That’s an actual quote from a tester who doesn’t even owe me money, so, you know, it may mean something.

This image is a sneak peek at the output from my upcoming addition to the Derange-O-Lab at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Another version of it will also go live at Retropolis because once you start Pulp-O-Mizing you just can’t stop.

The deal is, you have menus full of these science fiction pulpy backgrounds, and menus full of these retro science fiction pulpy people, and menus full of titles from the inspiring (Thrilling Tales of Wonder from the Radio Planet) to the amusing (Inadvisable Science) to the head-scratching (Hearts and Pistons).

And then you write your own titles, as you see I’ve done in this example. Which could be anything, and which might appall me, because in spite of what my tester thinks the Internet was invented to, you know, appall us. Or maybe that’s just me.

So anyway, when you’ve picked your background and your characters and your title and you’ve added your potentially me-appalling text, then the system will render out a web resolution graphic suitable for Facebook posts, blog illustrations, and so on, but then it gets better and better because you can also get a high resolution version of the cover as a poster or on other merchandise like fliers, coffee mugs, and whatnot.

Because the other reason the Internet was invented was so that I could shake all the change out of your pockets. And the Pulp-O-Mizer will commence its shaking, well, pretty soon. Pretty soon.

Update: and now you can play with it on the Pulp-O-Mizer page.

Now, at Retropolis: the question, if not the answer, that occupies all our thoughts: Where is My Jet Pack?

Because this is an area where the Future That Never Was has completely outclassed The Present That Really Happened. You can keep your iPhone; you’re perfectly welcome to keep your GPS and your full body scanners; you may enjoy your traffic cameras and your edible deodorants. I don’t know; somebody must be enjoying those, it’s just that I have no idea who they are.

You’re welcome to all of them. All I want, and all that any right-thinking person should want, is a jet pack. If you need to ask why then I feel truly sorry for you, but at least I guess I’ve narrowed down the answer to that that edible deodorant question.

Now I think we’ve been quite patient. Sure, if we got overexcited by the old Gernsback magazines then it’s possible that we cancelled our vacations in the Antibes and sat by the door, waiting for our jet packs to be delivered. That, I admit, was overly optimistic. But honestly! It’s been decades since then. Actual decades. And I don’t think that any of us is getting any younger.

So our jet packs have to be arriving soon. They just have to. And to make the wait more bearable, try these T-shirts and coffee mugs from Retropolis that make no bones about the fact that we want our jet packs now, thank you very much.

Late yesterday I launched the Indiegogo campaign that aims to send my upcoming Retropolis Public Library prints to your favorite library – and to about ten libraries that have meant something to me. The campaign’s pretty modest goal of $3200 is just enough to do that; but it’s when we meet and exceed that goal that things get really interesting.

That’s because for every 250 prints that we send to your favorite libraries I’ll be able to donate $1000 of actual cash money to my own local library. If we send off 500 prints, I get to donate $2000, and so on, up to… oh, wait. There’s no limit. That means that if we were to send 10,000 prints to your favorite libraries, I’d donate $40,000, which is an astonishing chunk of change even though I have to admit it’s not likely we’ll get quite that far.

I’m fond of my local library, but when I tell you that our town has a population of about 15,000 people in a region whose economy was once based on manufacturing, well… I think you can imagine what’s happened to every kind of local agency’s budget in the past few years in a series of reductions that – everywhere – often starts with the local library. So when I figured out what the stretch goals for this campaign might be I felt quite excited to think that I might be able to give a boost to my library’s budget.

Now of course that’s not the primary goal of the campaign. The primary goal is for people like you to do something nice, improbable and, just maybe, a little bit odd for your own local (or other favorite) libraries, by sponsoring a gift for them of one or both of these twenty by thirty inch archival ‘Public Library’ prints. When you sponsor that gift I’ll send the print(s) to your chosen library along with a letter that explains just how this happened and that you’re the one responsible.

There are other rewards (‘perks’, in indiegogospeech) including getting the prints for yourself. But the real aim is to put these retro-futuristic promotional prints on the walls of as many libraries as possible. In about thirty days.

So go look! And, I hope, decide to dive in and do something peculiar and interesting for the people who also serve by standing, waiting, and then giving you the books you want to read. Please: stop and think about how wonderful and unlikely that is. No, I mean it. Really stop and think. Then, please, join in.

Stop squirming, there – have you no self respect? Just lean back into the straps, bite down – HARD! – on this leather strap, and let me finish this up before dinner. And stop being such a silly goose. It’s for SCIENCE.

It can be so irritating, dealing with those experimental subjects who, all right, might not have volunteered, as such, to further the goals of science. Half the time they seem to start out as door to door salesmen and meter readers. But whatever their origins, is it too much to ask that they should just lie there quietly while you attach the electrodes? That’s very delicate work, there. They ought to be a little more appreciative. That’s all I’m saying.

