twenty minutes for the server. They have no steak, either. They ran out five minutes ago, in fact.

He screams. I bought a grill on Sunday.

Book Status

2011-02-21T16:15:00.001-08:00

I have gotten my hands on the final copy of Ten-Ghost. It looks good, I approve, and am going to be getting thirty more copies of my own. This means that in about six weeks, it'll show up on Amazon as available. Everything is awesome, though I've been told my name is suited more for hard SF than fantasy.

I do have a few places I'm going to be sending one of the thirty copies I'm getting; otherwise, I'm not sure what to do with the rest.

Any ideas?

2011-02-21T00:02:00.001-08:00

Sorry, some comics got transposed. Seems like what was supposed to be a few days from now just popped up a few days ago. Of course, the obtuse behavior of comicgenesis won't let me fix it.

Sorry about that.

I Get Fanart

2011-02-16T12:34:00.000-08:00

So, this fella on DevArt sent me some fanarts. It's a pretty awesome shoggoth kid.

He's got some cool nature photos up there, too, and some drawings of a really neat ooze headed character.

This current chapter's been a fight. A lot of things happened in rapid sequence that prevented me from doing full work on it, and so I'm only just wrapping up the art for it now. There's only a couple weeks of comics left before I absolutely have to work every day. Which is a shame, but I'm doing about two a day right now in the hopes that I can build it back up.

A Final Cover is Fine, Too

2011-02-02T19:32:00.001-08:00

So yeah. I squealed. With happiness.

So awesome.

A Book Cover is Fine

2011-01-25T15:48:00.001-08:00

So, I got a look at how the cover for Ten-Ghost is looking, and it's looking like awesome.

The point was to look like a period book as far as design scheme goes; I'm told it's also going to be aged in appearance before the final product gets done. The spine has the Opabinia logo at the top and that double bar pattern runs down the center, with a larger Opabinia on the back. It looks like something you'd see in a used bookstore in the bargain box, which, again, was the point of the thing.

As far as the content, I'm very happy with the way things turned out, except for one detail, which I fixed on the manuscript today. Otherwise, the whole thing is good to go, and I've been told that as soon as the whole cover with copy is turned in, it's going straight to print. There will be two more books after that; the second has a full outline and three chapters already, and the third has a vague outline.

...that means the sequel should be out sometime next decade.

Weakness is Strength, Strength is Weakness

2011-01-24T15:49:00.000-08:00

All too often I'll be researching or reading at leisure an article on how a mythos race thinks or a description of how its brain works, and the writer is intending for it to be creepy, mysterious, alien, and scary. Of course, it pretty much always is, usually pleasingly so, but will often come with a flaw in how the alien brain processes something we, as humans, would see as simple. We'll take Mi-go for example. The lore is that they think like computers; no human can beat a Mi-go for information processing or for task focus (or teamwork, considering how they break down tasks into constituent parts and assign them out). Once a Mi-go is set on a course of action, it's impossible to stop it or even comprehend the amount of concentration it's capable of dredging up. Humans don't do this, and realize the implications of new information rapidly (this is part of the reason humans go insane when exposed to mythos materials; they understand the true depths of it, and what reality they thought they knew is shattered before them). Imagine them as workers at a factory assembly line in which each worker assembles part of a widget; once they're locked on to the task, they don't ever look up, they don't stop, they don't question what they're doing and why. They just keep going. Until the conveyor belt stops. One Mi-go directing the task

However, this also means they can't make illogical leaps and have trouble thinking in abstract and metaphor, like a computer or an incredibly autistic kid. That is, they can't understand the implications of information or technology, and even go so far as to have assigned castes to break down specific aspects of something like this; Mi-go can't be generalists, for example. To a human, this is childish. And comedy gold. Here's a species that can't play tetris when first exposed to it and can be kept rapt by a “how to keep an idiot busy” keychain. If a Mi-go goes insane, it's probably killed or has its parts distributed among other Mi-go, just like how when you break a computer, you either change out parts entirely or get a new computer (or has a part replaced, which is more likely, given their predilection for body modification). Of course, writers and the lore started to immediately back away from this, handing out new powers, new abilities, just so that when they're caught in a situation that, by all rights, should make them break down just like a human would (even if it's a situation a human might find beneath his or her notice), they ignore it, too.

These weaknesses are terrifying in and of themselves; with the way that Mi-go brains work, it's unlikely that they will never figure out the way we tick, and indeed, will continue to specialize and focus and break down the tasks of vivisecting and analyzing humans, never becoming bored or frustrated or tired. They'll never learn to decide that doing so is useless. They'll just keep studying. Hitting walls they're unable to bypass, unable to even determine what the results of their tests mean, they won't become angry or jaded or upset at it, since they won't even be able to recognize they're not seeing the results. Forever. They might even one day forget why they're doing it, after becoming experts at the task. They will ruin your life, drive you mad, and eventually vivisect you, all for a purpose they've become so specialized at doing that it's lost all meaning.

