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.

At Kickstarter: Unidentified Funny Objects #5

Filed under Found on the Web

With stories (so far) by David Gerrold, Mike Resnick, Gini Koch, Jody Lynn Nye, Tim Pratt, Esther Friesner, Shaenon K. Garrity, and Laura Resnick, Unidentified Funny Objects #5 aims to continue UFO Publishing’s hilarious attempt at world domination – and so will unleash an Unstoppable Humor Machine in November, with a little help from you.

The Kickstarter project offers rewards that range from eBooks of previous humor anthologies ($5) through a paperback copy of UFO #5 ($20) and then rears up in its gel-filled tank to snap at unsuspecting lab assistants with a horrifying (though funny) head at the end of its colorful (though repulsive) neck with additional rewards that include original art and full sets of UFO Publishing’s eleven volumes of hilarity. And then there’s other stuff that wouldn’t even fit into a sentence that went on as long as that last one.

My rediscovery of humorous science fiction started with Henry Kuttner’s Robots Have No Tails and it isn’t done yet with the stories of Fredric Brown, only because there are so many of them. So I’m really happy to see people continuing that tradition with all-new stories in this crowdfunded series of anthologies. Be the first on your block to own one!

A collection of science fiction art by Alex Schomburg at The Golden Age

Filed under Found on the Web

The Golden Age has posted a small collection of science fiction book covers and endpapers by Alex Schomburg (Alejandro Schomburg y Rosa), best remembered for these and for his extensive work for Timely Comics in the 1940’s. Timely would later become Marvel Comics.

Born in Puerto Rico, he came to New York in the 1920’s and began his career in illustration in the decade that followed.

Schomburg was a Hugo Award nominee in 1962 and went on to collect many other awards during the 1980’s before finally receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the 47th World Science Fiction Convention in 1989.

Of the pictures in this Golden Age collection I think I’m most fond of the endapaper design above. But you can see many other pieces (with an emphasis on his work for comics) at the Alex Schomburg Estate web site.

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.

Andrew Liptak on C. L. Moore

Filed under Found on the Web

Andrew Liptak has posted an article about C. L. Moore over at Kirkus. The article – like the author herself – is well worth your time.

It’s hard to separate Moore from her collaborations with her first husband, Henry Kuttner. There’s something so appealing about the image of one of them typing away on a story and then getting up for a moment, only to have the other one sit down at the typewriter to continue, that it’s easy to forget that she had already made it as a pulp writer before they met.

She said later that she used her initials not to masquerade as a man, but so that her employers wouldn’t figure out that she was writing on the side. Another wonderful image is of this quiet secretary typing stories for Weird Tales after hours in the balcony that overlooked the bank where she worked.

If those early stories seem a bit overwrought today it’s only because she adapted so well to the Weird Tales house style; so much so that she was admired not just by hopefuls like the young Kuttner but also by the stars of that magazine, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. As time went on and tastes changed she also changed, as you can see in the stories she wrote with Kuttner under their numerous pen names through the 1940s and the early 1950s.

Catherine Moore isn’t quite forgotten; she’s just more forgotten than she ought to be. Her estate (and Kuttner’s) is doing a pretty good job of keeping her work in print. You just need to look for it.

In the meantime, pop over to Kirkus and let Andrew Liptak explain to you why you should.

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!

Writing Excuses, season eleven: ‘Elemental Genre’

Filed under Found on the Web

If you haven’t listened to the Writing Excuses podcast, you should know that it’s not only useful to writers. It is mostly useful to writers. But I think it’s also of interest to readers who’d like to know how stories work.

Okay, fair warning: there’s a lot to be said for not knowing how stories work. The more you understand about the mysterious innards of just about any thing, the harder it is to just sit back and enjoy that thing. You see that a lot if you happen to know people who work in film or television.

But if you’re the kind of person who will read the ingredients on a package of chorizo and still buy it, the Writing Excuses podcast is pretty interesting.

This month kicks off Season Eleven, whose topic is what Mary Robinette Kowal, Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells are calling “Elemental Genre”.

This isn’t the genre you probably expect. They’re not discussing “Bookshelf Genres” like mystery, romance, science fiction, or fantasy: they’re looking at themes and tropes that work independently of those categories. So, for example, Ant-Man is a superhero movie that’s also a heist film.

There are a gazillion kinds of stories that can be told in any Bookshelf Genre. And inside any one of those gazillion stories you find threads and subplots and themes that play to different sets of expectations: there may be romance within, well, anything; or elements of mystery, or horror, or adventure.

Season Eleven kicks off this week with an introduction to the whole idea. That’d be a swell place to start what looks like a pretty great season.