So for all of those times when the world doesn’t seem ready to capitulate to your plans for universal vivisection, or mass miniaturization, or even widespread liquefaction, I submit for your approval this instructive image, on T-Shirts, coffee mugs, posters, and other inspirational materials. Relax: This is for SCIENCE!

You may have discovered that, when it comes down to it, only a very small percentage of the questions people ask you are significant. That’s not surprising, really; what is surprising is that recent empirical testing has revealed that every one of those questions can be answered with the same word. That word is "Coffee".

The subject of the question, it turns out, is immaterial. The answer, always, is "Coffee".

So in this design for posters and T-shirts for Retropolis I have supplied a helpful list of subjects that you might be asked about in the course of a typical day; topics like "That Disturbing Smell in the Laboratory", "Why We Call It a Death Ray", "Giant Atomic Ferrets", and so on. Chances are that any question you’re asked will fall into one of these categories and now, armed with this shirt or poster, you can simply point rather casually to that subject in the list, and indicate your coffee mug, which possibly is empty, and hey presto, you’re done.

Because Coffee is the answer to all of life’s little peccadilloes and problems, including the problem of when you’ll ever be able to use the word "peccadilloes" in a sentence.

I’ve continued to think about the future of Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual since my last post about its troubled state. Well. When I say "its troubled state" I may be thinking about mine; but since the state of Thrilling Tales is dependent on my own state I guess that still works, whichever way you look at it.

Today I’m ignoring the question of serials and I’m looking instead at The Riddle of the Wrong Brain, Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS.

I’ve experimented with crowdfunding twice. The first time, I tried what I think is one of the worst Kickstarter pitches ever: "Give me money, and I’ll do what I was going to do anyway". Now that’s salesmanship. To my own surprise that fundraiser met its goal. But of course the goal was a fairly modest one.

The second time, earlier this year, I launched what I thought was a pretty good fundraiser, and its pitch, according to me, was perfect: "Give me enough money, and this thing will exist. If you don’t, it won’t." That drive was also, narrowly, successful, but I was surprised to find that it got some criticism because its rewards were almost completely limited to the object – a limited hardcover edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book. There were pretty good reasons for that: the book itself was expensive to produce, I faced a minimum order to get even that price for my print run, and the cost of any other rewards would have come out of the money that was needed for the edition itself. Adding a bunch of other rewards would have drastically increased the amount I had to raise. So I didn’t add them.

What I found was that a kind of Kickstarter culture had been trained by big projects with stretch goals, bells, whistles and hoopla, all of which are brilliant and gamelike marketing strategies that have nothing to do with the core idea of a Kickstarter project, which is: "Give me enough money, and this thing will exist. If you don’t, it won’t."

While that second Kickstarter project was successful, it didn’t make any money for me. All of its funding was needed in order to create what I think is a really nice archival edition of the book. I wanted it to exist; it was too expensive to produce on my own; and now it exists. The backers and I made that happen. But no, it didn’t make me any income. In fact it may have cost me something because the people who backed the project might otherwise have bought the paperback edition, which does make me money. This explains something important about my business sense. It’s missing.

I don’t regret anything about that. I wanted this beautiful edition to exist, and now it does. For a lot of reasons I think more about legacy than I used to and this archival edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book is a kind of legacy.

So my Kickstarter experience has been complicated and interesting. That first Thrilling Tales fundraiser was a terrible example ("Give me money and I’ll do what I was going to do anyway"). No one objected! The second project, I thought, was a very typical one because it was a simple pre-order for an edition that wouldn’t otherwise exist; but there were those who objected to it, in private correspondence and even in completely unrelated places on the web. It’s a funny old world. Once the hardcover Clockwork Book was out there I wasn’t too excited about trying crowdfunding again.

But I have been thinking about it lately, and here’s why. Unlike Kickstarter, IndieGoGo offers a flexible kind of funding that doesn’t follow the all-or-nothing Kickstarter model. A project isn’t required to meet its funding goal: if it uses the "Flexible" project type then its pledges are redeemed whether or not the project’s goal is met. That makes it possible to create a hybrid of my first Kickstarter project and my second, a project that would provide some funding for my ongoing work on Thrilling Tales, but which – only if the funding crosses a certain threshold – could also become the pre-order for an upcoming book.

This model would give me a lot more freedom in creating the rewards, which up to that threshold would offer only existing merchandise: there would be no risk to the backers. Up to the threshold, all rewards would be available immediately. Then if the threshold is crossed there would be additional rewards of the paperback edition of Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS, which would ship much later, of course. If we never met the threshold, the backers would get their rewards and I’d have a nest egg that would still help me to complete The Riddle of the Wrong Brain. If we did meet the threshold, well, I’d be able to complete that book in relative comfort and the backers who selected the new book as a reward would get it as soon as it was finished.