Lovecraft even made his own creations victims of the cruelties of the world; the Elder Things in At the Mountains of Madness were even said to have gone insane and were undone when they sought out what they thought was refuge and found only death. That humanity would eventually understand and perhaps stand with or above these creatures was one of the great fears of these stories, summed up in the oft-repeated quote of the safety of a new dark age. That a human being can and should be able to puzzle out how an alien mind thinks and empathize with it, especially if that thing can't empathize back, should be the most terrifying thing of all.

That Sound You Are Hearing

2011-01-13T21:44:00.000-08:00

...is David's Cthulhu Mythos score going up and his max sanity going down. It's like playing limbo with your brain!

Metazoa

2010-12-24T02:05:00.000-08:00

First, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and all that stuff.

Alright, this is sort of old news, but there's some fanart for OMS that can be found here and here. Does it count if Breland is a friend of mine and awesome, or that MihoshiK is some kind of badass for commissioning a piece from jaggyd? I totally like to think it does.

Picked up Monster Hunter 3 the other day, but I haven't had a chance to play it much yet, though what I did play through was pretty neat; I'm still too busy working with New Vegas and being distracted by City of Heroes. I'm also trying to use the time that everyone's on break and there's a lull in tabletop gaming as folks go see their families to get caught up with my buffer. I've been doing two pages a day for this last week. While I haven't gotten back to the buffer I used to have, I'm at least into February with the pages.

I've been reading over Fantasy Craft lately, and it looks like a lot of fun. I was thinking about seeing if I can't take the setting of Ten-Ghost, wind the clock back a couple hundred years, and bang and smash the rules into working and running some local folks through an advencha! or two. I'm totally going to write up a Path of Ether and also use family names and guardian spirits as alignments.

In other news, I've since moved to using three-dimensional models to represent time and plot threads in OMS, since I couldn't make one on paper without it looking like a total mess. Also, after a discussion about gravity, photons, neutrinos (and the dark matter properties thereof), the dual aperture experiment, and quantum cascade lasers, I realize that if the Higgs Boson exists, I owe somebody five bucks. Take that as you will.

Finding Things on the Internets

2010-12-16T11:37:00.000-08:00

A time ago (I don't exactly remember how long ago; years, at least four years), I had created a supernatural critter to fill a gap in a World of Darkness game I was running, more specifically to create a single villain with which to plague and creep out my players. I threw what little material I'd crapped out over the course of the weekend up on a geocities site and thought nothing of it (and when geocities faded away, I let it, too, fade away).

I discovered some time later through my deviantart account that at least some people had heard of or read it. This came as a surprise to me, since I had hoped, when I got some time, to tighten it up, discard the elements I didn't like, and get to work on it again, but time got in the way, and more fruitful projects kept lining up (and I don't run or play WoD anymore due to the ridiculous prep time horror games normally require).

Then, this afternoon, a friend sent me a message that he found a forum thread on tvtropes about it, and even a tropes page. Strangely enough, the OP even mentions the presence of paedomorphosis being odd or out there, which I agree with, and was even going to remove at one point, but left it in because I'm eminently lazy. Actually, I agree with nearly all the complaints, interestingly enough, and totally endorse the public gutting of the material.

This on the heels of an e-mail about a review of OMS that's appeared in the Innsmouth Free Press, which you can find here. I haven't read it yet, I'm scared to, but I like to pretend it's probably totally awesome, and I'll read it at some point when I've got myself all mentally prepared for it.

In other news, I've got the ISBN, front matter, and a pdf of the interior contents of Ten-Ghost, and it's all looking excellent. There's maybe a sentence or two I'd like to change, but it's a bit late now, and they're no big deal, really.

Happy Fun Think Time Go

2010-12-15T22:45:00.001-08:00

It's not that the Mythos is so often "dumbed down" to be made fun of should be worrisome. It's that the very idea that our modern society can make fun of the idea of an uncaring, nihilistic universe and doesn't have to dumb any part of it down that should be worrisome.

It means we're closer in mindset to the horrible things that lurk in the Mythos than we realize.

Think about this: what do you do as part of your daily life that would be considered impossible, madness-inducing, or cult behavior to someone from the 20s, who'd never heard of a supersonic jet, driven faster than 10 miles an hour, or couldn't even conceive of the notion of m-theory without being driven to fits of disbelief? How many video games, starting with the ever so innocuous A Link to the Past, have taught you to think in four or more dimensions? The very notion of the internet or a flash mob is frightening to contemplate under these circumstances.

Things to think about.

A Wild Narla Appears

2010-11-17T22:06:00.000-08:00

Progress on Chapter 11 is a little slow due to scheduling and sick. I am about seven pages in, but would like to have more done (I'd like to be done with it and halfway through 12 by the time this chapter ends, but you can't always get what you want).

