A T-shirt for The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett; a stealth t-shirt sale; and other news

Filed under Works in Progress

You won’t see the first page of The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett until June 15 – that’s a little over a month from now – but I defy the tyrannical strictures of the calendar. And, possibly, rationality itself. So I’ve add some Doctor Brackett T-Shirts over at Retropolis.

I mean, do we serve the calendar? Or does the calendar serve us?

Join me in my little uprising against uncompromising time, won’t you? You can stick it to our oppressors here.

As an added incentive, there’s a stealth sale going on there too. Through May 18 you can save $5 on a t-shirt order of $30 or more by using the coupon code TAKE5NOW during checkout. That code works at Retropolis and the Celtic Art Works, and also on t-shirts you make with my Pulp-O-Mizer.

Defy time and save money!

In other news, I just discovered that there’s an actual pre-order page at Amazon (and only there, I think) for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. No cover image (which is pretty reasonable, since I haven’t done a final one yet) and no real information: just a lonely, blank image in an expanse of pretty much nothing. Still, hey! A pre-order page! It’s neat.

Get free standard shipping on T-shirts from Retropolis and The Celtic Art Works

Filed under Works in Progress

I guess things must be warming up outside the Secret Laboratory because through May 1st you can get free standard shipping on orders of two T-shirts or more from Retropolis and The Celtic Art Works. That usually doesn’t happen before the lawn needs to be mowed… hence my conclusion about the temperature. Maybe I’ll poke my head out the window and find out.

Just use the super-secret coupon code TWOWOO when you check out. And you know what’s even more super-secret? You can do the same thing on T-shirt orders from the Pulp-O-Mizer.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: a mildly informative update

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

If you’ve been wondering what’s going on with Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, well… so was I, for awhile. I thought I had reasonable expectations for how speedily the publishing industry moves. In this I was mistaken.

But March and April have seen a sudden burst of activity, a new release date, and the slow transition from my recent no expectations to my current cautious reserve.

The book’s new publication date – which I still consider a pleasant daydream – is March of 2017.

That date is looking more likely these days because the sales department has taken an interest. At some point their interest will turn into intent, penetrating looks directed at any part of the book that isn’t moving toward the release date, and once those intent, penetrating looks start darting around I think we can be pretty confident about the date. Nobody wants to get looks like those.

I’ve finished a couple of rough layouts for the book jacket and I expect I might start getting some looks of my own once everybody’s had a chance to see them. The dust jacket designs were a genuine blast to work on: they’re wraparound designs, so each one is a big picture that’s made up of five smaller rectangles that also need to work on their own. I really enjoyed working on them.

No, you can’t see them.

But I am looking at them while I’m typing – which is actually pretty difficult – and I can tell you that we’re probably going to have a pretty nice cover.

In the meantime we can look forward to The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, the serial that should start up in June at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Purloined Patents will kick off a series of short serials that’ll run into February of next year. So there’s a lot to look forward to, in just a little while.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: now an international sensation

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

I can’t guarantee what kind of sensation that is; and if it’s the sensation of clammy tentacles slithering into your ear, well, I refuse to take responsibility. That’s on the record.

But I just ran across this announcement from the St. Martin’s Press catalog of upcoming titles. It delighted and surprised me, and I enjoyed that sensation. So maybe you will too.

Between you and me and the entire Internet, that’s not the release date; and when I did a quick count I came up a little short on jet-packed heroes, plucky rocket engineers, and bubble-helmeted canine companions – though maybe my editor wants to talk to me about them. Could be a subtle message.

But despite those discrepancies, nice to see!

Embossed leather journals with one of my Celtic Art pentacle designs

Filed under Works in Progress

Last year I licensed one of my Celtic art designs to a company that makes embossed leather journals for both retail and wholesale customers. These showed up awhile back on the wholesale site; I’ve been waiting for them to appear at the retail site before I posted about them.

The upper picture’s from the web site. Down below there’s one I took of the sample they sent me.

This is a variation on a pentacle design that I did about fifteen years ago. It’s one of the most popular of my Celtic designs, and it’s also so widely pirated that I doubt I’ll ever do anything like it again. The problem we faced here is that the image never existed as a line drawing, and what you need for the embossing die is a simple line art treatment.

The original image was painted directly in Photoshop and now, so many years later, I only have a few of its layers isolated. So an artist at the company reverse engineered a line art version so that they’d have one.

It’s a really nice job – it’s much better than I expected – and the only quibble I’d make is that we lost the dragons in the wide circular band. Chances are they had so many tiny details that they just weren’t practical here, so they’ve been replaced with a pattern of spirals. The dragons in the corners did survive, though, and I guess that was a heck of a lot of dragons anyway.

