Fragments of Shadow

An old fragment…

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:42:14 GMT

The girl floats in darkness, her hair fanning out delicate as seaweed. Her skin is clammy and white, broken by purple bruises like orchids in the snow. She has not been in the black water for long. Ragged cuts line her cheeks and arms, but there is no blood. A flowing dress wraps around her, hiding any further damage. Her arms are bound in front of her at the wrists. Cloudy, color-drained eyes stare up at the moon. Her jaw hangs limply open, and water laps in and out of her mouth.

Languidly, the current of the stream pulls her along, over silt, stone, and shining fish to places she never saw when she was alive. Tree branches reach out with grasping hands as she passes, but the river has her.

Her journey continues.

Something I wrote a few years back. It’s on my LJ, but I wanted to dredge it up and get it on Fragments of Shadow, just ’cause.

Originally published at Fragments of Shadow. You can comment here or there.

Somehow Comforting…

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:34:45 GMT

So, Neil Gaiman said this in an interview about ten years ago:

I was always so relieved that anyone wants to publish anything I’ve written. In many ways I feel like the biggest challenge hasn’t come yet. Because, if pressed, I would confess that what I’m really scared of is that one day somebody will knock at the door and they’ll have a clipboard. They’ll say, “Mr. Gaiman?” And I’ll say “Yes.” They’ll say, “It says here that you get to make stuff up and get paid for it.” I’ll say, “Yes.” “And it says here that you can do anything you want. You can go and do fantasy and you can do real fiction and you can do TV, films, whatever you want.” And I’ll say, “Yes.” And they say, “Well it’s over. It’s done. We’ve caught up with your game, Sir. You are going to have to go and get a real job. And work normal hours.”

Yes, Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar show up and they say “It’s over. You are now going to have to get a real job.” I will have gone to that point, seemingly expecting that this writing thing would go on for ages. I’d then think, “Well, it’s a fair cop.” I would go off and have to get a real job and get up the morning and wear a suit. I suppose I’d secretly make some things up in my head for myself before I went to bed at night, or before I go to sleep anyway lying in bed, sort of making up little stories. But I’d never be able to tell anybody. That’s the thing I’m scared of.

I mean, I know these fears are fairly universal, but it’s somehow comforting to see someone like Neil articulate them.

You can also read the full interview.

Oh, and go read the Graveyard Book. It’s wonderful.

Originally published at Fragments of Shadow. You can comment here or there.

Also...

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:19:11 GMT

I'm on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter.

I won't do that thing where it posts my tweets here, I might embed them in the sidebar over at Fragments of Shadow, when I get around to finishing the redesign.

"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice.

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:15:36 GMT

John Updike is dead from lung cancer.

The quote above is from "A&P," my favorite of his short stories. I haven't read the Rabbit series in years, and it's been even longer since The Witches of Eastwick, but he'll definitely be missed.

...Crap.

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:16:16 GMT

Get these free stickers over at Ziraxia!

http://www.ziraxia.com/stickers

There's also a special offer so you can get another set of stickers with all the Ziraxians and 20% off your order if you buy a shirt (or two, or more).

Do me a favor and repost this for your friends lists, I love these stickers, and want to get them out there far and wide.

Farewell, Forry.

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:51:41 GMT

Forrest J. Ackerman has passed.

Thank you, uncle Forry, for everything. For Ray Bradbury, for Famous Monsters of Filmland, and even for Sci-Fi. But most of all, thank you for being a truly kind person.

Kat and I met Forry at DragonCon. Kat was wearing a spider-shaped poison ring that was, essentially, a replica of the one Lon Chaney Sr. used to wear. The one Forrest had, with a picture of Chaney in it, and a dab of his makeup.

Forry came over, and sat down next to Kat, and complimented her on her ring, and showed her the real one. They talked for almost an hour, about everything and nothing, and for the rest of the weekend, every time we saw him, he’d wave at Kat, point to his ring, and wink. He truly loved what he was doing, and his enthusiasm was contagious. It’s no wonder all the things he championed caught on, with a cheerleader like him.

He’ll be missed.

This entry is crossposted from Evil Spy. Go to the original.

Ia, ia, Cthoobi phtagn!

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:04:09 GMT

This is a good example of why I work at Ziraxia. Where else would I get to do this?

This entry is crossposted from Evil Spy. Go to the original.

