Thrilling Tales: Clockwork Book Update

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I don’t do a lot of analytical thinking about where a story is between its first draft and the point where the changes I can make aren’t making the story better any more. What I seem to get are these stages:

1. First Draft! Woooo!

2. OhMyGodWe’reAllGoingToDie

3. All done

Number 2 can go on for quite awhile.

But today The Lair of the Clockwork Book has come out of the OhMyGodWe’reAllGoingToDie stage and hovers at what I guess is about Step 2.9: I’ve made all the big changes, medium sized changes, and tiny polishing changes that I’ve ever meant to do. So the sensible thing is to leave it alone for a day and then give it another complete read-through (it’s always difficult to read it like I’ve never read it before) before what I think will be a final polishing stage. Of course, my mileage may vary.

But the upshot is that I’m now very close to the point where I can start in on the illustrations. Once I’ve got about 24 of those done the story can go live, a page at a time, at the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual site. And I can then turn back to Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS – until I start to run low on Clockwork Book illustrations, anyhow.

The interesting ride that is that plan will be starting… sooner, now, if not yet soon.

Igor Sez: The Mug-O-Matic ith Online and Ready to Make Mugth, Mathter!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Web Development, Works in Progress

Through the liberal use of lasers, faceted coprolites, sub-aetheric rays, and a 3/8" open end wrench, I’ve now completed the MUG-O-MATIC edition of Cornelius Zappencackler’s Pulp Sci-Fi Title-O-Tron. It’s glowing where it ought to be glowing and it doesn’t make that high-pitched noise that attracted the squirrels any more.

Though I always liked that part, myself.

So you, too, adventurer, can now harness the awesome power that is the Mug-O-Matic: it randomly generates the titles of pulp science fiction stories that don’t exist, but often ought to*, and then it slaps your favorite titles onto coffee mugs, travel mugs, and mugs of other mysterious and malevolent kinds that it were not well to mention here.

Okay, not really: I just got tired of listing them. Fun little toy, though!

*every now and then it manages to re-create a title that does, in fact., exist. Which is even stranger than the thing with the squirrels.

Coming Soon: Custom Random Title Mugs from the Title-O-Tron

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

This isn’t online yet, but I’m sort of jazzed about it anyway: I worked out a way to connect my Thrilling Tales Pulp Sci Fi Title-O-Tron to my online shop, so that by clicking on a title you can automagically generate a coffee mug with that title on it.

So soon you’ll have a chance to create mugs with a Thrilling Tales logo and, say, "The Astronomer That Misplaced the Galaxy", or "The Airship of the Phantom Horde", or even "The Great Cephalopod of the Moon". Which (as I calculate it) will make your life complete. No thanks are necessary: I do this for the good of Humankind.

I’ve got practically no control over the typography, unfortunately, but when I’ve spiffied up the mug backdrop and made a pretty web interface for it this should be going into my Retropolis site in the coffee mugs section.

This picture’s from a screen grab of the whole astonishing mechanism in action. It’s aliiiiive!

UPDATE: The Mug-O-Matic is now live!

Thrilling Tales: Lair of the Clockwork Book Draft is Done!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Pardon me while I dance the happy dance: I know it’s not a pretty sight, but humor me, please.

This morning I finished the first draft for my Thrilling Tales story The Lair of the Clockwork Book.

You can continue to visualize the happy dance going on, here, though I honestly can’t recommend it. Now "finishing" the first draft really means that now I have to go through it and destroy everything that makes it a first draft. With a notable lack of mercy and steely determination, if not thews, for which, I’m afraid, it is too late to hope.

And it’s only once I’ve done those things that I’ll start the main event, which is working on the… um.. roughly 120 illustrations, which I’ll be doing a couple of dozen at a time.

In spite of my worries about my page count it’s come in at pretty much the right length: at two updates a week the story will run for about 60 weeks on the web and come in at just about the right number of pages for the print edition. So it’s all good.

Anyway, the short version (too late!) is: first draft done, lots of work to do, then pictures, which take forever, and, of course, happy dance. I’ve gotta quit doing that.

Thrilling Tales Begets the WORLDS GREATEST MEGALOMANIAC mug, in both Girly and Manly Editions

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’ve just committed the opposite of product placement. I can’t swear to it that I’m the first, so I won’t claim to have invented it.

