In a post at the Edtion One blog – that’s where they’re printing and binding the Kickstarter edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book – the gifted elves at Edition One are showing off the books in what they call a "very meta post", since what they’ve got there is post about a book about a book.

But I can’t let that stand, I tell you! I will now out-meta them by posting a post about a post about a book about a book! Muahahahahaha! Mua! and Ha! and Ha! I say! And Ha!

Of course my excuse for that outburst is that if they were taking photos and posting them last Friday, when the first 110 books were stacked up around my house, then the rest of the print run is likely to get here pretty soon. I’ve got to stamp thirty more books before I’ve got through that first batch. Still, I say, bring ’em on, and, also, Ha!

So here at the Secret Laboratory I have been invaded by books, which is one of my favorite kinds of invasions. What makes this invasion special is that the more-than-100 books you see – crowding me out of my ground floor – are all copies of The Lair of the Clockwork Book. That’s because the Kickstarter books have begun to land!

This is about 2/3 of the whole batch. My UPS driver thought it was all over… but he was so completely and tragically wrong. Well, wrong, anyway, because there will be another four or five boxes on the way soon.

You can see how I’ve spread many of the books with their vulnerable underbellies exposed: that’s so I can stamp them with my nifty custom "Limited Edition" stamp, prior to signing and numbering them. Right after I practice some more – like a mad stamping fiend – all over my proof sheets.

I know… this is as bad as somebody showing you pictures of their grandchildren or their cats, and it’s not over yet, either, boyo.

It takes awhile for the ink to dry after I apply the stamp and I’m so paranoid about having that ink offset on the facing page that I’ll leave each batch to dry for a good long while. That means my house is going to keep looking like this, but I can’t say I mind. Books, books everywhere!

Over at the Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog we see a collection of "Worlds of IF" covers from the 1950’s and the 1960′s, by a smorgasbord of illustrators including a few by Virgil Finlay, and what seems to be a posthumously published cover by Hannes Bok.

In fact I wasn’t positive that the publication date was, you know, after Bok’s expiration date, and when I went looking to verify that I ran across this small archive of his work. It includes the one I’ve reproduced below.

Frederik Pohl posted some of his reminiscences about Bok last year. You can read those here and here.

The 50’s and 60’s are actually a little too modern for me, for the most part, but I’m always ready for a little Finlay or a bit of Bok. I’m often bemused by the fact that the long, odd trip I’ve taken with my own work has led me back – by a route that’s anything but direct, and which couldn’t be called intentional – to illustrators like these, whose work I enjoyed so very much when I was young. It’s all a bit like a joke that I wasn’t in on, or the end result of a convoluted plan by some cackling archvillain.

As I mentioned back in December, I’ve produced a series of illustrations for the cover and 32 page booklet of Leslie Fish’s new CD, Avalon is Risen. After quite awhile in production that recording is now available for pre-order from Prometheus Music.

The CD’s priced at $15.97 and includes an MP3 download in addition to the physical CD in its packaging: you can also place an MP3 only order for $9.97. The CD’s are scheduled to ship shortly after June 15, but the MP3s are available immediately, as is the booklet in PDF form. They’re all available right here.

This is a sort of a bookend project for me, since ‘way back in the late 1980’s I illustrated the tape cover and the full sized songbook for Ms. Fish’s Cold Iron. That came very near the end of my days in traditional media and it’s nice to be back, with the set of digital tools I use all these years later. Though I did sneak in two pen and ink illustrations from the1980’s, just because.

So this week marks my return to the new, improved Thrilling Tales schedule. My schedule, I mean: not yours.

This follows my frantic scrambling to set up the current Intermission for the Thrilling Tales site, which in its turn was followed by a couple of weeks of much needed website work, new merchandise design, and, um, house cleaning. Yeah, even in the Secret Laboratory, I’ve got dust. And then data backup and some other important things that have been delayed.

But this week! This week, I’ve returned to Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS in the mornings, while in the afternoons I’m working on a new serial for the site. Which involves writing (quite a lot of it) which is something I can now do on the porch when I feel like it. Which I do.

The TWO BRAINS work has kicked off in an unexpected way. Back in the Summer or Fall I applied my new character system to Gwen, who’s an important character in Part Two; last weekend I did something very similar with Nat Gonella. But when I paged through the illustrations I’ve completed for that story, I decided that I didn’t like everything I’d done with Zeno.

With a few of his scenes remaining to go I decided to redo some of the finished illustrations where Zeno already appears. So I spent a couple of days working on a new head for him which, as we see above, is nicely expressive. I’ve now redone one of his illustrations and I should be able to work through about three others before I get down to something entirely new.

There are some serious questions about how ready the new serial will be when the Intermission concludes. This is a longer form story and it’ll be an unusual amount of work, not to mention the possibility that I’ll need to make many revisions as I go along. I’ve always been reluctant to start publishing one of these stories before the manuscript is really done. Dickens did it, but, you know, he was Dickens. So I may be as surprised as anyone else to see how things work out by Summer’s end.

For now, though, it’s nice to be back!