Night of the Wombat Trailer!

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:19:19 GMT

Joe, the new guy at work, made this video for the Daily Wombat shirt over at Ziraxia. Remember, you can buy the shirt at Ziraxia!This entry is crossposted from Evil Spy. Go to the original.

To Everyone Who Voted Yes on Amendment 2.

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:42:37 GMT

Thank you for allowing your ridiculous, homophobic fears to run rampant.

You have succeeded in banning something that was already illegal. You have destroyed what rights I had regarding my relationship with my girlfriend of fourteen years in your knee-jerk reaction, your “HOMO BAD!” flailing.

Perhaps next time you could have a more open mind or failing that, read more than the intentionally misleading summary of the law intended to drive an outmoded, “God-fearing” agenda that has no place in a society with a true separation of church and state.

Crap.

This entry is crossposted from Evil Spy. Go to the original.

I Want to Write My Secret Across Your Sky

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 01:05:08 GMT

Worlds are colliding. I’m working four jobs right now.

Ziraxia/Red Alert: The same, though I’m changing schedules next week to make Howl-O-Scream work better. We’re doing well. You should buy a shirt here :) Current Writing Gig: Stupidly behind, but almost done. I feel like crap for being late. If you see this, W, Sorry! Howl-O-Scream: Tuesday is dress rehearsal. House looks good this year. Come visit me in Club Muse! Third Eye Games: Doing the website, that’ll be moving here soon.

On top of all that? My mouth is a shambles. The braces I had as a child ate all the enamel off my teeth and now I’m paying for it. I have a root canal tomorrow afternoon. And thousands of dollars worth of work beyond that… With no insurance or idea where I’m going to get the money to pay for it all. Any rich uncles running around out there I don’t know about?

This entry is crossposted from Evil Spy. Go to the original.

From horror to slapstick in one easy step.

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:43:51 GMT

Horror must be highly orchestrated. If anything is off, it can turn into comedy, and all the tension you’ve built up can disappear in a puff of smoke.

All they changed was the score.

This entry is crossposted from Evil Spy. Go to the original.

A Song to Say Goodbye

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:50:37 GMT

My cat Groucho, my constant companion since he was a kitten 19 years ago, has been ill for a while. He lost a lot of weight over the last month. He’s been fading, despite my best efforts to help him gain weight, to recover. His whole life, he’s been a kitten. Playful. Loving. Last night I spent the entire evening writing with him in my lap or following me around the apartment as best as his wobbly, weak legs could carry him. I knew it was coming. I told him my goodbyes and made sure he knew how much I love him. This morning, I checked on him and he lifted his head up and meowed to me. I kissed his head and petted his purring flank, and went to work.

He passed away in his sleep this afternoon.

Farewell, little one. I miss you.

This entry is crossposted from Evil Spy. Go to the original.

Coming Soon – Mekhet: Shadows in the Dark

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 03:34:41 GMT

Unnoticed and silent, they watch. Their eyes have seen a thousand secrets, and yours are no exception. They are the Shadows that dwell among the Kindred, and everyone knows that the darkness has eyes in the Danse Macabre. Seek their wisdom under cover of night, and discover what awaits the wise and the patient.

A Clan book for Vampire: the Requiem.

The cover is a placeholder, the real deal will be way more interesting, though if that’s who I think it is, she’s quite interesting in her own right. I didn’t write a huge amount of this, (only about 10%) but I’m really looking forward to its release, since they’re my favorite clan in Requiem and it will mark my first published work in the World of Darkness.

This entry is crossposted from Evil Spy. Go to the original.

Amid the Wreckage

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:39:59 GMT

The comic Kat and I were working on has been stalled at the same point for too long. It feels stale and lost. So we’re setting it aside. It needs to be largely rethought.

That said, we dusted off a manuscript I started at USF, and reworked it into a comic idea that we’re both really excited about. We’ve been working on it for only a few days and it’s already farther along than the other project ever was, in a way.

I have too many projects going on at once, again. I need to step back and reevaluate exactly what parts of my creative life are important to me. I’m not going to cancel things, just put them into something resembling priorities.

Obviously, if I owe you something, you’re priority number one. Which, of course, means that White Wolf, Third Eye Games and Ziraxia are first tier. Everything else is basically up in the air.

Originally published at Fragments of Shadow. You can comment here or there.

