Hey, everybody...
those columns I helped write for Comicon.com's THE PULSE are up now.
It's a series of six columns on self-publishing. The first is with Layla Lawlor, discussing Print-On-Demand. Subsequent columns will feature Pam Bliss on Minicomics, Charlie "Spike" Trotman on Webcomics, Jim Ottaviani on Direct-to-Graphic Novel, and me on single issues, or lack thereof. The final column will be a roundtable in which all five interviewees will answer the same questions, and hopefully provide a nice wide perspective of answers.
Go! Read! Enjoy! See other people besides me natter on about self-publishing.
I've just added two new networking sites:
I'm still adding stuff to the pages, so please excuse how bare they are at the moment.
Enjoy!
All right, chemists! I need your help again.
I unmolded the lye soap I made on Thursday night, and to my dismay, found the whole bottom of the pan corroded all to hell. Turns out I used an aluminum pan. DANG IT. I could've sworn I used the same pan I did last year, and this didn't happen then. I don't give a darn about the pan; it was a grotty old one we got as a hand-me-down.
The good news: There was a piece of waxed paper between the soap and the pan. The soap didn't actually come in contact with it, from what I can tell. What I want to know is: Can I still use the soap, or will there be some horrible Alzheimer's-inducing amount of aluminum in it? For the chemists, it'd be Sodium Hydroxide NAOH versus probably straight aluminum.
Anyone?
I've got some seriously cracked heels. I'm used to having gross flakey heels, but these cracks go so deep that it's actually kinda painful to walk. Anybody know a good remedy?
This evening, I made soap again. I'm about four months overdue; that's when the last bar of last year's supply ran out.
Yesterday, I cranked up the special crockpot I keep for crafty things like soapmaking, and I made a really super strong "herbal tea" with homegrown organic Calendula, Chamomile and Comfrey from last year's garden, along with some old (like, ten years old) Green Tea I had lying around. I used this in place of the plain water for the lye -- I know this is arcane knowledge, but does anyone know if any of the herbal healing properties will survive the saponification process? There's a local herbalist I think will know, but it'll be another two weeks before I can get down to Farmer's Market to ask her.
Anyway, the lye went into yesterday's cold "tea", and the olive oil and beeswax went into the crockpot. When both were at 130F, the lyewater got poured into the crockpot. Then I sat and watched two episodes of Mythbusters while the darn stuff traced -- It takes about 45 minutes of constant stirring. At that point I added some Tea Tree oil, some Lavender oil, and (God help me) some patchouli oil because it was too astringent smelling, and needed a "bass note" to round out the smell.
I poured it into an old baking tin (which again, I use only for soapmaking) and wrapped the top in wax paper. In another three weeks, I'll have soap. Anybody want a bar?
Paul had a sudden shift in plans, and so we're actually going to come out for Motor City Con. We will be there Saturday Only. I'll have a few books to sell, but plan on mostly just walking around and handing out freebies.
See you there!
I had a little breathing room now that the book's at the printers, so I spent a few hours and gave the site a bit of a facelift. Most of the upgrades were behind-the-scenes, so you probably won't notice them unless you look really closely. I won't bore you with the nerdly details, but I did condense a lot of the character/people pages to make for a more concise list, and I added a snazzy new image interface called Lightbox to make it easier to view the previews. It takes a few seconds to load, but it's a lot nicer than the previous layout, I think.
There're new previews on the index page, the online store has been cleaned up, and most pages have had their content revised and updated as well. If you haven't been through the site for a while, it may be worth another look.
Enjoy! Oh, and if you see anything funky or broken, do let me know.
Johanna Draper Carlson is one of the first! Read her review here. It's so positive, I'm wondering if I should send her a check. YAY!
So there I was at the food co-op, buying avocados and heinously overpriced recycled toilet paper, when what should I see but the Seed Savers display case. There followed a brief but useless conversation between my Rational Brain and my Gardening Brain.:
"We don't have time this year. We already agreed that we'd just buy the seed starts in a few weeks and be done with it."
"But you can't buy beet starts. Or pea starts. Doesn't work that way."
"It's too early. They'll all die."
"Never too cold for spring lettuces! OooOO! Deer's tongue!"
"But I just pried loose some free time..."
"Hey look! Amish Sugarsnap Peas! Paul's favorite vegetable!"
"Sigh."
So I went home and planted pots of peas, lettuces, beets and radishes. I'm hopeless.
