Over at Spoonflower I’ve posted 14 celtic knotwork designs which you can buy there on a whole bunch of fabrics, on wallpaper, or on giftwrap.
There are some all-over repeating patterns, some panels with bold knotwork stripes, some more painterly work (hint:drapes), and a couple of stitch-them-yourself banners (seen below) with my crazy Celtic pirate flag and the Chaos Star.
Happy September!
So now I’m a one-month veteran at Patreon, and with any luck I know what I’m doing. Here’s what Patrons can expect to see this month:
Fauxliens from Outer Space is a 4700 word short story I wrote early this year. It was vaguely inspired by the Sector General stories of James White. It appears here for the first time.
Two print-resolution Celtic knotwork borders at greeting card size, with transparent areas inside the borders. If you have image editing software you can place your own picture or message inside the border. (These are for personal use only.)
Morno’s Masterpiece is a four-page illustrated story that was published in 1977 in a comic book called JAM: An Album of Fables. It’s not really a comics story, but what can I do about that now?
Robot Indentures in Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom is an article that looks at the way robots are produced and financed in my city of Retropolis, and why I thought that was a way we might handle intelligent mechanical people.
So, as before, $15 patrons will see something every week while the rest will see one, two, or three updates. I hope you enjoy them!
I’ve had an encouraging response to my Original Art page here, and as a result I fared back into my Scary Storage Room to dig out some more of my work from the 1980’s. The room’s not empty, but I don’t think I’ll find much more of this stuff in there.
For now, anyway, I’ve added 20 new ink and ink-and-wash drawings to the page.
There are a few more illustrations for the Leslie Fish/Rudyard Kipling songbook, Cold Iron; more illustrations and cover art for Runestaff; and some odds and ends like three numbered prints of my cover for issue #51 of The Folk Harp Journal (shown) and my title page illustration for Pat macSwyney’s book Celtic Ceilidh for Dulcimer.
If that’s not something for everybody, well, it’s the closest thing I have. Take a look!
If you’ve read my last post you know already that I’m in a difficult situation; you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m trying out some creative solutions to my problems. The first of these is a page at Patreon where you can to subscribe to a monthly supply of content.
There are tiers at $1, $5, $10, and $15. The highest-level patrons will get something from me every week, while the $1 patrons will see just one of the updates.
The big benefits of the $15 level are (for the first year or so) print-resolution Celtic knotwork greeting card images. They’ve got transparent areas so that you can add your own images to sit inside the borders’ frames.
Whenever I run out of those (or when you get tired of them) I’ll come up with something else.
The rest of the content includes unpublished or obscure stories, some illustrated poems by me and by dead people like William Butler Yeats, and some first drafts (which I don’t usually share) with my own notes that explain what’s wrong with them. There are also some less-classifiable things that date all the way back to the 1970’s.
I hope you’ll have a look at the page and consider supporting my work at one level or another. I’ll try to make sure it’s worth your while!
(I’m not sure how to tell this one briefly, or with much humor. Sorry about that. It’s just not a brief or funny story.)
In my twenty-some years on the World Wide Web I’ve read many, many tales of woe. People reach the end of their rope and appeal for help, and I don’t blame them for that: it’s just that I’m not sure it does any good. Not in the long term, anyway.
There’s probably a brief period when folks chip in whatever they can. But I’m always left wondering what the long term effect is, once you expose your vulnerable underbelly and admit that you just can’t make it on your own. Doesn’t that change the way people think about you? In a bad way, I mean? And, once they’ve helped, don’t they expect you to just be okay now?
This may be testosterone talking. But the result is that even though I have a Tale of Woe I’ve always kept it to myself.
That’s changed today. I can’t afford to care what you think any more.
I left the games business earlier than I planned, back in 2005, because I simply couldn’t face another project. The games business really is a place for the young, and it could be I’d had a bad run of luck; but whatever the cause I was just too burned out to keep going on that treadmill of bizarre decisions and endless crunch time and, in my case, plenty of responsibility without any authority at all.
I had an exit strategy: to find an inexpensive home where I could live and build up my online business and pursue only those projects that no one but me was likely to create. This is a pretty good description of what I thought I was here for, but which I’d found so hard to do while working for other people.