Looking for More Material

2010-11-04T11:38:00.000-07:00

I've got a bit of a mental disorder; I can't really talk at all to people I don't know unless I'm forced or prompted with a script (my mom used to write scripts for me while I was growing up). Typing is no problem, and I can be outgoing as long as I'm dealing with a written medium and have no one's face on the other end, but that's not what I'm discussing today.

It's faces and posture. Facial expressions and body language literally have no meaning to me at all. I don't know what someone's arm or face or body placement means at all, and in order to do this right, I've got to use reference charts (which, thankfully, I've mostly memorized now; you have no idea how much this has helped me. It's because of my attempts to do art (horribly) that have allowed me to actually go shopping by myself, even if I don't talk to the cashier) to even get a facial expression. Still, I'm entirely guessing on annoyance or surprise or anything like that (and as anyone who's looked at my attempts to draw backgrounds knows, my sense of spacial perception is crazy; my roommate finds it amusing to move things around when I'm not in the living room and watch me try to re-navigate when I come back in. Asshole.).

It's difficult, since I learn expressions and postures by rote and chart, I basically have to learn to redraw a face every time I want someone to have a different expression, which brings me to the real main point.

I have a large amount of physical reference material, but it's limited. I keep trying the exercises I can dig up with tutorials online. Anybody out there have any good ideas for helping me improve?

Call of Cthulhu

2010-10-20T08:29:00.001-07:00

Investigator Name: David Andrew Bartlett
Occupation: Artist
Colleges, Degrees: Miskatonic University, BA
Birthplace: Glowbury, MA
Mental Disorders: Dissociative disorder, not otherwise specified
Sex: M Age: 22
STR: 9
DEX: 12
INT: 17
Idea: 85
CON: 8
APP: 11
POW: 18
Luck: 90
SIZ: 10
SAN: 90 (It's a bit lower than this right now)
EDU: 18
Know: 90
Cthulhu Mythos: 00 (It's a bit higher than this right now)
Damage Bonus: none

Accounting 10%
Anthropology 1%
Archaeology 1%
Art: Drawing 60%
Art: Painting 75%
Astronomy 1%
Bargain 5%
Biology 16%
Chemistry 1%
Climb 40%
Computer Use 26%
Conceal 15%
Credit Rating 15%
Cthulhu Mythos 0%
Dodge 48%
Drive Auto 20%
Electrical Repair 40%
Electronics 11%
Fast Talk 60%
First Aid 30%
Geology 16%
Handgun 20%
Hide 10%
History 67%
Jump 25%
Law 5%
Library Use 52%
Listen 25%
Locksmith 1%
Machine Gun 15%
Martial Arts 1%
Mechanical Repair 20%
Medicine 5%
Natural History 26%
Navigate 10%
Occult 5%
Operate Hvy. Machine 1%
Persuade 15%
Pharmacy 1%
Photography 47%
Physics 89%
Psychoanalysis 1%
Psychology 31%
Ride 5%
Rifle 25%
Shotgun 30%
Sneak 10%
Spot Hidden 40%
Submachine Gun 15%
Swim 25%
Throw 25%
Track 10%
Fist/Punch 50%
Head Butt 10%
Kick 25%
Grapple 25%
Hatchet 20%

Call of Cthulhu is by Chaosium Inc.

Goin' Down to Eltdown

2010-10-12T21:15:00.000-07:00

The Eltdown Shards are bizarre fragments of seeming pottery found in 1882 and named after Eltdown in southern England, where they were first discovered. These shards date to the early Triassic period. Previously believed to be untranslatable, there have been several "translations" made, such as The Eltdown Shards: A Partial Translation, by Gordon Whitney. There are also a variety of non-collegiate translation, most of which make the rounds among cults.

The translation by Whitney is similar to another text, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, produced by the archaeosapients currently termed Yithians, which describes the planet Yith and the first encounters with the Yekubians. There also appears to be a shard that contains the formula for summoning a being known as the "Warder of Knowledge." It should be noted that the formula for dismissing the Warder is either not present or intentionally damaged. However, the majority of information contained on the shards deals with shoggoths, and may or may not make vague references to some sort of "prime source," which means that it's more likely the shards were inscribed by the Elder Things.

Looky!

2010-10-04T23:10:00.000-07:00

A Yog-Sothoth reference in today's comic... maybe. A couple other references to, and some foreshadowing, all in the same panel.

And of course, a DG scenario reference.

My mom contacted me the other day and signed us both up for NaNoWriMo, so I'm having to hold off on Ten-Ghost for a little while to try and set up some back up pages, since I won't be doing any pages this November. I'm even skipping out on going to Michigan for Christmas this year just so I can keep up with this.

Oh yeah, and the Deus ex Machina line is there because it's funny, see, because Shub-Niggurath is

________________

Somebody pointed out a typo in the Oct 06 comic. If it's still there... try refreshing. If that doesn't work, well, sorry about that.

