I’ve got so many irons in the fire – mainly, wrapping up the book designs for the two editions of The Lair of the Clockwork Book and preparing for the next features at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual – that this morning I finally filled up a page in my notebook with lists of tasks. I will say that after a year and a half I do enjoy having a bit less structure to my days: but it turns out that a little bit of structure is sort of necessary.

This picture is a very happy surprise. It’s a rough layout for the next real serial for the Thrilling Tales (not counting a sixteen week "Intermission" feature) and the happy part is that it works.

That next Real Serial is going to be a little different in several ways. Its updates will be longer, but will appear only half as often; the illustrations will be in black and white – or, as we see here, at least in monotone; the illustrations themselves will be more tightly coupled to the print version of the story, with two-page spreads and wrapping text; and to support that I’ll have to add additional HTML markup to the story pages. The sample picture I dropped into this layout is one of the illustrations I did last year for Starship Sofa Stories, Vol 3: those illustrations, with their old sf pulp flavor, were the whole seed that grew into this New Plan. It turns out that I’ve always wanted to be Virgil Finlay.

I mean, who wouldn’t?

Now the two page spread at the beginning of this post has been compressed down to the usual Thrilling Tales size and the text has wrapped around the image – though not as neatly as we’ll see in the real story. I was convinced that this would not work – that there just wouldn’t be enough space to show both the illustration and its text to their best advantage. I’ve been figuring that I’d need to create a mutant page layout to support the new format. Hence my surprise: it looks like the existing page layout can support these changes just fine. It won’t be as nifty as the print version but it will be a pretty decent conversion.

Now… I’m not sure yet how I’ll handle enlarging the image for the pop-up windows; it’ll be a bit odd if that wrapping text disappears. But the first experiment, anyway, is a success.

In other news I’m now waiting for my second proof of the paperback edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book. I made substantial changes after I saw the first proof – much more substantial than I had expected to make. The dust has all settled now, though, and I expect that I’ll like what I see when the new version arrives.

Once that fundamental design is set I can start the proofing process for the hardcover edition. I’ve seen paper and linen samples for that now. The interior paper is really, really nice but because it’s a brighter white I may have to make adjustments to the illustrations once I’ve seen the hardcover proof. All in all, though, it seems to be moving along on schedule.

The paperback edition may be available late next week. It all depends on that second proof.

Oh, and then there’s this guy above. The only thing I’m going to say about him is that you should keep an eye on your kittens. ‘Cause you just ought to know.

Mister Doortree’s Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog has been giving us day after day of Alphonse Mucha (here, here, and here) including the wonderful, atypical, and seldom seen Slav Epic murals. They’re so very different from his decorative work – not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you, but these come as a big surprise if you’ve never seen anything but his Art Nouveau illustrations and borders.

I was lucky to see this one in Paris; through sheer happenstance there was a Mucha exhibition at the Petit Palais during the week I was there in 1980. As I recall the canvas was edged with great big grommets and the painting was stretched on cords looped through them – it looked like a gigantic, taut sail of mythological wonderment.

That nearly made up for the fact that the Louvre had closed its late nineteenth century collections for some kind of renovations. But I did get two afternoons in the Musee Gustave Moreau, and that was a real pleasure since in those days Moreau was right up my street. I think that his street was the Rue de Rochefoucauld.

You won’t see it until April 23, but yesterday I finished the last illustration for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. It’s been such a very, very long haul – exactly fourteen months after I finished the first illustration, and that doesn’t account for the months of pre-production and writing that went before.

It was a little earlier that this really hit me; about three illustrations back, I think, when I started to realize that I was beginning a long goodbye to the Book. There’s a strange combination of relief and dismay.

Of course there’s actually a lot left to do. I’m now taking the rough book layout and making it significantly less rough, with typographical changes, page ornaments, and so on. I need to finish the paperback cover and then the cover and dust jacket designs for the hardcover edition (thanks, Kickstarter!). Even when I think that’s all done, I’ll have to proof the pages and fix everything that wasn’t really finished. And finally, with all the cover issues settled, I’ll produce the actual books.

But yesterday was still a big day!

In the meantime although I’m certain that the next serial at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual is going to be different, I’m still not quite sure what that means. It will probably update just once a week; it will probably be illustrated in black and white, rather than in color; it will be longer, and the presentation of the pages will need to be a little different.

I’m not even positive that the guy on the left here is going to be Our Hero, but I think he’s more like the character than the last version was.

But before I can really wrestle with those ideas I have to make much better progress on Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS.

In my original plan that would have been nearly done today; my original plan went cartwheeling into the Sun quite some time ago.

Just to make things even more interesting, which is what you always want, I’ve been watching the traffic at Thrilling Tales: the site’s returning visitors have just about doubled since the Kickstarter drive for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. I know that if I hunker down and work on TWO BRAINS for a few months those folks are going to get tired of coming back to see nothing new.

So I’m also wondering what sort of Intermission I can run on the site that can update weekly without killing my TWO BRAINS schedule. Again. While I also lay the foundation for the next thing.

Fortunately, there’s always coffee.

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