LookingLand

The Orchard officially launched last week (New Year's Day!). This weekly webcomic will update every Thursday and you can expect it to be a gritty slow burner. If you love meditations on death, war, and breakfast (and who doesn't, really?), then set a bookmark for The Orchard: Hosted at Webcomics Nation. We'll get it its own space on the server with special artwork and behind-the-scenes extras hopefully in the coming year!

We're excited to kick off 2009 with this new project!

If you're excited too, you are always welcome to Donate! to this small press. Your contributions help keep Here There Be Monsters happily humming and running!

from LookingLand.com

Nucleus LiveJournal Plugin © Evgeny Lykhin

wow, i spent entirely too much time making this. i don't know what i was thinking. that said, it came out pretty nifty. i basically kiped the design from this fabulous library in portugal, but toned down the opulence a bit. i'm still working on the bottom half, but i had to stop after drawing and coloring all those little books. it was a bit much.

it's been a lot of fun doing this today. i seem to work best when there's no expectation looming over my head (no surprise there). and look: it's even in color, which is pretty amazing for me. i might dicker with the tones a bit for the final, but for now i am pretty pleased with it. and i wrote a little today too. about two-thousand words for whatever that's worth. nothing brilliant, but it was nice to throw down some verbiage nonetheless. i can't exactly account for my current good mood, but i certainly welcome it given all the angsting i've been doing lately about my creative stuff. i don't know if this will last, but i plan to enjoy it while i can. i've still got a ton of work to do on other projects and i'm now going to go do it (yes, at ten o'clock at night, why not?). i'd like to wrap up at least one of the major projects on my desk tonight (i'm nearly there!), so that i can work on the other one tomorrow and next week. with the holiday weekend coming up i have an extra day off and that's great too. i'm just babbling at this point. but all procrastination must come to an end and this is it. happy sattidy all! : D

it's finally happened. i have completely lost control of my desk. last night i sat down to work on Reconstruction and couldn't comfortably angle the clipboard in a way that made painting easy. of course, instead of clearing the desk, i just forced myself to make do. because God forbid i disturb the tower of i don't know what. and that's the worst part of it. i'm not even entirely sure what's in those piles at this point. a lot of photocopies, i think, and notes, and scanned microfilm. last night i was trying to baste together reconstructed pages of the Evening Star from 1865. and of course i did the scans wrong, so i am missing two lines in the middle of the pages (argh!). fortunately i still have the microfilm reel, so i can write in the missing lines tonight or tomorrow (but i am such an idiot).

i'm glad i went to the trouble of ordering this newspaper for a couple of reasons: it's the local paper for crying outloud! what was i thinking for blowing it off originally? and also, it's given me a few interesting new tidbits to work with (one description of sam arnold's father crying in the courtroom was rather heartbreaking).

i was really tempted to include a bunch of random local news things in my outline, but restrained myself (fascinating as they were), given that the monstrousness of this project is already too much for even me to handle at this point.


the good news is that this desk will be completely wiped clean this weekend. i've got the summer projects moving in (for the Here there Be Monsters press) and so everything is getting put on hold until late July. well, by "everything", i really mean In Pursuance of Said Conspiracy, which means i can get most of this stuff off my desk until then. this is not the way i wanted to do it, but life has a way of dictating the priorities. i have to write Issue No. 5 of Eleison in the coming week (yikes). thankfully i have a story in mind. just have to commit it to paper now.

in painting: Reconstruction shouldn't suffer for the schedule change (i hope). i'm a little bit behind, but the style change is gradually making it easier. i also have something more like a draft to work from (instead of winging it like i was doing for several pages there ~ shouldn't have done that, but oh well, it's all a learning process).

new projects: ooo exciting ~ my brother and i are going to launch a webcomic of some sort in late June/July hopefully. i want to title it The Orchard, but that sounds so prosaic given the subject matter. this will be an online exclusive about Death, War, and Bacon (for those of you who aren't familiar with my obsession with war and breakfast, please see Grantcakes). it will star Death, a soldier, and a pig (right?), and will likely be a meditation on themes familiar in my work for those who know it (fidelity, honor, and estrangement chief among them). stay tuned for more details!

in reading: book updates later. this post is already long and jumbled!

i've been threatening it for a while, but last night i actually started to do it: i'm pitching all my old files. i've already dispatched nearly a thousand (that's 1,000!) files and though it doesn't seem to have made a dent in the computer folder problem, that's a thousand less documents i have to futz with on my hard drive.

in writing: curious about s. weir mitchell's The Summer of St. Martin, i rooted out a copy of the text from internet archives (here it is if you're curious ~ they have all of his books online). the flip books are very cool there, by the way (they have tons of nifty stuff, including Poppet's memoir). the text is also digitized (not terribly well), but i dumped the words from St. Martin into a .doc file just to see how long the story is (word-wise, page-wise, etc.). it's really a very wee thing: just over 3k and about 10 pages (the design of the book it's printed in translates it into 30 pages!).

i thought this was really interesting. there was something very satisfying about its brevity in a book form ~ turning the pages, feeling like i was getting a whole meal when really it's just an hors d'oeuvre.

i've never been much of a short story writer (i've published a couple, but it's never appealed to me as a form). i much prefer the epic ~ but small epics! cram an epic into 150 pages and i am ecstatic. it's not impossible ~ some writers do it amazingly well. a while back, i agreed (after polling) to concentrate of "a lot of little books". this has become my mantra. and mitchell certainly raises the bar on just how short they can be! i am challenged, and by that challenge, emboldened.

: D

in other news:

my brother sent me a picture of our booth at ComicCon (looked fab!) and i have updated the Order page for the Here There Be Monsters press. yay!

i'm off to Comic Con in San Diego with Here There Be Monsters Press <~ to debut Eleison (which i still have not seen). talked to my brother earlier and he seemed a little lackluster about the results from the printer ~ i'm hoping he was just in a mood and there's nothing wrong with the book (eeeeeeeee!)

i feel totally unprepared to do any of this. but at least i have my shoes (so that much is right in the world ~ ha!) ~

i will be gone until sunday night and will keep all of my friends in my happiest thoughts.

fare thee well, all! see you in five days!

: D

the pigfish press (affectionately called), Here there be Monsters, will publish Eleison, The Red Dragon, that infernally untitled Jack the Ripper melange, the Barabas series (whatever it decides to be one day), and probably eventually Witnesses of the Locust after its stint at Eden's Edge (yeah, i'm working on that ~ hahahaha).

that is, of course, if the silly thing can get off the ground.

everyone push ~ !

: D