Yeeeessss

2010-09-21T01:32:00.000-07:00

As a side note, I would like to apologize for this chapter. I really would. Next one is better, I promise. It's a little difficult to deal with a new character, in addition to having been rushed through that month, so a majority of the art suffered.

David's Parents Are Disbelieving

2010-09-11T12:50:00.000-07:00

They wonder why he can't be successful, like his brother, or attend college for a real purpose, like his sister.

I was toying with the idea of her going to the same college, but that's one more character I don't want to have to write for, even though she's the only family member who really tries to care, even if she doesn't understand him. There's obviously a conclusion everything is building up to, and I'm almost one sixth of the way there (another 24 pages and I will be). Even so, it feels monumental, and I keep rearranging later chapters in the hopes that it will make things easier on me.

I've already planted a few clues as to what's going on here and there... and a really big one sometime in early August, so much so that it's almost a spoiler (but I won't tell you which one it is). Rest assured, though, that even if everything looks fine right now, it's just a build up to the inevitable Lovecraft ending. I mean, it is a Lovecraft comic, I should have a Lovecraft ending, right? I think I've even figured out a way to make it seem a little hopeful regardless, though, so there's that.

David is Dangerous With That Logic Stick

2010-08-27T11:28:00.000-07:00

Go David. Don't take no shit off dat tsundere wannabe.

It's not like she's an artist named Pickman who paints odd and gaunt figures, with feral features and a strange, almost lupine cast.

She's not the actual tsundere, anyway.

Holy Crap

2010-08-19T01:39:00.000-07:00

People are interacting with objects in their environment, it's amazing!

...and also David's eyebrows and epicanthic fold have mysteriously disappeared from his face for a single panel. Now I must dig out that shit and fix it.

Yeeeeeeah

2010-08-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

I debated with myself long and hard about how much I want Colette to be in this, considering what I have planned later on (and the spirals into madness once I get all the characters into place and can begin this in earnest). I'm still not entirely sure how I want to approach this; I'm rewriting a bunch of things to include her a little more, notably to make her storyline heavier when it comes up.

Ten-Ghost 2: Burn the Bodies Please is coming along at a leisurely pace. A few things are slower than expected, but everything's falling together much more easily than my last two novels.

Six-Gun Gorgon Dynamo

2010-08-09T23:02:00.000-07:00

Inside joke, very obscure. It's funny to all the maybe fifty people who know it.

For the rest of you, the internet is wide open, I'm certain you can figure it out.

I had a bit of a slow week here, and only managed to get eighteen pages of the next chapter finished. I hope to at least get it done before this one runs its course, but I don't know how successful I'll be. I just know that if I start to slip, it will never stop, and I'll never get this thing out one day at a time. If that ever happens, I will still post as often as possible, probably in batches.

Elder Things

2010-08-04T17:27:00.000-07:00

Interesting critters, really. Here are a few, mixing qualities of several types of echinoderm. It's interesting Lovecraft chose echinodermata as the basis of his descriptions of them, especially considering Helicoplacus was described as early as 1933, allowing us to determine that the earliest echinoderms appear to be sessile organisms (though, to be fair, At the Mountains of Madness was published in 1931). It's also interesting that he chose the method of movement that he did for such an ungainly critter; I'm having to make minor changes to some things to make them fit our current xenobiological speculative knowledge (which, ironically, has surpassed the expectations of the 30s and of Lovecraft in general), namely, that most life forms we run into are going to move "front forward," by and large being that you want your senses oriented in the direction you're moving.

Here, the elder things will twist and turn, facing any number of directions depending on their current needs, their bodies thick and yet flexible enough to rotate like this, due to their largely aquatic lifestyle. It should be noted that elder things are the most human-like life forms in the universe, aside from beings living in the ~~Dreamla~~ Phase Space.

Chapter 1 Excerpt: Trashing the Ha-ahk-oo (draft)

2010-07-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

She came to a mound, a square pyramidal structure with nothing more than a small, one-room hut at the top, decorated with prayer strips and pinned money, the base of the mound scattered with ashes and broken flatware and food scorched into black char. She stomped up the slope, which rose only about seven feet into the air, hoping they were north enough that the door would actually function and south enough that this was a good place to stay the night. She threw the wooden latch open and slipped inside, ducking down almost to crawl due to its size, and was instantly in a room about as square and large as a suburban parlor.

There was simple furniture inside, and the lights were on in the corners, lamps that shone steady, a radio set in the corner, with crystal candlesticks and a corn blanket over the top, showcasing a ring of sculptures that would be more at home in an upper-class dwelling. She heard the gentle hum of music as she entered, some stereotypical drivel borne on strings after a trumpeted opening.

“Oh, well, good afternoon!” someone belted out, his voice distorted as from a speaker.