Given that it was my birthday on Friday, and that I'd finished my book on time, I decided to give myself a break this morning and just chill out for most of the day. I got up late, made a pot of the lovely, lovely birthday Chai that Virus brought me on his way to Tulsa on Thursday (MWAH!), and sat in the back yard drinking tea, reading my FCBD haul, and watching the birds and fish play in the fountain.
Heavenly.
After a couple hours of uninterrupted solitude and bliss, Neighbor Nora's daughter Rachel came over and asked if I still wanted some of their expanding groundcover plants. I agreed, and liberated a bunch of sweet woodruff and forget-me-not over into our backyard. I transplanted some more myrtle from the front yard, watered everything, and called it a day.
And now I'm catching up on my blogging, as you may have guessed. Yay for relaxing days... first I've had in months, I think.
Yesterday was Free Comic Book Day, and because I was a good little artist and finished my book on time, I unchained myself from the desk and bolted for freedom; I wound up at Green Brain Comics in Dearborn.
Dan and Katie Merritt run the place, and they are the some of the best people going. The store was packed for most of the day -- at closing, Dan reported that they had at least 900 people, and Katie announced that it had been their single highest grossing day in the 22-year history of the store. WOOT! I even brought along Zoë, who was on her best doggy behavior. She stayed in the car for most of the time, but whenever I let her out for a walk, or to visit, she charmed and impressed everyone she met. Go Zoë!
I was so glad that I had the chance to get out there; Scott McCloud and family were hanging out and signing books. The McClouds are really super people. Ivy and I got a chance to talk dogs and dog names, Winter was doing some great drawings and took photo reference of Zoë for upcoming art, and I think that Sky may have single-handedly convinced me to consider giving San Diego Comicon a try next year. Most of the Hamtramck crew was out in force; Suzanne Baumann, Michelangelo Cicerone and Matt Feazell were all there, handing out freebies and signing new books, along with some of the inZero crew (which stars the voice talents of Vögelein's co-creator, Jeff Berndt , and the multiple talents of Vögelein supporter Mike Zawacki) and a bunch of other folks I don't know. We talked and laughed and drank too much Jones soda and ate pizza and generally had a great time, and afterwards, a few of us met up with Sean and Sophia and walked over to LaShish for a bunch of really good food. Tons of fun, all around.
So by now I suppose you might be wondering about the title of this blog post. Well, you see, a couple weeks ago, it was looking like I was going to hit deadline, so I placed an ebay order and bought myself a brain-shaped jello mold, thinking I could make Dan and Katie their very own Green Brain. I figured that even if I didn't get the book done on time and had to bail on FCBD, I could at least make one for the inevitable booksigning to come later. But things worked out, and on Friday afternoon, I followed the directions and made a beautiful lime-jello brain to bring with me. We actually have an honest-to-God penny candy store around the corner from our house, so I stopped over and got red licorice for the brainstem and a couple of googly jawbreakers for the eyes.
You should've seen Dan's face. Awesome.
It's a terrible shame that Paul had my camera with him in NYC... maybe someone will email me a picture so that I can show off. Anyway, up until closing, when Michelangelo finally got brave and tried some, Scott was the only one with enough intestinal fortitute to sample the jello -- which I should add, did look pretty brainy and appropriately gross.
So now I can say, honestly, that Scott McCloud ate my brains.
Today was my birthday. It turned out to be a really great, really busy day.
I worked a full day, then ran out to see a local drum and dance troupe that I really like. Dunuya was playing an Art Hop performance at one of the local grade schools. I had originally hoped to get Tish out here to see them, but she got sick and decided to bail -- but it turned out to be the right choice, as their performances were interspersed with the kids' performances of dance and short plays. Still, they rocked that cafetorium harder than it'd ever been rocked before. Dunuya's Samba is a force to be reckoned with. While we were waiting for a group of first graders to finish their story, I sat and talked with one of Dunuya's dancers, and we made plans to get together for a midnight showing of Spiderman 3, which was extra impressive because she'd been up since five that morning, had already done two performances, and had one more to go before the end of the night. Iron woman, indeed!
Then off I went to meet Paul's folks to see Paul's Art Hop gallery opening at the KVCC Center for New Media/Arcus Gallery. Sadly, he's in NYC so he missed it, but we were able to see his stuff. The gallery has these big plasma screens that face the street, and you can see them through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Paul's got three looping galleries of his digital art, one for Moped Army, one for Little White Mouse and one for his new project, BPM. The rest of the gallery features student animation and production drawings and cels from the "Nine Old Men" years at Disney. They've got some really tremendous stuff -- Model sheets from Lady and the Tramp, a bunch of cels from Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and original production drawings from Snow White. The "Photostat years" -- the time when Disney skipped the inking phase and just photocopied the drawings straight to the cels -- is really well-represented, which suits me just fine as it's my favorite era; there's just something so raw and vital and unrestrained about those features (Robin Hood, Jungle Book, 101 Dalmations, Aristocats) and I love them the best.