You can just see in the second picture how the cover wraps around into a flap behind the latch. The back cover and flap are also embossed (though not with designs by me) and there’s even a narrow stripe of knotwork that runs around the spine and the outer edge of the flap. I’m really pleased with them.

The journals are available in brown or in black, with 120 pages of handmade linen paper, at $32.95 each.

More graphic snippets of early 2016; now explained!

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

Twice, since December, I’ve posted some mysterious cropped images from things I’ve been working on (here and here); and each time I’ve posted them without any explanation. Today makes the third time. But today, guess what? I’m going to tell you what they are.

Starting in June I’m going to serialize a series of short stories at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Now, the Thrilling Tales site is mostly known these days for the Pulp-O-Mizer. That’s because I haven’t run a real serial over there since the conclusion of The Lair of the Clockwork Book. But that will change in June, when you’ll see the first of five stories set in the Retropolis Registry of Patents.

That’s a department of government that oversees patent registrations for the city’s Experimental Research District, from which all Mad Science flows; but the Registry also has a secret purpose that Registry Officers and Investigators never mention in public. Because that’s what you do with a secret purpose.

I just finished the first draft for the fifth story; twenty-one of these stories’ thirty-four illustrations are also done. After the fifth Registry story there may also be a stand-alone story, but you won’t see the conclusion of the Registry of Patents series until they’re all collected in print and eBook form sometime next year.

That collection will contain all six of the Registry stories plus three or four other stories about Retropolis. They’ll all be pretty profusely illustrated.

I’m making some format changes for this series. Past Thrilling Tales have featured updates (that is, web pages) with a wide variation in word counts. That’s caused problems when it came to laying out their print editions. Some serious problems. So this time each week’s story update will run pretty close to one thousand words, with an illustration.

That makes the book layouts much easier to handle even though it still results in one heck of a lot of illustrations. Which, seen one way, is nice. But it means that my nose has been pressed into my monitor for the past few months; and my nose is likely to stay there for awhile longer.

The new stories will also feature illustrations in black and white, as you’ve been seeing. The cost of the full color illustrations in my earlier books put a lot of limitations on where and how you can buy them. Also, I’ve decided that Black and White Is Cool.

So that’s it. That’s what I’ve been doing, and what I’m still doing, and you ought see it for real in June when we begin with The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett.

Unexplained graphic snippets of early 2016

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

If you’ve been following along you may remember that late last year I posted some snippets of illustrations; and I posted them without any explanation at all. You may have hoped that by now I’d explain them.

In this, you would be wrong.

Instead, here are some additional unexplained graphic bits and pieces.

Some of my covers for The Runestaff (1981-1985)

Filed under Can't Stop Thinking, Works in Progress

Yesterday’s post of pen and ink drawings I did for The Runestaff proved to be so popular over on Facebook that I figured I should follow up with more.

As I explained before, though, most of the drawings were auctioned off in fundraisers for the newsletter. I could only find about three or four more originals that I liked well enough to share. So instead I picked through the back issues and chose ten of the covers, which I’ve scanned right off the newsletters themselves.

That means that today’s quality isn’t as high. These covers are over thirty years old, and they were just photocopies even when they were young. But all the same, here they are.

I had plenty to say yesterday about my memories of The Runestaff. I doubt I have much to add here. So today, it’s mostly the pictures. As before there are so many of them that I’ve placed most under the “More” link below.

Some of my drawings for The Runestaff (1981-1985)

Filed under Can't Stop Thinking, Works in Progress

I guess I’ve only done a couple of retrospectives here at my blog. I have a kind of sheepish attitude about my oldest work, as you may have seen, in spite of that very early work being more visible than a lot of what I did afterwards. But today I’ve put together some slightly later work from the 1980’s. This is stuff that I remember with less embarrassment.

From 1981 through 1985, I first helped edit, and then edited, The Runestaff. This was a newsletter for the Barbarian Freehold Alliance, a large household within the Society for Creative Anachronism.

Freeholders were less interested in re-enacting the feudal system and more interested in cultures from the early Middle Ages. And… in parties: even when we were out of favor with the local feudals they still always came to our revels. Which were epic, as I recall. And we fought, of course, though not necessarily under the banners of the kingdoms where we lived. Sometimes we fought for the highest bidder, even when the bidding was in cookies.

Anyway, from its first issue through its thirty-fourth I drew most of the illustrations and covers for the little magazine, and I also wrote quite a bit of its content. While I don’t still have the originals for all of those drawings (most were auctioned off to support the newsletter and, well, me) I do still have some of them. I’ve gone through my stacks and scanned a selection of those drawings here.

Because there are so many images I’ve put most of them after the jump. So jump!

Unexplained graphic snippets of late 2015

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

Here are a few little graphic non sequiturs; they’re just tiny cropped bits of some things that I’m working on. Because I felt like almost showing them.

My work here is done.