Her head jerked up to the stairs, eying the man descending the stairs with a critical gaze; his shirt had no symbol on the right shoulder, a blank family guide, but deeds surrounded the empty space, trailing down his sleeve and part of the way toward his neck. He wore suspenders, with loose slacks like a city man. He was some kind of house spirit. His deeds strictly remained confined to homes, protecting them from intrusion, earning money, and fixing broken things. Wondering how to trick it, she pressed her lips together. Taking in a deep breath, she shifted to a cheery voice.

“Hi, honey!” she said, and he cracked a smile.

“Oh, well, hello, Maude!” he replied, and she waved Rules up to the door.

“You're not going to believe this!” she shouted, “I found the boy out wandering with his friends, and he's still on that whole human thing.”

He glowered at Rules as he entered the building, and she fixed a glare on him.

“You're probably going to have to give the boy a good talking-to,” she nodded, approaching the spirit, one hand reaching into her pocket, the other held up to point at him.

He nodded in response, crossing his arms.

“Well, you know how Zachary is," the spirit laughed, "the more I try to talk some sense into him, the further apart we drift. I think we should cut the boy a little slack.”

Ten-Ghost nodded and shoved a handful of dried nettle into the spirit's face, who immediately began to scream and cough. She dumped out her moccasins, spilling sand on the floor, and ordered Rules to do the same, shouting and banging on the walls as she did. The man stumbled back further, screeching and howling, and she pushed the sculptures off the radio top and told Rules to pull off the corn mat and sit on it; she kicked over a coffee table, and shook her pack, rattling the pots and belting out forest songs in a rough voice. He shivered and fell apart into a small crab-thing that resembled a high chair with human arms and a preponderance of rusted feet, the carapace scrawled over with those same deeds, etched in gold.

“Why did you do that?” he howled, opening one large eye with his mandibles.

“I had to assert my dominance,” she said, “I need to sleep here for tonight, and I didn't want to ask you when you have the possibility to say no.”

So Yeah.

2010-07-28T02:11:00.000-07:00

Shub-Niggurath.

_______________________

The majority of chapter 6, to me, is actually fairly weak. My dialogue was a little flimsy, and I can really tell I'm still getting used to the medium here. Chapter 7 is actually a little stronger, even if the art is still pretty foul. I'm working on around page nine of chapter 8 right now, and hope to forge even further ahead before seven really gets itself moving. Chapter 6 was necessary to me in order to close a gap, and that's all it really does, is close a storyline gap; the really relevant parts are the reference to Yog-Sothoth and the last couple of pages with Shub-Niggurath emerging from the red-veined oddly-angled stones in the backyard, and the fact that the house used to belong to William Dyer of the Pabodie expedition.

Ten-Ghost 2: Son of Ten-Ghost: Everybody Sick up in This Shit has a full summary and outline, and a first chapter draft that is 50% complete. It's going slow because I have to split my time between Ow, My Sanity, Ten-Ghost 2: Return of the Whiny Doctor, and a boatload of City of Heroes alts, also, trying and failing to do artwork for friends and family. My roommate wants me to do a pair of tiger shark jaws for a tattoo of his, and I don't know if it's a good idea for my art to be on someone's skin for the rest of their life (admittedly, he already has one, a Machinato Vitae symbol I designed).

____________________________

Fresh from one ordeal, spiritual doctor Ten-Ghost wanders the countryside with her adoptive son in tow; after a visit with an old friend and hitching a ride from a forest without a home, she receives a letter. In the town of Hawiya, people are dying of a mysterious illness. Where physical doctors have failed, her contact hopes that she can succeed. But when even she can't pinpoint the cause for the sickness, and when it begins to spread like wildfire, she becomes trapped in the town. Cults and alternative practitioners take advantage of the spreading sickness to blossom, and even Death itself arrives to view the proceedings with detached amusement. Her frustration over an illness she can't solve compounds with the thought of being unable to leave causes Ten-Ghost's psychopathic mandrake instincts to begin to take root. To deal with the plague and protect the people she's been hired to help, she may have to do the most unsavory thing of all: interact with other people.

Updates

2010-07-26T00:14:00.000-07:00

I didn't miss an update. I mislabeled a comic, even after double-checking it. Everything should be good tomorrow. I feel horrible, I can't even name my files right...

David Finally Fails a SAN Check

2010-07-15T23:10:00.003-07:00

He can't resolve reality when good things happen to him.

Ten-Ghost Part Two

2010-07-13T01:55:00.000-07:00

"I, Lucy Alraune Greeble, Finishes the Test Satisfactorily, do hereby solemnly swear, through direct or indirect action, to perform no activity that will harm a patient, to practice to the best of my ability for the good of my patients, to avoid violating the morals of my community, to avoid attempting that which specialists can do better, to keep the good of the patient as my highest priority, outside the interests of vigilantism, monetary concern, community welfare, or conserving economic resources, and to avoid any and all sexual relationships or other inappropriate conduct with my patient and his or her family."