So we’d still be without an ongoing serial, but we’d be a lot more likely to see The Riddle of the Wrong Brain in the nearish future – around April or May of next year.

It’s an interesting idea. Now one problem is that all the rewards up to that stretch goal might be things that my existing readers already have (the paperback books, bookmarks, some of the prints or t-shirts, and so on) and that might make it all the more difficult to reach the stretch goal unless there was a pretty large influx of new readers. That happens, by the way: a crowdfunding drive is in itself a form of promotion. But it could make it more difficult. Still, since the project would not fail even if we missed the goal it could still be worth a try.

Crowdfunding projects can take an awful lot of time and work, and I wouldn’t start a new one casually. But: it’s a thought.

September 6th saw the final update in the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual Feature "So! You’d Like to See Retropolis!" This sort-of a serial was a filler feature that picked up immediately after "The Lair of the Clockwork Book", and I’d hoped it would give me some breathing space during which I’d be able to get more work done on Part Two of "The Toaster With TWO BRAINS", and get the manuscript (and a few illustrations) done for the next Thrilling Tales serial.

It was a good plan: really, it was.

I did make some more headway on the illustrations for "The Riddle of the Wrong Brain" (that’s Part Two). And I did make a sizable start on the next serial, whose tentative title is – this week – "Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom". I got a bunch of character modeling done for the new Switchboard characters, too.

It’s been about four weeks since there’s been a story update at the Thrilling Tales site; so it’s pretty clear that I missed my self-imposed deadline.

Why is that? There are a couple of reasons.

Let me tell you about "Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom", or whatever its title is by the time you read this. Whereas "The Lair of the Clockwork Book" ran to about 37,000 words, the first draft of "Switchboard" is currently at just over 67,000, and it’s only about two thirds done. And… it’s a first draft. The second draft is going concentrate on vicious editing. The third draft, I hope, will go back over the wreckage and polish it up into a finished manuscript. Because these plans sometimes surprise us, there could easily be a fourth draft too.

So the first problem is that where "Lair" was a novella, this one’s a full length novel. And so in terms of building and finishing it, it turns out to be a completely different sort of beast: compare building a cottage, say, with building a skyscraper. Throughout – and even if there wasn’t that structural difference – I’ve wanted to spend more time with it, because in my need to feed the Thrilling Tales web site I’ve rushed the writing on all of its stories, and that’s curious, since the illustrations were always the genuine bottleneck. This time I’ve wanted to spend all the time it takes to make the story more worthy of the months of work that goes into its illustrations.

"All the time it takes", when it comes to something this much longer and larger, turns out to be quite a lot of time indeed.

Of course the longer length of this book – taken together with its black and white illustrations, which are so much more economical to print – means that it might rouse the interest of a traditional publisher. In view of what follows, it might be worth my while to try to attract a mass market publisher.

Because, and this is the second problem, the Thrilling Tales site is an experiment that I’ve been running for three years now – well, over two and a half years since it launched, anyway. It’s an experiment along the lines of popular Web Site Theory: give away a whole lot of content for free, and people will buy a little bit of stuff from you in return.

The Thrilling Tales site is based on the format of a web comics site. It’s just got more words, and fewer pictures. Web comic sites depend on their readers to buy books and to click on ads, because it’s only through those book and merchandise sales, plus the ad revenue, that the sites make any kind of return on the artist’s investment of time. In my case, all the ads on the Thrilling Tales site lead to other web sites of mine where I hope to shake all the change out of my readers’ pockets. But the model is still the same: a small percentage of readers will buy something, or go to an external site and buy something there, in return for all that wonderful free content. Even in the most successful sites the percentage of people who "convert", or buy something, is very low. That math is pretty much the same for everybody.

So the successful sites are the ones that attract tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of visitors every day. With that kind of traffic even the low conversion rate can result in an income.

It’s very rare for the Thrilling Tales site to see even one thousand visitors in a day. So it ought to be pretty obvious that the math is not on the side of Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. If it’s not as obvious to you as it seems to me, it’s like this: in order to be successful, this kind of web site has to attract a very, very large audience, and sadly that hasn’t been the case.

If we were to ask "Why?" then I guess the answer probably wouldn’t flatter me. So we’ll avoid that, and instead we’ll look at the results.

During the fourteen months that "The Lair of the Clockwork Book" ran on the site it was effectively my full time job. Just keeping the site fed while trying to make more progress on Part Two of "TWO BRAINS" ate up almost every hour that was available in my day.

So during the feature that ran this summer I cut the number of updates down to one each week so that it would run longer and I would have more time to work.

