David is Dangerous With That Logic Stick

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

Shub-Niggurath.


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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).

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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.