Writing began on the Ten-Ghost sequel today in earnest; I could probably turn this into a trilogy at least, but I don't want to go too far. These things have a habit of turning into bizarre, seemingly overpowered characters, and Ten-Ghost is someone I want to remain a bit neurotic and not much more than she is right now. The story is a rather cliché one nowadays, but I think I can do something new with it, namely in the direction I'm going with it, and the fact that the part that's cliché in the plot is only a vehicle for character development and inner conflict. Basically, the goal is to take something that's normally an outer conflict and turn it into an inner one.

Ten-Ghost/Lucy is very interesting to write, since socially she's about where I was perhaps ten years ago.

Oh, shit, that's right, she will have written a thesis. I'd better get on that.

Finding a House

2010-07-01T13:55:00.000-07:00

Finished a novel. Ten-Ghost. Currently in the hands of an agent, maybe something will come of it, maybe not. If not, I'll just buy some ISBNs and publish it my damn self. Working on a sequel, even though it stands alone just fine. I can see it being a trilogy, but that's as far as it goes.

The "Buy Owner" joke is an old one among my mother and I, having figured out a bunch of "code words" a long time ago and spending hours looking at house photos, trying to discern the good ones from the bad ones.

Angel Densetsu & Company

2010-06-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

Every time I feel bad about what I'm doing here, I re-read Angel Densetsu. The artist started out rather poor but rapidly jumped in skill, and the story fills me with hope, too.

Imagine using horror manga layout techniques to tell a "normal" high school comedy.

Cover of Book Two

2010-06-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

One hundred twenty strips. That's the content of book one.

Book two is starting, and I'm a little afraid. I don't know if I can keep up the pace, I don't know if my writing will stop hiccuping, I don't know if my skill level will get better, I want to challenge myself, but I'm afraid and I'm a creature of habit..

I'm going to keep plowing on through. I think these fears are good things to have. I believe that if I stop questioning myself entirely, I won't ever improve.

Originally I had intended to take a break after each chapter, then after each book, and I realized a bit too late that I did want to take a month-long break before diving in again, but it's not too much of a problem. I'm working on chapter seven right now, since some hiccups in life forced me to lay off the strips for awhile. I think if I pound out about two to three pages a day for the next month, I'll have a good cushion built back up.

The Pancakes

2010-06-11T16:32:00.001-07:00

Nancy has eaten the pancakes.

Truly this is our blackest hour.

2010-06-04T10:10:00.000-07:00

Thus is Teratoma.

Teratoma is a super hero with the cancer of justice. The original concept was to have her blood be under her conscious control and she was going to carry around needles and cut herself when a fight broke out. It evolved into cancer when I imagined her doing a couple of other things and remembered teratomas, your own personal little cancer clone!

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with her, but I at least slapped her together in Mutants & Masterminds and am using her in a tabletop game...

Friday, May 28, 2010

2010-05-28T14:09:00.000-07:00

Chapter 6 is exactly half done; I've lost a lot of time and cushion due to a crisis of faith regarding whether or not I can continue doing this. The answer, of course, is yes. I've already spotted problem areas and areas where I've improved a little since the beginning, but the story is pretty much fully ready to go, even if the scripting process is slower than I'd like it to be.

I've also been trying to ease off a little due to a novel I've almost finished.

Monday, May 24, 2010

2010-05-23T23:29:00.000-07:00

The local cell is P-Cell. Primus, Philip... I wonder what the names of the other two members are?

I love writing these guys, even if I still don't have a good handle on the art.

...also, for some reason, tomorrow's comic showed up today. Oh, well. Enjoy it. And its references to Nyarlathotep.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

2010-05-23T11:10:00.001-07:00

Alright, I finally got the archive and the front page to update, everything should be good now; Thursday and Friday's comics are up to date.

Progress on chapter six is going a little slower than expected, but it should be done before chapter five runs its course. Five is the last chapter in book one, and chapter six is about the acquisition of the ridiculously large magical girlfriend harem animu house. Being Lovecraft country, of course, the house has secrets of its own. Terrible secrets.

Arkham, in Lovecraft country, is disturbingly close to Beverly, and Clark's Corners is between the two. Beverly and Salem are now almost a contiguous urban sprawl, and it makes sense that the neighboring towns continue this trend, especially with the prestigious universities nearby. In this particular "setting," Glaston contains Clark's Corners and Arkham areas with Kingsport. If you head west up Yankee Division, and then get on Aylesbury, you can get to Dunwich (and the Glowbury area) in a matter of a half hour or less, but it's still an old, creepy place. Arkham Asylum has become a tourist attraction (it's "haunted," they say, and had a lot of high profile patients at one point), but the transition to a modern town has made a lot of the region fall into a new, more open and gentle array of people and places. This does not, however, obviate it from still being Arkham, and the transition of Miskatonic University into a branch of Massachusetts University has not obviated its libraries and halls from harboring the strange and unearthly.

Thursday, May 20

2010-05-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

Today's comic isn't updating for some reason; I forced an update, but I don't know how long it will be.

