The Odd Update

So I'm currently working way too few hours at my job, which means I'm trying to find other ways to make money. Got a bunch of watch & clock movements from Dad, so I'm playing with the idea of making steampunk jewelry. Working on a necklace now, which looks okay on my desk, but look like crap on, so more work to do there.

But here's a weird bit. I decided to look on Etsy to see who else is doing the kinds of things I want to do. And most people are not. They are either gluing random gears to stuff to make it "steampunk," or they are taking to heart the idea that gears have to serve a function, in which case they are soldering entire watch movements to random pieces of jewelry.

Which is really no more steampunk than gluing random gears, since the watch movements are all backwards and not serving any purpose other than to give a mechanical flavor. Meanwhile, I'm working on stuff that uses scavenged parts and gears as design elements, not functional machinery. But the entire thing is supposed to be a harmonious whole. Gluing random metal gears to a cloth books cover is silly; using a metal gear as a design element in a piece of metal jewelry is not (to my mind).

But here's the crazy part: I do find one (1) person on Etsy who is doing almost exactly what I envision myself doing as I develop my skills. And she's in Tulsa.

Meanwhile, I tried to learn how to do a pulp-style painting to make a new cover for a paperback edition of Death Wave, but after three failed attempts, I'm about to give up and try a new approach. And I also have to edit the manuscript and format it for print, which will be a bit of work.

Last night, we gamed and it was a hell of a lot of fun as my character tried to talk another character into bed and finally gave a speech I've been holding in reserve for over a month. It went okay, but then last night, I had a dream (which is weird, because I very rarely remember my dreams anymore).

It was like watching a cop show or movie or something, only I'm simultaneously in it and watching it. And as I'm locked in a cop car (maybe arrested for something I didn't do), the serial killer (played by a really creepy John Lithgow) appears and start head-butting the car window, cracking it. At which point efamar, trapped outside the car with the killer, says something like, "the killer's skin is really soft!," which provokes this terrified "ew!" from the audience, because he's like Hannibal Lecter: refined and probably moisturized and manicured and smelling really civilized, and yet absolutely fucking bestial, his lips bleeding where's he's chewing on them in his frenzy to kill anyone who gets in his way. And that's all I remember.

The Daily Grind

Wow, hard to believe that it's been almost a month and a half since I posted here. Just goes to show how much mental effort goes into the daily postings over at Hero Go Home.

The daily Run, Digger, Run! serial experiment is not going as well as hoped. I have a couple of daily readers, but there has been no build. What's more, it's a lot more work than I anticipated.

Because it's a lot more than just writing 500 words a day. I have to write the daily episode (and because I set myself the challenge of making each episode 500 words, no more and no less, I have to massage the episode until the length is right). Then I post it, write intros and outros and add the social icons and Twitter feed. Then I add the image header, which changes every day (and manually change the size in HTML); I make up the set once a week, using Inkscape and GIMP. And now I'm having to remember to pull out a small quote for emphasis, as well.

Then I have to open up the previous entry to pull the first episode link to paste in the current episode. After I publish the episode, I copy the link address and put in a "continue to next episode" link in the previous entry. And after all that, I have to change the slideshow on the main page. It's a long process for what ends up being a couple minutes' worth of reading for two people.

But I press on. And I'm trying to come up with more ways to make money. I'm putting together a new, better (I hope) cover for Death Wave to put on the paperback edition (with perhaps a special bonus story for added value). And I have some other projects in the works as well, but with all the work I've committed to on Run, Digger, Run!, everything else is moving very slowly.