While I was working on the Thrilling Tales script for The Lair of the Clockwork Book, I wrote in a coffee mug with "World’s Greatest Megalomaniac" printed on it. And having written it, I found that it wanted to exist. So now it does: twice over, in fact.

The Girly Edition Megalomaniac mug features a young lady with goggles and a ray gun that may not be approved for use by young ladies. I’m not sure: etiquette confuses me. I’m especially happy to have done this one because lately I’ve been getting requests for Mad Scientists of the female persuasion, especially girls. So I’m doing my bit here to encourage more of our young ladies to build giant robots and death rays. Somebody’s got to do it.

There’s also a Manly Edition Megalomaniac mug for the hidebound traditionalists among you. There’s plenty of world domination to go around, folks: no need to get competitive.

Anyway, these are just the thing for cowing your subordinates at work or down in the bomb shelter. Drink up! Shirts are likely to follow.

Thrilling Tales: an excerpt from The Lair of the Clockwork Book, with Captain Bonnie Scarlet

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

"Excuse me," Bonnie said to a passerby, "Which way to the Experimental Research District?" And then, like all sensible people, she went the other way.

The District represented one successful approach to innovation. If you took every wild-eyed scientist with a lab full of explosively inventive progress and then shoved them into the same small neighborhood, it was argued, they would tend only to hurt themselves, each other, and their assistants. There would always be civilian casualties, of course, but it was so much easier to keep those to a minimum if the threats were all crowded together. The apparent danger of one immense, coordinated incident was considered small because the occupants of the District tended toward self regulation of the kind that starts with "Fenwick’s project may be more remarkable than mine!" and ends with "Good old Fenwick. When shall we see his like again?"

The curious thing is that the District, in spite of its frequent disasters and the resulting unfortunate turnover in its population, had grown steadily in what Retropolitans often referred to as a quite literal explosion of scientific research, or, for short, as "the big boom".

The Air Safety Association had a special squad trained to deal with the District. That training, although Bonnie did not know it, was concentrated on a very large, top secret manual entitled "Things We Have Run From, and How To Run From Them". So the Myrmidon’s advice had been good, in its way: the authorities tried just as hard as anyone else to keep their business out of the District. But Bonnie had no intention of going where the Clockwork Book so clearly wanted her to go.

This had been planned for.

The Lair of the Clockwork Book, and Other Stories

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Now if you’re of a cynical bent I know that you’ll look at this picture and tell yourself "That’s it, then: he’s just sitting around in the Secret Laboratory and playing poker with his robots". But that would be so unfair!

This morning I got oh, so close to the halfway mark on my draft for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. And although it is a draft – and has all the problems you expect from such an animal – I’m really pleased with the way it’s shaping up. It all needs polish and there are at least two scenes that need some important rework. But I’m happy so far.

It’s a complicated beast: viewed one way, it’s an anthology of short stories from Retropolis. But all of the stories are tied together by a common thread: so viewed another way, it’s one big, meandering story. Add to that the not-quite-rigid formats for the web version (updates twice a week) and the print version (a frightening relationship between the page count and the cost of the full color books) and the whole thing becomes a sort of ecosystem whose parts need to stay in balance. Which sounds sort of scary, but in fact is kind of neat.

The math for the production schedule is likewise interesting. Once the script is ready I’ll start in on the illustrations. When about two dozen of those are done, the story will go live at the Thrilling Tales web site and I’ll reformat my brain to get back to work on Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. When I start to run low on Clockwork Book updates I’ll do another reset and work my way through another two dozen Clockwork Book illustrations. And so on.

If everything works out you’ll see twice-weekly Clockwork Book updates at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual while I still manage to complete Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. And there won’t ever be a hitch or delay. Or so I think.

Starting… when? I still don’t know. I hope to start illustrating The Lair of the Clockwork Book sometime in the next few weeks. How long, though, before the updates start at the web site.. this I can’t yet predict. My best guess is that the story will start before the end of this year, continue to its end in Spring of 2012, and then transmogrify into a book. In fact, at least the second TWO BRAINS book should be out long before the complete Clockwork Book sees print.

