It’s always Buck Rogers day here in the Secret Laboratory, but I don’t always have anything to show for it. Therefore, let’s take a moment to admire Teresa N. Fischer’s painting of vintage Buck Rogers toys arranged in a still life, complete with a hanging backdrop of the starriest stars imaginable.

This 20" by 20" oil is currently on display at the Elliott Fouts Gallery in Sacramento, California through May 3rd.

I’m very happy to say that as of today, The Lair of the Clockwork Book is available in soft cover; that’s eight by ten inches and 134 pages of full color illustrations, collecting the entire Clockwork Book serial from the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site.

For those of you who are keeping track… the story won’t wrap up on the web site until April 23rd. So, you know, you can definitely be the first one on your block to find out how the story ends.

Actually, you’re probably the first person on your block to know that the story exists. But it’s always wise to hedge your bets. Those neighbors of yours are pretty crafty.

For the moment you’ll find the book only at the Thrilling Tales web site; it takes Amazon a little while to pick up a new release. Between you, me and the fencepost I’d much rather you bought it through my web site anyhow. Amazon takes a sizable chunk out of sales over there.

Next up: the hardcover edition! With the page layouts all finalized I can concentrate on that one at last.

Oh, and there were big developments this morning for the Thrilling Tales "Intermission" feature that’s starting on April 26th. They were all technical changes and invisible to anyone but me – except for about one minute when I broke everything – so it’s the kind of thing that I guess only I can get excited about. Still, very neat: I like discovering that I can train the site to do things I never anticipated when I originally built it.

UPDATE: Oh, heck, I completely forgot to mention that although the list price for The Lair of the Clockwork Book is $19.55 you can get it for $17.55 by using this coupon code when you place your order: HVNHQN7Q . You won’t get that deal at Amazon, boyo.

I’ve got so many irons in the fire – mainly, wrapping up the book designs for the two editions of The Lair of the Clockwork Book and preparing for the next features at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual – that this morning I finally filled up a page in my notebook with lists of tasks. I will say that after a year and a half I do enjoy having a bit less structure to my days: but it turns out that a little bit of structure is sort of necessary.

This picture is a very happy surprise. It’s a rough layout for the next real serial for the Thrilling Tales (not counting a sixteen week "Intermission" feature) and the happy part is that it works.

That next Real Serial is going to be a little different in several ways. Its updates will be longer, but will appear only half as often; the illustrations will be in black and white – or, as we see here, at least in monotone; the illustrations themselves will be more tightly coupled to the print version of the story, with two-page spreads and wrapping text; and to support that I’ll have to add additional HTML markup to the story pages. The sample picture I dropped into this layout is one of the illustrations I did last year for Starship Sofa Stories, Vol 3: those illustrations, with their old sf pulp flavor, were the whole seed that grew into this New Plan. It turns out that I’ve always wanted to be Virgil Finlay.

I mean, who wouldn’t?

Now the two page spread at the beginning of this post has been compressed down to the usual Thrilling Tales size and the text has wrapped around the image – though not as neatly as we’ll see in the real story. I was convinced that this would not work – that there just wouldn’t be enough space to show both the illustration and its text to their best advantage. I’ve been figuring that I’d need to create a mutant page layout to support the new format. Hence my surprise: it looks like the existing page layout can support these changes just fine. It won’t be as nifty as the print version but it will be a pretty decent conversion.

Now… I’m not sure yet how I’ll handle enlarging the image for the pop-up windows; it’ll be a bit odd if that wrapping text disappears. But the first experiment, anyway, is a success.

In other news I’m now waiting for my second proof of the paperback edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book. I made substantial changes after I saw the first proof – much more substantial than I had expected to make. The dust has all settled now, though, and I expect that I’ll like what I see when the new version arrives.

Once that fundamental design is set I can start the proofing process for the hardcover edition. I’ve seen paper and linen samples for that now. The interior paper is really, really nice but because it’s a brighter white I may have to make adjustments to the illustrations once I’ve seen the hardcover proof. All in all, though, it seems to be moving along on schedule.

The paperback edition may be available late next week. It all depends on that second proof.

Oh, and then there’s this guy above. The only thing I’m going to say about him is that you should keep an eye on your kittens. ‘Cause you just ought to know.

Mister Doortree’s Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog has been giving us day after day of Alphonse Mucha (here, here, and here) including the wonderful, atypical, and seldom seen Slav Epic murals. They’re so very different from his decorative work – not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you, but these come as a big surprise if you’ve never seen anything but his Art Nouveau illustrations and borders.

I was lucky to see this one in Paris; through sheer happenstance there was a Mucha exhibition at the Petit Palais during the week I was there in 1980. As I recall the canvas was edged with great big grommets and the painting was stretched on cords looped through them – it looked like a gigantic, taut sail of mythological wonderment.

That nearly made up for the fact that the Louvre had closed its late nineteenth century collections for some kind of renovations. But I did get two afternoons in the Musee Gustave Moreau, and that was a real pleasure since in those days Moreau was right up my street. I think that his street was the Rue de Rochefoucauld.