So I bought a fixer-upper of a house and started to fix it up; not quickly, but steadily, since I was building up my business at the same time.
It wasn’t easy. But it worked! By 2008 it seemed like everyone on the web was linking to my Retropolis Transit Authority T-shirts and man, oh man, were they selling, that summer!
The thing I laugh about now is that I remember thinking that pretty soon I’d be able to afford health insurance.
Soon after I had that thought, I discovered that I had cancer.
The surprise was that it wasn’t lung cancer. I’d been a smoker for many years. But this was one of the other cancers, one that grows slowly, way down in your guts. You don’t find out about it for a long time.
Apparently you don’t find out about it until you start thinking about health insurance.
I seriously considered foregoing treatment. I really did. Though things were looking up, I couldn’t possibly afford the cost of my care. And I still argue with myself about whether that would have been a better choice.
Anyway, I was talked into treatment by medical professionals. The idea was that if I couldn’t afford it, there would be financial aid for me. And to some extent this was true.
But remember how business was looking up that year? It was, and in addition I had set aside the money for my income taxes. This is a thing that the self-employed do. And so, at the time I became sick, I was not indigent. I just didn’t have enough money to cover the costs of the tests, radiation, surgery, and post-surgical care.
We beat the cancer, which was great. (It’s still gone.) But first the bills wiped me out, and then they kept on coming.
Even at this length I can’t describe to you the full horror of what it’s like to deal with the US health care system when you don’t have insurance. That’s a story in itself.
But in the end, late in 2009, I finally had a single medical debt on which I could make monthly payments. And I kept making those payments until just a few months ago.
I’d been wiped out by the just the first few months of bills. Since I was still uninsured, I now had to meet other monthly expenses as a result of my surgery. My income rose and fell, but those costs were consistent, and I always met them. That meant acquiring other debts along the way.
Obviously, I wasn’t fixing up the house any more. (You can tell).
For nine years I’ve been staying ahead of it all with some success. I even wiped out my non-medical debts once or twice.
But during those years my income has also been dwindling. There have been brief reversals, like the Pulp-O-Mizer’s fifteen minutes of fame, or the book advances for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. Still the trend has always been down, in a month-to-month,white-knuckled race toward the date when I’d qualify for Social Security.
This year I lost the race.
Some of you noticed that I withdrew from the web once Patently Absurd was published. There was nothing I could say that wasn’t horrible, and of course I was trying one thing after another to turn things around.
It was rude of me to avoid responding to those of you who contacted me. But it seemed like the alternative was worse. I didn’t want to lie, but neither did I want to tell you the truth: so I’ve been saying nothing at all. That’s probably worried some of you, and I’m sorry.
As the year’s progressed I’ve defaulted on one bill after another. I’ve finally reached the twin hurdles of my property tax and my mortgage payment.
It seems certain that I’ll lose the house. I will likely try to sell it; but I don’t think I’d even get my equity back. And as for what I’ll do when I don’t have a house, that’s another difficult question. My mortgage payment is actually lower than any rent I might pay. So, yeah, there’s that.
I have to say… for a guy who’s worked on a hopeful future for the last twenty years I don’t seem to have any hope left for myself.
You can’t fix my problems. I don’t expect you to.
But this is still the best of all possible times for you to buy original art (especially!), merchandise from Retropolis and The Celtic Art Works, or copies of Patently Absurd.
I guess my hope is that if I manage to make it through the next few months, and I sell my house and most everything else, I’ll find some way to scale back and survive for a couple of years longer. The first tier of Social Security may not be much, but it’s a lot more than I have coming in now. That lowest tier is still two long years away.
So… this has been my Tale of Woe. I’m sorry I had to share it with you.
It looks like I’ve reached the “Everything Must Go!” stage of my life; because the sad financial reality is that, one way or another, everything really must go.
So I’ve braved my scary storage room and come out again with twenty-six paintings and drawings from the 1980’s which you’ll now find for sale right here at my blog.
There are illustrations from the SCA/Barbarian Freehold Runestaff, the Leslie Fish/Rudyard Kipling Cold Iron songbook, and from a few other places.
So it’s release day for Patently Absurd, and that means heavy drinking a release day race. Right?
Because even though A Day at the Races isn’t anybody’s favorite Marx Brothers film, it’s still a dang site easier to deal with on my blog than Duck Soup or Horse Feathers.
