Happy April!

If you’re not sure why Patreon has become so important to me, you can read all about that here.

Yeah. That was depressing, wasn’t it? So let me try to cheer you up with the rewards my Patrons will receive this month.

April 6 (for Patrons at $5 and above)

Pirate Penguins of Patagonia was a game proposal that I put together twice: once – as a simple treatment – around 1995, and again in 2001. That second time I made a demo, a trailer, a soundtrack CD, and a printed proposal.

I’m going to tell you its story, and then you can download a PDF of the proposal so you can see it for yourself.

April 13 (for Patrons at $15 and above)

Two print-resolution Celtic knotwork borders at greeting card size, with transparent areas inside the borders. If you have image editing software you can place your own picture or message inside the border.

(These are for personal use only.)

April 20 (for Patrons at $10 and above)

Of Vulcanis is a sort of Dunsanian short story I wrote (probably) in 1978. There was once a title illustration, but that’s lost: you can read the story here. though.

This one holds up surprisingly well.

April 27 (for Patrons at $1 and above)

Stalking Made Me Who I Am recalls an episode from my family history that might be illegal now, but I can’t regret that. Without a little stalking I would never have been born.

So, as usual, $15 patrons will see something every week while the rest will see one, two, or three updates. I hope you enjoy them!

Here we are in March. You can go back outside soon. If you’re not sure why Patreon has become so important to me, you can read all about that here. Yeah. That was depressing, wasn’t it? So let me try to cheer you up with the rewards my Patrons will receive this month.

March 6 (for Patrons at $5 and above)

Chapter 6 of the first draft for a sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. This final chapter advances the plot – all the pieces are now in place – but this is the point where I set it aside, for reasons I explain in the notes.

March 13 (for Patrons at $15 and above)

Two print-resolution Celtic knotwork borders at greeting card size, with transparent areas inside the borders. If you have image editing software you can place your own picture or message inside the border. (These are for personal use only.)

March 20 (for Patrons at $10 and above)

Six scanned pages from The Well-Dressed Clairseach, a book of designs and techniques for decorating Celtic harps. I worked on this in 1986 but never completed it. Only a few pages have been seen before now.

March 27 (for Patrons at $1 and above)

Ten covers, dating from 1981 to 1985, for Runestaff – the sometimes monthly, sometimes bimonthly newsletter of the Barbarian Freehold Alliance. I was the Runestaff’s editor through most of those years, and I nearly always drew the covers. You’ll see a selection of the ones I like best. So, as usual, $15 patrons will see something every week while the rest will see one, two, or three updates. I hope you enjoy them!

Here we are in February. Have a good one!

If you’re not sure why Patreon has become so important to me, you can read all about that here.

Yeah. That was depressing, wasn’t it? So let me try to cheer you up with the rewards my Patrons will receive this month.

February 6 (for Patrons at $5 and above)

W. B. Yeats’ poem The Hosting of the Sidhe with my 1982 illustration for it, from Runestaff #5.

February 13 (for Patrons at $15 and above)

Two print-resolution Celtic knotwork borders at greeting card size, with transparent areas inside the borders. If you have image editing software you can place your own picture or message inside the border.

(These are for personal use only.)

February 20 (for Patrons at $10 and above)

The Chapter 5 first draft from my unfinished sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. It’s probably my favorite of the six chapters I wrote.

Don’t tell the other chapters I said so.

February 27 (for Patrons at $1 and above)

The Big Mad Science in Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom examines the way Retropolis has dealt with its abundance of Mad Science. Is there a method behind the madness? Read and decide.

So, as always, $15 patrons will see something every week while the rest will see one, two, or three updates. I hope you enjoy them!

Happy New Year!

If you’re not sure why Patreon has become so important to me, you can read all about that here.

Yeah. That was depressing, wasn’t it? So let me try to cheer you up with the rewards my Patrons will receive this month.

January 6 (for Patrons at $5 and above)

Chapter 4 of the first draft for a sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. Friends, co-workers, and neighbors; also the second thing that broke the book.

January 13th (for Patrons at $15 and above)

Two print-resolution Celtic knotwork borders at greeting card size, with transparent areas inside the borders. If you have image editing software you can place your own picture or message inside the border.