Decompression = Insomnia, Apparently

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:29:29 GMT

Last night was a lot of laying in bed staring at the ceiling. I expected, with all the stress finally subsiding to a dull roar, to get a decent night’s sleep.

Not so much. I was suddenly wired in all the wrong ways. I couldn’t stop thinking about a whole lot of nothing, but I was too tired to get up. Blah.

Originally published at Fragments of Shadow. You can comment here or there.

Secret Project #1 Down.

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:32:48 GMT

First draft done, and sent off. Now I can try and get some work done on my personal projects and 3EG before I get started on the next one.

In other news, my grandparents are settled into their new home in Arkansas. I miss them terribly, but I know they’ll be happier up there. It’s funny, because I’ve been so busy that I haven’t been able to see them much, but it was comforting to know they were at least nearby.

And I’ve seen Dark Knight twice now. Good doesn’t even begin to cover it. This year has easily produced the best comic films ever.

Originally published at Fragments of Shadow. You can comment here or there.

There’s a ringing in my ears.

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:49:22 GMT

And there has been for three days… I’m updating from my iPhone because if I don’t, I won’t update at all. Current secret project is still a few thousand words out.

I have so many projects going on at once that I’m starting to lose track of what goes where. It’s time to take a step back and get myself organized.

I need a method of synchronizing docs between multiple computers… Maybe it’s time to try google docs again.

Originally published at Fragments of Shadow. You can comment here or there.

Weekly Ziraxia Shirt... ;P

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:05:10 GMT

This one will only make sense to the WoW geeks amongst you.

It's on hyperspecial this week for only $12.99 through Monday! Buy it and lower my stress level a notch. Thank you.

Nightmares and Visitations

Fri, 30 May 2008 15:53:40 GMT

Last night was horrible. Every inch of sleep was nightmare.

I've mentioned my recurring dreams of the woman before. There is nothing blatantly sinister about her, but she frightens me so much that Kat always wakes me up because I'm hyperventilating. Sometimes she's an old woman with, as I described before, skin that is precisely the color of mouse feet. Sometimes, like last night, she seems younger, but she's wearing a veil. She never speaks, but behind the veil, I can hear her breath gurgling like water dribbling over a rocky riverbed. Always, I feel paralyzed. I am aware of her presence, but I can't even look down to see her. There is a weight like that old painting of the cauchemar, the nightmare beast sitting on the sleeper's chest. All of the ambient noises in my room, the fan running, the hedgehog going about his nightly shuffling, it's all gone. The room is completely silent, except for her breathing. All the lights are dark, both the glow of the cable box and the alarm clock on my nightstand, and the ambient light coming from the streetlights outside the window.

Last night, even her breathing disappeared, and I was laying in pitch darkness, in utter silence. And then Kat spoke, "what's going on?"

The entire block had lost electricity. I woke from a nightmare of darkness, isolation and oppression into a blackout.

Kat's half-sleep and the clinging shreds of my dream made the entire situation absolutely terrifying. I couldn't fall back asleep until almost three hours later when the power came back on, so I just alternated between laying in darkness and flickering candlelight.

Then I went back to sleep and dreamed of being trapped in a town of walking dead, animated by swarms of locusts nesting in their viscera. When they attacked they opened their maws and let forth a torrent of insects, who would begin to devour and burrow into their prey. I had lost my shoes somewhere, and the crawling bugs burst and popped beneath my feet. Thankfully I don't remember much more of that one.

Can I have some pleasant dreams tonight, please?

I <3 Kat.

Tue, 27 May 2008 02:52:57 GMT

We worked together on a shirt that will be on Hyperspecial at Ziraxia this week, and I think it's my new favorite shirt on the site.

Updates...

Tue, 27 May 2008 02:50:10 GMT

Thank you to everyone who commented or e-mailed me. I appreciate the support.

My mom is doing worlds better. She's coherent enough to be bored, now, though she won't be out of the hospital until at least Thursday. My grandma's in a cast up to her elbow that keeps her hand in a fist, and my uncle and stepdad are both moving along into the next phases of their care.

It's stupid around here, still, but it's not as oppressive, and that's nice.

...Now the update.

Thu, 22 May 2008 15:26:24 GMT

So Monday, I got a call from my stepdad... "Your mom can't stand up on her own, and she's really out of it. I think she may have had a stroke." I rushed over there and helped him get her in the car, since he refused to call 911.

