I’m just two illustrations away from completing the next story for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. Okay, make that one-and-a-somethingth illustrations: my computer’s rendering away as I type this.

I’m still not really on schedule; I’ve got a dozen or so more to do before I’ve got enough pages in my buffer that I’ll be able to go back to The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. But I think I’ve made up some of the time I lost when I took about a week each to do two (yep, two) of these pictures. I’m not completely sure why that happened… but there were technical problems, stubborn lighting issues, and what all, which in this case meant that I got ill for a few days in the middle of everything. Those two pictures could be the whole reason I’m running late.

In fact, I want to go back and rework two more before they start to go live at the Thrilling Tales site. Next week will be a busy one, though I realize that doesn’t actually mean it’ll be different from, say, this week.

This won’t show at all to you, of course. It just means that I’ll stick with the Clockwork Book for a bit longer than I’d planned in this part of the schedule, for however long it takes for me to get 32 pages ahead of what’s been published at the site.

As far as what you can see of The Lair of the Clockwork Book, we’re nearly through the story of Osgood Finnegan (which is the first story of Osgood Finnegan, as you’ll see later). I rewrote large parts of that one just before I added it to the site and I’m still a little worried about the fact that it’s different in tone… for reasons that are quite necessary, but which still worry me a little. I’ll feel a little more comfortable when we get started on the one pictured here since it’s back in the "present" of 2039, where I feel a little more at home.

Tentacular, Tentacular is a multiple-choice interactive story from Ars Technica in which you (yes, you!) can play the part of a private investigator who is (or will be) hard boiled, hard bitten, hard fried, hard nosed, or hardly married to a booth babe, all depending on what you (yes, you!) choose to do when confronted by a plot of creeping madness in a Las Vegas trade show. With an extra side of Elder Gods and bacon!

Along the way, you (yes, you!) may encounter eldritch beings like, well, Steve Ballmer, Sergey Brin, Alec Baldwin, and more, as you try to solve the mystery of why thousands of geeky conventioneers, all smelling faintly of bacon, are being driven totally insane by their unscheduled encounter with Cthulhu himself. Itself. Thing. Self. Thingself. Whatever.

And you may learn a new use for coaxial cables, too.

The Uira Engine – that astonishing bit of retro futuristic flimflammery that powers the Raygun Gothic Rocketship – will be one of the objects shown by Alan Rorie and his co-conspirators at this year’s Maker Faire. Rorie’s shown here discussing the Engine at San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

The Engine won’t be alone, but all we know so far is that there will be "some new work that I’ve not even posted about".

Rusty here is possibly running like crazy because I’m about to start up the vacuum. Robots hate that. Except for those Roombas, anyhow: the alternative would be incredibly cruel. (Unless you’re reading this in syndication, you can click the image to see it embiggified.)

But no! I forgot. He’s running for a completely different reason, which Clockwork Book readers can look forward to learning sometime in July. I guess you could say I’m trying to keep up with him, or at least with something, since I’m running a little bit late in my Thrilling Tales schedule.

That’s not actually a disaster or anything. The first crop of pages won’t run dry till early June, and I already have about ten more in the bank, so it’s not as though the story will pause. The deal is, I need to have about thirty-two unpublished pages ready to go before I can go back to Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. So it just makes me nervous. You can ignore me, if you like. Most do.

At worst, I’ll get back to Two Brains a week or two after I’d planned.

It can be a difficult schedule, all right. The fact that I’m illustrating two stories at once means that for the time being Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual is a full time job. I guess that’ll be true for as long as I’m doing an interactive and a serial at the same time… so it’ll stay true, I suppose, at least until I’ve finished Part Three of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. I have no idea what’ll happen after that; Thrilling Tales will then have a three-part interactive story and two completed serials. It’ll probably be time to regroup.