Friday, May14 and Monday, May 17

2010-05-14T12:06:00.000-07:00

So. Liz is a member of the local cell. Obviously. Originally, this was two characters. I rolled it into one to save space and to make things more interesting.

Tuesday, May 11

2010-05-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

In the original script, David replies "that's very Kurt Vonnegut of you," but it's a bit out of character.

F@cking Awesome

2010-05-06T22:52:00.000-07:00

I was unaware that there was a long version of this trailer out!

This is full of so much win it's not even funny. Can't wait for this to come out. The last production by the society was just as awesome, and this one is on a much bigger budget, but still filmed in period style.

Tuesday, May 04 (Chapter 4, Page 15)

2010-05-04T00:46:00.000-07:00

This is the part of David using logic to deduce that there is probably a conspiracy already after him, and why they haven't moved on him yet.

...sometimes, when something so unreal happens to you that it can't possibly be happening, the only out your mind has is to either convince you it's not happening, or detach itself and coldly rationalize everything.

Wednesday, April 21 (Chapter 4)

2010-04-21T00:11:00.001-07:00

WORDS WORDS WORDS

Chapter 4, General Thoughts

2010-04-15T10:49:00.000-07:00

One of the things I'm trying to do is challenge myself, largely by drawing figures at angles I don't normally work with, backgrounds every once in awhile (something I typically never do because I am lame like that), and working with a variety of techniques I wouldn't normally try. It's not working out well, and is mostly blatantly obvious. I also find myself subconsciously trying to rest on the strength of my writing a little more often than I'd like, which will be clear in a few pages.

Chapter 4, Page 1

2010-04-14T01:01:00.000-07:00

The statues out front and the artist Henry Wilcox are, of course, an unambiguous Call of Cthulhu reference.

The Whateley family is from Dunwich, several miles outside of Glaston. There was an incident down there about seventy years ago and they were run out of town.

Chapter 3, Pages 23-24

2010-04-08T23:03:00.000-07:00

Love writing the Deltas. Chapter 5 has a lot more Delta action, and almost a straight week of it. I'm still settling in on their designs.

One thing I've noticed has been massive shift changes in dialogue. The story is all still the same, but pages collapse and expand based on the dialogue I can fit into them.

Chapter 3, Pages 17-22

2010-04-08T23:02:00.000-07:00

The exchange here is a little wordy, but less so than her previous rant. You can see now why her forearms are short; she's supposed to perch like a frog.

Chapter 3, Page 16

2010-03-30T23:40:00.000-07:00

I like this page.

That is a bat-toad-sloth thing.

Chapter 03, Pages 12-15

2010-03-30T00:04:00.000-07:00

The confrontation here was intended to be longer, but I realized a lot of my limitations in compiling many of the panels in this area, and am still working on how to arrange things. Chapter 04 will be much better with this, I promise, with a bumpy road in the middle. One of the major problems I'm running into is that in learning to compile faces much better, I'm still very lacking in the way I do backgrounds; interactions between multiple figures is also something I have a lot of trouble with. That I can get two people on the same page is a miracle in and of itself to me.

Chapter3, Pages 8-11

2010-03-24T01:36:00.000-07:00

"Yandere" is a moe term meaning, effectively, "ax-crazy." It refers to a character that will do anything to keep their beloved, including turning a bunch of other potential suitors into frogs to eliminate the ones that aren't who she wants them to be just to make sure there's one less guy in the world that she has to sift through in order to find the right one.

Frog girl has been an interesting experiment. As is perfectly clear in page 9 pan 4, I still haven't quite gotten the hang of her yet (heck, I haven't quite got the hang of Nancy or David at this point).

Originally, the role of frog-girl was restricted to a single chapter. This has been changed; you'll be able to see that in pages 13 and 16, if you haven't already (protip: Land of dreams, Hyperboria, and Mount Voormithadreth are your clues).

Chapter 3, Page 7

2010-03-17T22:22:00.000-07:00

First, witness the psycho frog's shape changing scar.

Second: Good god, David's eyes in that last panel are so far apart...

Third! Yes, her arms are stubby on purpose.

Chapter 3, Page 6

2010-03-16T22:49:00.001-07:00

I really like this character. I like her so much that I made her a part of the overarching plot, and she was only intended to be a one-off, one chapter deal. She plugged into the plot so easily, however, it was almost like I'd intended for it to happen.

So I'm very happy with that.

Her name in my original notes was "psycho frog/bat girl." She has a new name now.

Chapter 3, Pages 4-5

2010-03-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

Those are poorly drawn leopard frogs.

I like David's head in Page 5 Panel 1. It's where I'd like him to be as far as design goes, even though his hair is a little dark in that shot, but it's at night, so that's ok, right?

Side note: I may have to slow the comic down. I'm halfway through chapter 4 right now, but my computer was attacked yesterday morning. It could be another week before I'm able to start the FTP working again, but there's enough strips in the buffer to last until the end of April, at least.

