You’ll be seeing Osgood Finnegan again, around late September, in The Lair of the Clockwork Book. For the moment you can see his airship sailing out over… someplace. Click it, and see it swell into world-dominating magnificence!

The new illustrations are moving along at a respectable pace – that surprises me, since I’d been dreading the number of new things I’d need to build for this one. But between my working quickly, on the one hand, and cheating outrageously, on the other, things are going well so far.

I’ve even been thinking about exactly what comes after The Clockwork Book and Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. Part Three, obviously: but there will be a new serial to figure out too. I keep having these urges to fold in something I was working on awhile back – but since that one nearly destroyed my brain last time around I have to question whether that’s a very good idea.

It all depends on how much I like my brain, doesn’t it?

So I’ve left Nat Gonella here, in the laboratory of mad Doctor Rognvald – more or less – because my current stint on the illustrations for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS has come to its end.

For the past week I’ve been working on another web project that’s still a ways from being ready for prime time. That one’s a commercial site for all of my Celtic art merchandise, just as I did with the Retropolis site for the retro-futuristic side of my brain.

I had meant to finish the Celtic Art Works site before the holidays last year… but Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual just wouldn’t let me go. This year, I’m making a stand.

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

But on Wednesday I plan to sit back down with The Lair of the Clockwork Book, where I’ll remain for a couple of months as I keep illustrating weeks out ahead of what you see on the Thrilling Tales site. With the occasional diversion into the ten million sidebars I have to write for The Celtic Art Works, I should get where I need to be on time, on all fronts. I think.

I hope to be able to (soon!) show you a pretty neat thing that I hinted about back in April – a tie-in with something that’s so much more popular than I’ve ever been that I feel a little funny about showing up with it at the dance. Shouldn’t be too much longer. I’m sure I’ll have this cummerbund figured out by then.

On the slopes of the volcano Fremrinamur in a remote and ashy part of Iceland where only mad scientists thumb through the real estate section of the local paper, the Space Patrol has established its camp around the well defended tower of mad Doctor Rognvald. Here we’re very near the beginning of Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS… although in a total refusal to conform I’m actually about a quarter of the way done with that story’s illustrations.

You can click the picture above to initiate an explosive form of embiggification which, although terrifying, is Entirely Safe When Used as Directed.

This is the second illustration in the story. I still haven’t managed the first one: I guess I can’t take the pressure. But anyhow I’m nearing the end of this weeks-long excursion into TWO BRAINS so soon I’ll reset my own brain, and get back to The Lair of the Clockwork Book.

Come to think of it, during those last anxious weeks of the Clockwork Book I never realized that I’d passed the halfway mark. Over half those illustrations are done now… when I include a bunch that you haven’t seen yet, but I have.

There is a web project that I really need to make some progress on, and I’ve been asked to do an illustration for something else, too. So once I’ve finished two more of the TWO BRAINS pictures I’ll probably try to race through those two things before the big reset.

Work proceeds apace on Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS while I watch the pages update in The Lair of the Clockwork Book. Here we see Gwen, who is not completely happy about what she’s learning from Doctor Temiar.

"Apace", I think, is just vague enough to suit because in the nature of things I work wildly but slowly on new scenes or characters, then produce the illustrations just as wildly but quite a bit faster; then rinse and repeat. I spent about a week on Doctor Temiar’s office only to find that you’ll never even see parts of it since the final shots worked better if I concentrated on one side of the room.

That’s because here I’m continuing something I’ve played with in the Clockwork Book illustrations, which is to (often) follow the rules of continuity editing as we go from page to page. I’m not welding myself to those rules; in fact with an interactive story like TWO BRAINS it’s sometimes impossible, or at least unusually difficult; but I’m trying; and I am also indulging, I see, in a large number of semicolons; this is due, I am sure, to the fact that I’m re-reading Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin books.

Whew.

Anyway this is part of Gwen’s main branch in the story, which soon after this point splits again into two additional branches in that branchy way these things happen. I started with a bunch of illustrations that come late in the story; here I’ve reined myself in, and I’m much nearer the beginning.

Along with all the other things I need to do as I work on these illustrations, at the end of each batch of them I re-render a few in a higher resolution in order to slap them on archival prints, t-shirts, and other gimcracks as Thrilling Tales merchandise at my Retropolis web site.

This time I was more clever than usual, in one way, anyhow: I set up scheduled renderings for about five of the new Clockwork Book illustrations – so that when I got to this point I’d only need to do the Photoshop work on them. That has helped. But these are likely to trickle out over the weeks since I’m also working away at the new illustrations for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS.

For now, anyway, I’ve added a couple of T-Shirts – The Astro Diner shirt shown above, and another shirt with Osgood Finnegan’s airship. In fact there are also diner mugs and airship mugs, along with a poster and an archival print of Late Night At the Astro Diner.

Along the way I’ve noticed a subtle but annoying problem in one part of the Retropolis store. It’s not a problem for you – not functionally, anyway – but the breadcrumbs and sidebars aren’t doing the magical things they used to do. I have an idea why that is, but I can’t fix it at the moment.

But there it is: some new bits of the Thrilling Tales on neat things, presented almost neatly. More to follow, if on an erratic schedule.

As you see, our friend Osgood Finnegan is sailing off in his airship and that, I have decided, is my cue to switch back to my work on The Toaster With TWO Brains.