It's really cool, and if you're in the area, make sure to stop by; the plasma screens run 24/7.
After visiting Paul's gallery, his folks and I went over to see another friend's gallery opening, and said friend reminded me to go steal some of his hostas from his backyard. So after bidding the in-laws goodnight, I biked over to his place and harvested a hunk of them. They're my absolute favorite kind of hosta, the big "matte-finish" wrinkly blue ones. They're really sturdy and vital and were a huge pain to dig up, so I have good hopes that they'll transplant well.
Then, after my late-night gardening adventure, I washed up, ran upstairs, and finished the book. It seemed (and felt) a little anti-climactic, but I finished the final pass for errors in the footnotes, made some adjustments to the leading and kerning, and called a friend to wring his biography out of him, which was the final piece of the puzzle. It's done. Really, really done. Finishing it on my birthday really felt right, somehow. Paul's going to give it one final prepress-pass on Monday, and then it's off to
Then (yeah, I know. I said it was a busy night, didn't I?) I hopped back on my bike and raced downtown to meet up with the Dunuya Dancer to see Spiderman at the new digital theatre. Alas, it was sold out. So we went out for margaritas, instead. GIRLY DRINKS SPELL VICTORY!
So yeah. All in all, a wonderful thirty-third birthday. Yay!
I found what I thought was the fourth fish corpse this morning, so I cleaned the pool a bit, added more stress-coat and pH balancer, and went to the pet store to get some replacements. I had the clerk catch two of the most vigorous, ornery feeder comets, and after returning home I set the fish's bag in the pool to normalize before releasing the new tenants. About ten minutes ago I went out with a flashlight to open the bag, and ... there were two orange-and-white fish still in the pond. So now there are four, and it'll probably be a bit overcrowded in there, unless one of them keels over. Here's hoping it stays crowded.
So tonight I took a much-needed break and went to go see Loreena McKennitt.
Wow.
Now, I know some of you are already rolling your eyes at me. She's world music. She's modern. Her songs are a mongrel blend of celtoid and middle eastern.
But still.
The passion and professionalism with which she and her nine-member band played those songs was astonishing, and left me in tears several times. The lighting was worthy of a broadway musical, the sound was impeccable, and the musicianship was astonishing. Each musician, except the fiddler and cellist, played at least three different instruments; sometimes the guitarist had a lute strapped to his back, an irish bouzouki on a stand in front of him, all while he played an acoustic guitar. The tabla player handled accordion, keyboards, and the occasional viola solo. Yeah. Crazy good.
One other sad note was when she played "The Highwayman." It's hard for me to listen to that song, because when the album first came out, that song was the favorite of a friend of mine named J. One summer (it must have been 1998) about five of us piled into J's big SUV (one of the first real big SUVs) and drove out to Rochester, NY to hang out with some friends. They used to throw a big party every summer, and friends would drive in from Michigan, Chicago, Toronto and New York to hang out together. In the cool of the basement, many guitars were produced and many songs were sung.
In the midst of all that music, J started going on about how much he loved that "Highwayman" song. I said I couldn't play it on my whistle, but if he had the words, I knew the music well enough to sing it. He ran to the car and got the liner notes, and so I sang it, every last tlot-tlotting damn verse. J loved it, though I'm not sure if anyone else did.
After we all drove home (including an unintended detour to Pennsylvania, but that's another story) J and I hung out some more. I couldn't quite call it dating, and I'm not sure exactly what he thought it was, but it was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed his company. One warm summer evening we shared greasy Chinese food on the Diag and made plans to go swing dancing the following week.
And we would have, if he hadn't killed himself in the days between.
Nobody knew why. Nobody saw it coming. J was a bright, charismatic, seemingly happy guy with a good job, a fancy new car, a huge and supportive group of friends, and the whole world in front of him. My unfortunate last memory of him was sobbing into Ric Conway's dress shirt at his funeral. Though I never saw it, J's mother told me later that he'd apologised to me in his suicide note.
And so nearly ten years later, I sat there at this beautiful, stirring concert, listening to this heartbreaker of a tragic song, thinking, "J, you stupid shit. You could be here right now."
And I cried.
Miss you, J, you big dumbass. Wish you were here.