(These are for personal use only.)

January 20th (for Patrons at $10 and above)

In the House of the Cosmic Frog is an illustrated poem from my summer of 1976. It’s difficult to describe. Another “Morno” piece.

Apart from my own distribution of copies it was published the next year in Greg Stafford’s Wyrd #7, published by (or at) Chaosium.

January 27th (for Patrons at $1 and above)

The Western Institute of Muchness is my memory of a strange thing I found while I was walking down the street in 1974 or so. I’ve never forgotten it. I’m so glad it existed.

Let me tell you what it was.

So, as always, $15 patrons will see something every week while the rest will see one, two, or three updates. I hope you enjoy them!

Happy December!

If you’re not sure why Patreon has become so important to me, you can read all about that here.

Yeah. That was depressing, wasn’t it? So let me try to cheer you up with the rewards my Patrons will receive this month.

December 6 (for Patrons at $5 and above)

Englyn is an illustrated poem from Runestaff #28, in 1984. The title’s unimaginative: this is a poem in the ancient Welsh verse form called “englyn”.

But it always knows who it is.

December 13th (for Patrons at $15 and above)

Two print-resolution Celtic knotwork borders at greeting card size, with transparent areas inside the borders. If you have image editing software you can place your own picture or message inside the border.

(These are for personal use only.)

December 20th (for Patrons at $10 and above)

The first draft for Chapter 3 of a sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. First drafts are things of horror. Let me share my horror with you.

December 27th (for Patrons at $1 and above)

Adventures in Corporate Logic: Electronic Arts, ca. 1991 recalls some of the challenges I faced with a friend of mine while we dealt with a major corporation. We did okay, considering.

So, as always, $15 patrons will see something every week while the rest will see one, two, or three updates. I hope you enjoy them!

Much to my own surprise – in my capacity as The Guy Who Sees the Sales Numbers – Tor Books will release the trade paperback edition of my Slaves of the Switchboard Of Doom tomorrow. It’s up on Amazon already with a preorder price of $10.99.

They sent me a few copies last week, so I can tell you they’ve done a pretty good job on this less prestigious edition. You (naturally) lose the wraparound dust jacket, and you get just 50% of the endpaper art.

I was curious about how they’d handle that: you seldom see a trade paperback with printing on the inside covers. The way they approached it was to keep the side of each endpaper that features the book title, and although that means some important character vignettes are missing it’s probably as good a solution as any. Those characters are more likely to show up in the other illustrations anyway, I guess.

Still, it’s worth mentioning that the hardcover price is dropping with the new edition’s release. In hardcover the book has lovely, heavy paper, the ends of the cover art, and the complete endpapers. The hardcover would still be my first choice.

But whichever edition you choose, Slaves of the Switchboard Of Doom stands ready to serve all your humorous, retrofuturistic needs.

There’s the eBook version too, of course. I assume its price will drop once the paperback is released tomorrow, but I don’t know by how much, or when. The world is just chock full of things I don’t know. You get used to it.

Happy November!

If you’re not sure why Patreon has become so important to me, you can read all about that here.

Yeah. That was depressing, wasn’t it? So let me try to cheer you up with the rewards my Patrons will receive this month.

November 6 (for Patrons at $5 and above)

Chapter 2 of the first draft for a sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. We’ll find out what’s put Dash into such a terrible state, meet some old friends (and some new ones) and learn how Nola’s career is looking up, apart from the explosions.

Note: Because of the way I’m alternating Celtic and fantasy art and writing with their Retropolitan counterparts, $5 backers are only getting three of the six chapters. It’s weird.

November 13th (for Patrons at $15 and above)

Two print-resolution Celtic knotwork borders at greeting card size, with transparent areas inside the borders. If you have image editing software you can place your own picture or message inside the border.

(These are for personal use only.)

November 20th (for Patrons at $10 and above)

The Technique of Theodoris is a short story with a title illustration from around 1978. It’s work I signed with my Morno signature; and I have a few words to say about Morno, too.

November 27th (for Patrons at $1 and above)

The Dive of Death remembers how I was warned about a bar in town and never went there, then warned other people not to go… without actually knowing whether the stories were true. That’s a strange thing to do.