I haven’t completely filled the Clockwork Book buffer – I’m constantly banging my head against Zeno’s paradox, here – but in order to do the next two illustrations (thereby to catch up) I’d have to create two new characters. Due to the length of time I’d spend on that, by the time I’d "caught up" I wouldn’t, in fact, have caught up. I’d need to do several more illustrations to make up that time in filling my ever-dwindling buffer of complete illustrations.

It’s just bad luck, really. It’s got to do with what I’d need to build right now. Over time the hours would average out, I’d be happily caught up in all actuality… while the birds sang, and the bees buzzed, and Osgood’s airship would sail on with its favorable wind.

But I’m tired of chasing the buffer. I’m going to swap over to my other story while I’m still two pictures short, and just take a week off The Toaster With TWO BRAINS at the end of its part of the schedule.

If I hadn’t had to model the airship I’d have been back on track this past weekend: but after that, the two new characters are just too much to bear.

This is my decree.

As you’ll see in (um, lemme do the math there, well, okay, I dunno)… a while*, Osgood Finnegan will be making his return in The Lair of the Clockwork Book: older, perhaps not wiser, but certainly more knowledgeable than he was when we last saw him.

This is the first time I’ve created an aged version of an existing, younger character. It was pretty interesting: more so, I guess, since I didn’t do what you might suggest by just retexturing his young head. I wanted to experiment with a new tool that has some nice features and in order to do that I had to start more or less from scratch. So far nothing’s exploded and I’m happy with the results. Fingers crossed.

JhJHGJ Kg;g hgl;ghghfd ssf?

Okay, not a great idea to type with my fingers crossed. Life is so complicated.

My lateness in this part of the schedule means that in order to catch up I need to build a bunch of other new things; that will no doubt push me back even a bit later. Eventually, though, I’ll catch up. The good thing is that I’m doing all of this so far in advance that it hasn’t any effect at all on the publication schedule. The only thing that gets delayed is my temporary return to The Toaster With TWO BRAINS, which I really would like to be working on right about now. But that’s the way it goes.

I’m still working away at the new illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book – mostly – but I had to set aside a little time to finish this piece, an entry for a Starbucks contest at DeviantArt. Really, I had to. I had enough time invested in it already that it would have been wasteful to be more responsible and stick to what I really should have been doing. Besides, there’s some neat swag. And I do like my swag.

Whatever happens in the contest, though, I have plans for at least one of the elements in this picture… because shortly before I got to work on the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual site I had an idea for a series of travel posters from the Retropolis Travel Bureau. I still want to do those, but the Thrilling Tales have turned out to be a pretty demanding project. So I haven’t been able to, yet.

But anyhow, on the Thrilling Tales front I am indeed gradually filling up my buffer of illustrations for the Clockwork Book, so that before too long I should be able to go back to Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS as planned. But since I’m late in filling that buffer it’s now getting used as I go: in order to have my roughly 32 unseen pages banked in advance, I have to keep making even more till the buffer’s full. The longer it takes, the more I have to do. Math is cruel.

Anyway, at the right is a little snippet from something that’s coming up for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. I know you need proof, and I don’t blame you: it’s because I’ve got these shifty eyes.

While The Lair of the Clockwork Book isn’t exactly headed off into the sunset, I am just now finishing the last illustration for its upcoming story; you’ll be seeing the new pages over a sixteen week period starting in early June. I’m really pleased with this new series of illustrations and, naturally enough, I hope that you will be, too.

Over the next week I’ll be entering the story data for those weeks’ worth of updates and I plan to revisit two of the pictures that I still think could be made a bit better.

This second series will begin to appear (on schedule!) on June 2. But I’m not quite done in there yet because before I can rewire my brain for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS I need to make sure that the Clockwork Book buffer is around 32 updates ahead of what’s appeared so far on the site. In a Zenolike bit of scheduling, that’s a moving target: the longer it takes me to fill the buffer, the longer I have to keep at it because the pages are updating as I go. I do expect to catch up to the tortoise before the middle of June. But then I’m no Achilles, am I?

I’m just two illustrations away from completing the next story for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. Okay, make that one-and-a-somethingth illustrations: my computer’s rendering away as I type this.

I’m still not really on schedule; I’ve got a dozen or so more to do before I’ve got enough pages in my buffer that I’ll be able to go back to The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. But I think I’ve made up some of the time I lost when I took about a week each to do two (yep, two) of these pictures. I’m not completely sure why that happened… but there were technical problems, stubborn lighting issues, and what all, which in this case meant that I got ill for a few days in the middle of everything. Those two pictures could be the whole reason I’m running late.

In fact, I want to go back and rework two more before they start to go live at the Thrilling Tales site. Next week will be a busy one, though I realize that doesn’t actually mean it’ll be different from, say, this week.

This won’t show at all to you, of course. It just means that I’ll stick with the Clockwork Book for a bit longer than I’d planned in this part of the schedule, for however long it takes for me to get 32 pages ahead of what’s been published at the site.

As far as what you can see of The Lair of the Clockwork Book, we’re nearly through the story of Osgood Finnegan (which is the first story of Osgood Finnegan, as you’ll see later). I rewrote large parts of that one just before I added it to the site and I’m still a little worried about the fact that it’s different in tone… for reasons that are quite necessary, but which still worry me a little. I’ll feel a little more comfortable when we get started on the one pictured here since it’s back in the "present" of 2039, where I feel a little more at home.