I mean, the last time I had Duck Soup over I had marching soldiers singing “Hail, Hail Freedonia” in here for days. Actual days.
So we’ll stick with the races this time.
Booklist was first past the post this time with their review:
It’s all lighthearted fun and wild invention, but Schenck takes a serious turn in the final story, which brings touching depth to his main characters. A great follow-up to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom (2017).
But they were soon overtaken by SFRevu:
Patently Absurd may not be serious science fiction, but it’s great stuff, and it’s stuffed with the tropes that made the pulp era pulsate like a mutant alien squid, albeit with a nod towards modern sensibilities. Maybe, in its own way, it is serious science fiction, camouflaged as whimsy. No matter what you decide to call it, it’s fun.
And then, like a death ray out of nowhere, came Paul Semel’s interview with me:
I wanted to do something with ordinary people whose jobs made them interact with the mad scientists in the Experimental Research District. So I thought about accountants. I don’t think about accountants that often. I mean, you don’t, do you?
The field’s still wide open: it’s anybody’s race at this point. Look! There’s Utopia State of Mind, racing ’round the bend! And you can’t forget the Toronto Star, where they loved Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom; that review will be here on Saturday. (Hey, this is a marathon, not a sprint, okay?)
And of course the real main event on release day is that you can buy the book now in all of the usual places. And once you read it, don’t be shy: please, please, please review it at Amazon, and at Goodreads, and wherever else books are reviewed.
It’s that time of year when people and web sites look back on the year behind us and draw some conclusions.
According to borg.com, ‘Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom’ is the Best Sci-fi Read of 2017.
I can’t say I think they’re right, but it’s awfully nice of them to see it that way.
Here’s how they justify themselves:
Imaginative, new, and fun, Schenck took us into a timeless world full of nostalgia and classic science fiction. Great tech, and a sprawling story. Interesting characters and great world-building, this novel will be a great surprise for sci-fi readers.
Ah, just when things were going so well.
As we land in the worst shipping week of the year, the ten-year old computer that powers things here in the Secret Laboratory has finally sputtered and died. It was a faithful companion: I’m going to miss it. Especially because at the moment I’m typing on the creaky old laptop that I use downstairs.
That laptop really can’t handle most of the work I do. So I’m forced to build a new outboard brain.
I’ve been hoping to do that for a long time; but as important as my computer is to me, it can’t compete with things like groceries.
So this would be an excellent time to help me out, if that’s your inclination. You can always do that by purchasing merchandise from Retropolis or The Celtic Art Works; but in an extremity like this I’ll also mention that you can contribute directly through Paypal.
I’ve already ordered the things I need; I have to complete the fulfillment of my Kickstarter rewards and finish the promotion for Patently Absurd, and those tasks won’t wait. But anything you can do to help sponsor the Secret Laboratory’s new computer would be very, very welcome.
As always when it’s quiet around here, I’ve been busy. This time I’m working toward the book launch of Patently Absurd. And you can tell!
In fact you can tell all over the place: at Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, and at many of the places where books hang out. The print and eBook versions of Patently Absurd are available for pre-order in lots and lots of places, as you can see at right.
Review copies have gone out to those publications that have really long lead times, like Booklist and The Library Journal; I have two large piles of advance copies that are fated to go elsewhere (some to my Kickstarter backers, some to other reviewers, and some to booksellers). I have some smaller stacks of promotional materials and labels. Don’t even look at my dining room table. Please.
The rest of the world can see the book on March 13 of next year. But, like I mentioned, pre-orders are now a possibility.
For the print edition, I started out with a reduced price of $12.75 (that’s two dollars off the final price) but Barnes & Noble immediately marked it down again; so at the moment you can pre-order the book there for just $9.24. Don’t look at me: they’re wild and crazy over there.
The Ebook pre-order price isn’t discounted anywhere, to my knowledge, but I may run a special for my own pre-orders at Radio Planet Books. We’ll see.
Also, the book now has a presence at Goodreads for your adding and to-reading pleasure.
Radio Planet Books will be selling the eBook editions (you can pre-order there now!) and I’m working on a way to sell the printed edition there, too.
So these are exciting days for me and the UPS driver. I hope that yours are going well, too.