So, as always, $15 patrons will see something every week while the rest will see one, two, or three updates. I hope you enjoy them!

Having finished the redesign for my Retropolis site, it was much simpler to make the same changes to The Celtic Art Works. The two shops are built in a similar way: for the most part I’d solved all the problems already.

Okay, they’re not exactly the same. I had several surprises along the way. Still, this shop took about half as much time as the first one.

When I posted about the Retropolis redesign I described it as “phone-friendly”, but I never explained what I meant by that.

It seemed ridiculous to maintain two separate versions of these shops, one for desktops and one for smaller displays. I’ve always thought that was a pretty terrible solution.

If you view either site on a desktop computer you can see what I’ve done by resizing your browser window, from full screen to just under 400 pixels wide.

You can use CSS to wrap the elements differently at different widths, but there are design limits when you rely on CSS alone. So I made things a bit more complicated.

First, I do the obvious by checking the width of your browser’s window when the pages load – but there’s also a Javascript listener that watches for changes in the browser’s width. Those changes kick off a function that hides some screen elements and reveals others. This works equally well on any platform and also allows the layout to change when a phone or tablet is rotated.

That allows the site to use more than just CSS to move the elements around. If your window’s wide enough (as in the first image), you get a large, fixed-position menu at the top of the page and a sidebar on the right; on smaller displays the wide menu gets hidden, a narrower one is revealed, and the right-hand sidebar is replaced by a copy down below. (Most of that’s shown in the second and third images.)

Because I can make different changes at a variety of widths I’m able to get a pretty good looking layout at almost any size.

Finally, I go through a little dance to adjust the height of the sidebar when it’s visible. You can’t check the height of a floating element in Javascript – ouch! – so I have to check the position of the footer to figure out how tall the sidebar needs to be. That’s the kind of thing that’s automatic when you lay a page out with tables, but ends up being difficult with CSS.

The redesign has a problem with wide left-side content when the sidebar’s visible. So on a few pages I’ve always hidden the sidebar and revealed the lower copy.

Anyway, as I said you can play around with this by resizing your computer’s browser window. I can’t promise hours of fun, but it may be kind of interesting to see the layout change at different widths.

Oh! And consider buying something while you’re there, right?

I’ve spent the last two weeks on two projects: rebuilding part of my front porch (which you probably don’t care about unless you’re knocking on my door), and creating a phone-friendly redesign of my Retropolis web site.

I’m not crazy about the ways that phones have affected web page design – and I really miss my old page layouts – but because I am also not actually crazy I finally caved in to peer pressure and converted the site into something that works well on phones. Mostly.

The big exception is the Business Card Construction Kit. You still need a much wider browser window to do much with that one.

But in every other respect you can now shop quite comfortably even on one of those tiny, ridiculous devices that you all use.

So go do that, please, while I dart outdoors between the rainstorms and try to get my deck boards nailed down in time for Winter.

As always, you can find the Retropolis Transit Authority T-shirts, along with posters, greeting cards, postcards, business cards, and other things that are not cards. Like, uh, coffee mugs. And books. And other stuff. Go get ’em!

Happy October!

If you’re not sure why Patreon has become so important to me, you can read all about that here.

Yeah. That was depressing, wasn’t it? So let me try to cheer you up with the rewards my Patrons will receive this month.

October 6 (for Patrons at $5 and above)

The Selchie is a traditional ballad that I illustrated for Runestaff #29 in 1984. You’ll see the ballad and its illustration at Patreon.

October 13th (for Patrons at $15 and above)

Two print-resolution Celtic knotwork borders at greeting card size, with transparent areas inside the borders.

If you have image editing software you can place your own picture or message inside the border. (These are for personal use only.)

October 20th (for Patrons at $10 and above)

Chapter 1 of the first draft for a sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. It’s a first draft, so there are a gazillion things wrong with it.

But the book was going to have two huge problems that weren’t obvious to me when I started. One shows up already in this first chapter.

October 27th (for Patrons at $1 and above)

My 1978 cover for the final issue of Evermist. It may be one of my earliest centaurs. I was going to spend a lot of time with those creatures through the early 80’s.

So, as always, $15 patrons will see something every week while the rest will see one, two, or three updates. I hope you enjoy them!