She couldn't stand up, her legs kept collapsing out from under her. Her entire body was shaking in little tremors that he hadn't noticed... She couldn't make a fist. She couldn't hold a drink but she was terribly thirsty. She was barely aware of her surroundings.

It wasn't a stroke, thankfully. What it is, though, is something called rhabdomyolysis. Her muscles are devouring themselves. The proteins they released into her bloodstream caused kidney failure. A few rounds of dialysis have kick-started her kidneys, but she'll probably be in the hospital for a while, and then they want to put her in an assisted living facility for a while, to get everything under control. See, the cause of this whole thing is that she was on so many medications that she was too wonky to manage her own medicine. So she was taking too much, and it caused the rhabdomyolysis.

Also, on Monday, my grandfather was in the hospital for a heart examination, and my grandmother got into a car accident, totaled her car and broke her hand. Yesterday, my stepfather and my uncle both had tests done to determine the real extent of their back damage and how feasible a surgical solution is. My other uncle is closing on a house tomorrow, if they finished repairing the roof that collapsed on Monday.

Tuesday, the hard drive in Kat's computer gave up the ghost, and entire architectural paradigms at work got respecified, so a large chunk of the last year of development is almost entirely out the window.

So yeah.

I'm done now, ok?

First, the plug...

Thu, 22 May 2008 15:02:05 GMT

The Maddeningly Cute shirt, featuring a little relative of Nyarlathotep's named Bob, with art by memkhet and layout by me, is on sale until Monday at Ziraxia for only $12.99.

Reynolds/Washburn 2008

Tue, 13 May 2008 16:37:52 GMT

The only real option in this election season.

It's on sale for only $12.99 through Monday, so now's the time to grab it, before it goes back up to $16.99!

Stupid questionnaire.

Tue, 06 May 2008 14:23:39 GMT

Stolen from greygirlbeast to keep myself from having to work until I've finished my coffee.

TECHNOLOGY
Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer?
This one has a photograph of a beautiful lock from a door in Spain. The one at home is a character from the comic I'm working on with memkhet.

Q. How many televisions do you have in your house?
Two. One in the living room, one in the bedroom.

BIOLOGY
Q. Are you right-handed or left-handed?
Right-handed.

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
A mole. :P

Q. What is the last heavy item you lifted?
I lift boxes of t-shirts that way between 30-60 pounds all the time.

Q. Have you ever been knocked out?
Yes, a few times. But not in a long time. Last time was on a BMX track when I was a teenager.

BULL*OLOGY
Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
Nein, bitte.

Q. If you could change your name, what would you change it to?
I like my name. I might drop my surname, since it has very little meaning for me anymore.

Q. What color do you think looks best on you?
I like black. And grey.

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item?
A live goldfish, once. It was my dad's fault.

DAREOLOGY
Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100?
Duh.

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000?
Sure.

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000
Why not, I barely have time to blog as it is.

Q. Would you pose naked in a magazine for $250,000?
Sure.

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1000?
I can get JP to do it for $500 and take a $500 finder's fee.

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000?
Depends on the human.

DUMBOLOGY
Q: What is in your left pocket?
$7.04

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie?
Dear God, no.

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house?
Carpet.

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower?
Depends on how awake I am, and if I'm alone.

Q: How many pairs of flip flops do you own?
Null.

LASTOLOGY
Q: Last person who texted you?
Borders, with a coupon.

Q: Last person who called you?
My stepdad.

Q: Last person you hugged?
Kat.

FAVORITOLOGY
Q: Number?
47, long story.

Q: Season?
Autumn

Q: Color?
A nice dark red.

CURRENTOLOGY
Q: Missing someone?
James Trekkey.

Q: Mood?
Tired, headachey.

Q: Listening to?
A Rapid Systems truck idling just outside the office.

Q: Watching?
Nothing, currently.

Q: Worrying about?
Money. Deadlines.

Q: Wearing?
A Stiff Kitten t-shirt, jogging pants, a pair of Misfits Vision Streetwear.

RANDOMOLOGY
Q: First place you went this morning?
Bathroom.

Q: What can you not wait to do?
Get a full night's sleep. See Alien Sex Fiend and Specimen next month.

Q: Do you smile often?
Yes.

Q: Are you a friendly person?
Yes.