You won’t see it until April 23, but yesterday I finished the last illustration for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. It’s been such a very, very long haul – exactly fourteen months after I finished the first illustration, and that doesn’t account for the months of pre-production and writing that went before.

It was a little earlier that this really hit me; about three illustrations back, I think, when I started to realize that I was beginning a long goodbye to the Book. There’s a strange combination of relief and dismay.

Of course there’s actually a lot left to do. I’m now taking the rough book layout and making it significantly less rough, with typographical changes, page ornaments, and so on. I need to finish the paperback cover and then the cover and dust jacket designs for the hardcover edition (thanks, Kickstarter!). Even when I think that’s all done, I’ll have to proof the pages and fix everything that wasn’t really finished. And finally, with all the cover issues settled, I’ll produce the actual books.

But yesterday was still a big day!

In the meantime although I’m certain that the next serial at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual is going to be different, I’m still not quite sure what that means. It will probably update just once a week; it will probably be illustrated in black and white, rather than in color; it will be longer, and the presentation of the pages will need to be a little different.

I’m not even positive that the guy on the left here is going to be Our Hero, but I think he’s more like the character than the last version was.

But before I can really wrestle with those ideas I have to make much better progress on Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS.

In my original plan that would have been nearly done today; my original plan went cartwheeling into the Sun quite some time ago.

Just to make things even more interesting, which is what you always want, I’ve been watching the traffic at Thrilling Tales: the site’s returning visitors have just about doubled since the Kickstarter drive for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. I know that if I hunker down and work on TWO BRAINS for a few months those folks are going to get tired of coming back to see nothing new.

So I’m also wondering what sort of Intermission I can run on the site that can update weekly without killing my TWO BRAINS schedule. Again. While I also lay the foundation for the next thing.

Fortunately, there’s always coffee.

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Save $10 on an order of $40 or more with the coupon code NewAAMerch; save $20 on an order of $75 or more with the coupon code MoreNewAAMerch; or go all out and get crazy by saving $35 on an order of $100 or more, with the coupon code LotsNewAAMerch.

The sale runs through March 21. I have spoken.

The tireless scanner of Mister Doortree now casts its uncanny, glowing beam of awesomeness on a collection of covers from Big Little Books and their countless clones, all featuring the adventures of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, and all at that ever-interesting site called Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Robots! Rockets! Death Rays! Sinister Comets! Forgotten Cities!

There’s a small collection of Michael Kaluta covers from DC’s Strange Adventures and Time Warp comics of the seventies at Diversions of the Groovy Kind; while I loved the layouts at first glance, what I keep looking back at is the wonderful inks – especially on #240. Great stuff!