Further Upward Steps

There comes a certain point in one's life when one begins to wonder if Lovecraft's fiction isn't really all about a fear of genitals. At this point one can flee the field or one can confront The Great Old Ones face-to-face, as it were.

In addition to Lovecraft this was influenced by Escher and the unspeakable six-ought Rapidograph point. The original was about twenty inches across as I recall.

Care for another cigar, Dr. Freud?

This is a Cthonian, out of Brian Lumley's Cement Surroundings and The Burrowers Beneath. Honestly, I should be ashamed of myself.

Well, there have been a couple of notable events in the last couple of days. I'm gonna be in my first gallery show! It's going to be at the Gualala Arts Center from March 14 to April 6. It's a group show of large prints coming out of Berkeley Community College. If you're a constant reader you may recognize the image they chose -- here it is. Gonna drop a fortune and print it up at three by four feet on canvas. It's interesting -- a lot of the participants in the show are instructors here at school.

Man, Gualala. They got rich folks there. I hear you can get superpowers if enough rich folks see your art. I'm trying to figure out how to make my work appealing to rich folks and I'm currently torn between pheromones from apes in oestrus and some of the musk from behind Alan Greenspan's ears. Decisions, decisions.

And I am now convinced that I'm gonna be in a book. Here's the home page. And here's the author page. Look at that! My name on the same page as Joe R. Lansdale's. Dang. And the title has been changed to Ligature Marks, which I think is a real improvement. Now I need to put a link to my blog from my original site.

This all seems so weird. After being a self-identified loser for my whole damned life all of a sudden things like this are happening. It makes me nervous -- but I think I can live with a little nervousness.

Those first tentative steps...

Right, so I'm a former toilet cleaner, ditch digger, and box hucker with a screwed-up back looking for a new career as a writer/artist. This isn't as ridiculous as it sounds on the surface; I've made money as a writer, actually supporting myself for a little more than a year before the web crash of 2001, and my art has appeared in everything from Artfuck magazine to the University of Bristol's DinoBase website.

Right now I'm back in school. I started out working toward an AA degree in creative writing with the intention of following that up with courses in editing and copywriting from the UC extension program.

Those plans were delayed when I was mugged by a novel. I found that classes that required a lot of writing were sucking out the juice I needed for the big project; this led to some spectacular emotional situations that forced me to drop a number of courses mid-semester.

While this was going on I was asked to work on a new small press magazine, Swill. (There's an old-fashioned SF story of mine on the site right now.) I write, assistant edit, design, and illustrate the damned thing.

http://swillmagazine.com/

I needed to take classes that would allow me to write while giving me creative stimulation. Until the novel's finished, anything that gets in the way has to go -- so since I was working on the visual aspect of Swill I started taking courses in art and graphics.

Then a teacher suggested I join the Digital Arts Club.

http://www.digitalartsclub.com/

I thought this would be a schmoozefest; instead it turned out to be a hardcore society dedicated to advancing the careers of its members. This led me to realize that I might be able to move my art into the gallery scene. So that's my current position. I'm working on the novel, writing short fiction for the small press, working on Swill, and developing my art in order to start getting gallery shows.

I suppose you're wondering what the novel's about...