We’ll see if that’s how it happens :).

Thrilling Tales: Seven New Characters! Arbitrary Rocket Animation! And… Scripts!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I hadn’t exactly planned on it, but most of my Thrilling Tales work over the Summer turned out to be making and setting up a new group of characters for the upcoming stories. I finished up the seventh character on Saturday, and on Sunday and Monday morning I celebrated by doing something completely different: this animated shot of one of my open cockpit roadster rockets in flight. It’s just a disconnected shot, of course: I think it wants to be part of a promo for my Retropolis web site. I’ll probably let it have its way, eventually.

But as fun as this was to tinker with… I do have actual work to do on the Thrilling Tales stories. During some re-rendering and compression this morning I did just what I probably should have been doing all along, which is to get back to work on the outlines and scripts for the stories.

What I did over the Summer really was productive, though, and not just because I needed the characters for my illustrations. Because as I worked on them my brain was exploring just how I want the two stories to work. And it was only when I started to know these characters better by working on them that I truly saw what they were about, and what they’d do, and how they’d do it. Al Bowwly and his rocket pack were a major revelation.

So this morning I wrote up a new, more complete outline for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. I’m now looking forward to working on the script itself… but the highest priority, as I’ve said before, is the script and the first illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. That non-interactive story is the one I need to get up on the site first, with regular updates every week, as I start to illustrate the new Toaster With TWO BRAINS story. Whatever its name is. I still don’t know.

So anyway it’s on to the Clockwork Book outline next, and then to its script(s). That means there won’t be much work to share just yet… maybe I’ll work up some set pieces with the new characters in the meantime. For now, though, I recommend a quick trip in my rocket. It did wonders for me!

Harry Roy Reminds Me That Character Skinning Isn’t Always Torture

Filed under Computer Graphics, Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

In spite of what I said yesterday about how much I hate skinning characters to their skeletons, every now and then I do get to smile. My latest trick is to skin the characters not only to bones, but to splines that are (sometimes) also skinned to some of the same bones.

So when Harry’s chest and waist were getting pulled back and forth between warring bones I extracted some splines from his model, skinned those splines to parts of his skeleton, and added the splines to the bones that control Harry himself.

Then I adjusted the influence of those splines to even out the skinning and lock down the chest and waist lines – which are structural parts of his clothing, among other things.

This is a lot like what I’ve lately been doing with faces. The 3DS Max UI does a lousy job of displaying the splines’ envelopes, but since I can see the results on the model that’s not a huge problem.

The biggest downside seems to be that if you intend to edit the splines, as I’m doing in my faces, it’s not a great technique for animation because it’s hard to keyframe the shapes of the splines*. I guess you could create morph targets for the splines, which is a thought, but I so rarely do animation that I’m not worrying about that for now.

One reason this might be nice for animation, though, is that you can use the splines to simulate the way surfaces like skin or cloth slide over the more rigid surfaces they cover. That’s sort of what’s happening here already.

*Oh, there might be a way, but I don’t seem to be clever enough to work it out.

Thrilling Tales: New Characters, Pesky Logistics, and Imaginary Robot Assistants

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I really seem to be on a roll with my new characters even though I know I that I ought to be working on the Thrilling Tales scripts, instead.

In one way it doesn’t matter. I mean, we’re going to reach the finish line at the same time, regardless of what I do first. But on the other hand I know that I need to start posting the Clockwork Book stories as soon as possible and all this character setup (a lot of which is for the other story, Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS) isn’t helping me to start posting those any earlier.

But I do hate to break my streak.

If I could just build ’em, I’d be pretty happy. But I have to skin the characters to their skeletons and that, as I think I’ve mentioned, is a task that I really don’t enjoy. Probably because I’m not that good at it.

Along the way I’ve worked out a completely different way to skin their faces. It’s a little wonky, but it’s giving me much better results. So I also know that at some point I need to go back to my recurring characters and reskin their faces the new way. Oh joy.

I think what I need is servants. Though I just got a little nervous when I remembered that there’s a name for servants that you don’t need to pay. Oops. Okay, what I need is a Faithful Robot Character Setter Upper, or, as I have just decided we ought to say it, an FRCSU. Does Roomba do that?