Chapter 3, Page 3

2010-03-11T22:30:00.001-08:00

Still very stiff.

Yes, if that puppy were a terrible thing from beyond that possesses no morality.

Chapter 3, Page 2

2010-03-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

Oh, hell.

My movements and poses are so stiff.

It's like these people are made of wood.

I try, I really do. I gesture and practice and work and my hand hurts but fuck it. I'll keep going and hope something pings.

Chapter 3, Page 1

2010-03-09T22:03:00.000-08:00

The irony in doing a Lovecraftian webcomic is that I want to remain as laconic as possible while still engendering a sense of Lovecraft's atmospheric verbosity. The chapter narration is perhaps my refuge of that, though I've noticed in my scripting that it slowly begins to disappear, but manages, in fits and starts, to continue on. Only future chapters will reveal what becomes of the opening narration.

This is the first actual "episode" chapter, even though the continuity still recognizes its presence and what is mentioned here will have ramifications through the entire story.

That's a free font I picked up from HPLHS, by the way.

Chapter 2, Page 24

2010-03-07T22:56:00.001-08:00

Initially, this was going to be a much more busy page, with David setting up a tent and a few more panels with much more dialog, but when I get around to drawing pages, I always shrink my dialogue to far fewer lines, which is good. I don't want to be writing a damn wall of text every two pages, nor do I want to have the reader slog through it.

Chapter 2, Page 23

2010-03-04T22:48:00.000-08:00

My structures are terrible; I actually have some interesting issues with the way I remember details that makes it easy to retain place-memory, but few other details. I can, for example, return to and navigate a place I haven't been in years with little difficulty, but even if it's been a few hours and a major structural feature has changed, I react like it's a completely new area.

I decided to draw buildings with the features as I would navigate by as opposed to rendering them more realistically, and I'm still practicing that feature. You'll see it most prominently when I start rendering the campus more in later chapters.

Chapter 2, Page 22

2010-03-04T12:52:00.001-08:00

The use of color is sporadic overall; I'm trying to make what color does persist stand out, and I'm still playing with the effect. When Chapter 3 rolls around (which the cover will come around on Tuesday), there will be some more than just green. I'm trying to plan for colors to use for the others when they arrive.

Some plans include:

Nancy: Green
Shub-Niggurath: Red
Narla: Deep Violet
Artifacts: Gold/yellow

At the moment, though, I like the effect.

Chapter 2, Page 21

2010-03-02T23:12:00.000-08:00

Spider conchs are awesome. That is all.

Chapter 2, Page 20

2010-03-01T21:55:00.000-08:00

Coming up to the end, here. Of the chapter.

Xexanoth and Aforgomon are Clarke Ashton Smith contributions.

I'm having great fun drawing the eyes that show up in the background every so often.

Chapter 2, Page 19

2010-03-01T02:49:00.000-08:00

So. I'm terrible at clothes and shoulder motions. That's okay, that's the point of this exercise. Also, necks.

In Call of Cthulhu, it takes one "spell" to summon something, and another to actually bind it, so you have a little while of terrible outer things thrashing and crushing things left and right before you can actually deal with what you've got.

Chapter 2, Page 18

2010-02-25T22:09:00.000-08:00

Told you he changes shape. I'm still trying to figure out how to render things reliably, which I am terrible at, mostly because I learn by rote. At least I get the orientation of the triangle pin on his lapel reasonably accurately.

Chapter 2, Page 17

2010-02-24T21:38:00.000-08:00

And now the arrival of Mr. Suit. I admit. I really like drawing this guy, even if his design changes dramatically from scene to scene. But then, I'm working with an Unreliable Narrator specifically because I'm using this comic to teach myself both skill and the medium, so it's ok, right?

YOU FORGIVE ME, RIGHT?

RIGHT?

...damn.

Mr. Officer has got to have the world's weirdest neck in this shot.

Chapter 2, Page 16

2010-02-23T21:28:00.000-08:00

Well, it's a green triangle. You'll be seeing it a lot.

Also, Primus Cell.

Chapter 4 will get in to why Miskatonic University is no longer officially titled "Miskatonic."

I like Mr. Officer, but I like Mr. Suit better; he'll show up tomorrow.

First Post: Chapter 2, Page 15

2010-02-23T02:08:00.000-08:00

http://owmysanity.comicgenesis.com/

In today's comic, I was testing out a crinkle effect on the paper for later use when terrible things are doing terrible things. I'm happy with the effect, but not the colors I used. Expect to see it a few more times until I finally get it right or abandon it altogether. It's on a separate layer, since I didn't feel a need to go about balling up my original scribble. I got a little eraser tool happy, also, but I'm not happy with that effect. Mr. Officer's arm looks like it's going to pop an elbow out of socket.

Below are the two police officers, whom I can only presume are members of the speed trap off the uncanny valley highway exit.