As we’ve seen… that wasn’t enough time to keep feeding the web site. Like I said at the start: it’s been about four weeks since the site’s last update.

So although the Thrilling Tales web site isn’t dead it still won’t be seeing any new content for awhile. The next thing to appear may be Part Two of "The Toaster With TWO BRAINS", because what I now have to call The Novel is a long term project. It’ll likely be several months before it’s ready to be read – and then, of course, there are the illustrations. When the manuscript is done I might – instead of posting it to the web site – start it on the always depressing rounds of editors and literary agents. In the meantime I also have to pursue freelance work – or any kind of work – more aggressively because my Secret Laboratory’s finances are in a sad, sad state.

You’re not here to hear my Tale of Woe; in fact, there are more than enough Tales of Woe to go around, these days. It’s enough to say "I have one."

I do hope to be able to update the Thrilling Tales site in a while, but even I don’t know when "a while" is. It’s certainly farther away than "soon".

So if it’s 1975, and you hand a teenager a woodgrain boxed edition of Dungeons & Dragons along with a stack of paper and some pens, well, you just sit back and see what happens. Here’s what happened to me. I turned into Morno.

From right around 1975 to sometime in 1978 I drew illustrations for some of the earliest D&D supplements, modules and fanzines, and even had one cover and two illustrated stories in TSR’s own The Dragon magazine. I also did some of the covers and illustrations for Dave Hargrave’s Arduin rules sets and for a great many products, some peculiar in retrospect, for Wee Warriors; that included the first commercial D&D character sheets and the very first module for the game (Palace of the Vampire Queen). There’s a huge, long and complex history of those products that I frankly don’t remember very well after all this time. But in this age of eBay and the Web it’s not too hard to ferret that history out.

People actually collect these things now, and you have no idea how old and crotchety that makes me feel.

If you want to understand how I feel about all of that… well, imagine that something you did when you were seventeen was remembered, resold, and talked about decades later. Yeah, pick a thing you did when you were seventeen. I dare you. Chances are you’d rather the world just forgot about the things you did at that age, and I wouldn’t blame you. So I can’t forget that I was just a kid, doing the kinds of things that kids do, and that even five years later I had a much more respectable set of tools and experiences and was making art that was a lot more accomplished; and for many years I’ve been glad that I did all of this work under an alias. So that, you know, it couldn’t find me.

Like I said, though: age of eBay, age of Web. People tracked me down.

So I’ve tried to make some kind of peace with the fact that I was once a kid with a woodgrain D&D set and some pens and paper. It hasn’t killed me.

Part of that inner peace has led me to put together a little retrospective of that very, very, very early work in the form of this calendar, featuring acts of drawing that I committed between 1975 and 1978 when I was using the “Morno” signature. A couple of these will be new to everyone but me. Because even if I tried to get away from the kid I couldn’t entirely cut him – or his old drawings – loose. It was something about his eyes.

Today only – that’s September 17th, if you’re temporally challenged – you can get any or all of my posters from Retropolis at 60% off. That’s a me-chokingly sixty per cent. And I have the choke marks to prove it.

Just use the coupon code 60FALLINSALE during your checkout to get this insanely innovative discount.

So if you’ve been meaning to get a New, Improved SCIENCE: Now With Death Rays poster, today would probably be a really good time to do it.

While you’re at it, that same coupon code will get you 15% off the coffee mugs, customizable business cards, greeting cards and other Retropolis Travel Bureau merchandise from the site*. It’s all because September 17th is National Insane Discount Day. Someplace. I heard it somewhere.

Oh, and the same sale is on, over at The Celtic Art Works, for similar items from Ars Celtica.

*The discount applies only to merchandise under the “Retropolis Travel Bureau” tab.

Hot on the nonexistent heels of my rebuilt calendars (I couldn’t squeeze in that last minute "heels" upgrade) comes the MAD Science Calendar; that’s twelve months of Things that Man Was Not Meant to Wot of, But Wotted of Anyhow. Because we’re sort of like that, when it comes right down to it.

This Calendar from Retropolis includes the year’s new favorites (the "SCIENCE" series) along with more pages that I’ve lovingly adapted from the T-Shirt designs at The Retropolis Transit Authority.

So in addition to "New, Improved SCIENCE: Now, With Death Rays!" in one month you’ve got "Tell it to My GIANT ROBOT", "Certifiable MAD GENIUS", and nine other months of merciless experimentation, unfortunate lab assistants, and Things Gone Wrong.

Like my other new calendars this one has rolling start dates: you just pick the month you’d like to start the calendar on and it automatically churns away to spit out twelve months beginning at that point, in a timey-wimey manifestation of That Stuff We Wotted Of.

Still to come, maybe: a couple of new calendars for The Celtic Art Works.