New T-Shirt Preview

So last week I mentioned that I was thinking about ideas for a new Digger website. One of the things I've been contemplating today, seeing as how I'm dipping a toe back into artwork again, is doing Digger as a webcomic. I come up with lots of ideas like this, and very few of them ever make it beyond the, "Wouldn't it be neat if...?" stage. But I'll probably play with it for awhile, knock out some test strips and see how I like them.

In the meantime, here's a look at the T-shirt design I mentioned earlier, based on "Double-Secret Weapon." It's still very much a work in progress, as I'm mainly not sure what to do with the background. What's there right now is a photo background of an actual food court. I spent about two hours tonight screwing around with it, trying different ways to make the background look cooler. Came up with something pretty decent-looking, although I still wasn't completely happy with it. And then Gimp crashed.

Hadn't saved, either.

So now I get a mulligan. But not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

Still Alive

Yes, I'm still here. I've just been on a brief personal hiatus from a lot of things. But I have a bit of news.

My third Digger tale, "Double-Secret Weapon," is now live at Baen's Universe. This issue doesn't have quite the all-star lineup of issue one (but quite frankly, what could?), but still, Nancy Kress, Mike Resnick, Eric Flint, Norman Spinrad... not bad to share a TOC with.

Funny, though, how the last few jobs I've worked all used the acronym TOC with different meanings. In the Army, it was Tactical Operations Center. At TV Guide, it was the Transmission Operations Center. At Clear Channel, we're the Television Operations Center. When I'm writing, though, it's a Table of Contents. I wonder if there's a big publishing house somewhere that has a department just for producing tables of contents for all their different book divisions. They could call it a Table Of Contents Operations Center (TOCOC).

The illustrations for this story (by Luis Peres, example at left) are better than the ones for "Astromonkeys." A nice comedic flavor, although the guy apparently kind of skimmed the story. He gave Digger a helmet with dog ears apparently because someone mentions Dig-Dog at one point. And he gave Digger white hair, although the story quite specifically assigns that feature to Professor Pierce. But those are tiny nitpicks against what is a Really Cool Thing: having another story officially published.

I actually started to do an illustration for this myself a couple of months ago, but couldn't get it looking the way I wanted, so I gave up. I may give it another try.

The story went live late Friday, and then today, Monday, I got another cool piece of news. "Astromonkeys" has been accepted for Escape Pod, so double-sale for that one. Yay!

Now I just need to start writing again. Haven't written a lick for a couple of months. Time to get back on it.