State of the Oaf

So, whatcha think of the new look? Please glance to your right and notice the link to my spanking new Redbubble gallery, where the Bonelands series of prints is currently posted and ready for purchase. Also note a few changes in my blog roll -- I've added a couple of pals, deleted a few people who -- while certainly worthy -- were not particularly close to my circle.

See, it turns out that I passed 20,000 hits when I wasn't looking so I figured it was time to class the joint up. The banner? I didn't use 3D software; instead, I used Illustrator to draft a three-point perspective grid, then I drew the shapes in Photoshop, rendered them in Painter, and then brought the thing back to Photoshop for the lettering. Fun times.

So here's what's going on with me.

There's no need to go into the hell of last winter. If you're a reader, you've got an idea, if you're not, you don't need to read my pissing and moaning.

Things are different now.

I have a number of very specific plans to try and make some money. I'm going to be putting all my old art up on Redbubble and possibly DeviantArt galleries, and there will be prints available. My friend Deborah has recently approached me about doing a series of place mats with a dinosaur theme. I'll do those, and then use them as samples of my art when I try and sell a children's book on dinosaurs. And I'm entering the UC Extension editorial program this fall, and while I'm doing that I will be investigating the possibility of writing and editing manuals and tutorials for graphics software.

And I won't be going further into debt while pursuing these options. My sister has finally agreed to sell our family house in Merced, so I'll have enough money to get through the editorial program.

I will also be able to make a few changes in my studio that will make it a more effective creative space. Blinds on the west window so I can work in the late afternoon and early evening, a pillow to support a drawing board so I can sketch while at my workstation, a new stand for my light table so I can use it as a surface for blocking out plots with Post-It notes and file cards, and whatever I need to do podcasts. (That's right, by the end of the summer you'll be getting some spoken-word Oaf.)

The novel is cooking right along. I did some important writing yesterday, and will be doing a thorough re-reading in conjunction with the new plot outline generated at Taos Toolbox. I have every confidence that by the end of the summer, I'll be starting to circulate both the novel and the film script.

And Taos Toolbox was perfect. It set me back on my feet, made me feel that plot is learnable and the novel is under control, and the sheer pleasure of doing something well with people you respect is a difficult thing to beat.

I'm a little further along the process of coming to terms with myself. I am, like it or not, a classic crazy genius. If you were to go back and read this blog from the beginning, you'd find a fascinating if not always pleasant history of what seems to be a series of bipolar episodes. I run the gamut from sleepy croaks to extreme lucidity to hysterical ravings, and if you plot these out you do seem to get a sine wave.

So I am going to be experimenting with therapy, as well. But right now I'm riding the sweet edge of a manic state, and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

I'm grateful to all the people in my life who are patient enough to put up with me. I'm a rewarding person, I hope, but I'm not what you'd call easy on the nerves. Oh, well. Dealing with me is not always like dealing with a person. I'm a bit of a force of nature, a larger-than-life character, and that's just the way it is.

In the past I've felt kind of crappy about the fact that the personality I present to the outside world is one I deliberately tried to construct -- it's only bad craftsmanship on my part that keeps me from being arrestingly charismatic -- but I've come to realize that I had to assemble that personality from the parts I had laying around, and some of those parts are actually fairly admirable.

Yeah, I'm a weirdo. Even in the company of New Agers, stoners, junkies, writers, artists, and SF people I still stand out as an eccentric. What the fuck. You know what I am?

I am brilliant. Smart, talented, imaginative, and skilled. I have an excellent prose style, a fine control over composition, a rock-solid rhythm. I'm a brute, but I'm a good-natured brute. Having me around is like having a pet bear. And at the same time, I like to take care of people. I'm the kind of person people ask for advice, the kind of person children and animals automatically trust. People tend to open up to me if I'm around them for more than twenty minutes or so. That's because I really listen, and I really care. My raging insanity is balanced by a mind of exceptionally fine discipline, and the intense pressures involved in that balance are the source of my art.

I'm a man you don't meet every day.

My powerful drives toward self-negation and self-destruction are hard on the people who care for me. I'm sorry, I'm sorry -- but that is something that's going to come up. It just is. I can take responsibility for it, but sometimes I'm going to need help.

The thing is? I get that help. People think I'm worth the extra effort. I am so grateful for the kindness of those around me that it's hard to deal with sometimes, but it's enough to keep me going, to keep me motivated, to keep me interested in life. Every kind word and gesture extended to me carries a vital importance that I cannot ignore.

So think of it this way. If you're going to care about me, expect a fucking rollercoaster -- but you can count on a scenic ride. Yes, I make extra demands on the people around me. I wish I didn't. But I'm a rewarding person to be around in ways you won't get from anyone else. It's my job to be as good a person as I can be, but I simply am not going to be an easy person, and I'm through thinking I should be. I am big and hard and complicated and frequently difficult, because that's who I am.

I just have to try and be worth the trouble.

A Good Night For A Goddamned Change

Well, I really had to force myself to take care of business last night. I've been sleeping even more poorly than usual the last few nights and yesterday was brutal by my standards -- I had class, a Digital Arts Club meeting, and then a reception for the release of the new Milvia Street magazine. It's depressing to think that even with the freedom to stand and sit at will, something that isn't even a full day for an office worker leaves me thinking that I need to refill my prescriptions. When itchy twitchy Vicodin starts seeming preferable to pain it's just not good.

But everything else was swell. There was an emergency call for large scale art for a nice gallery show out where the rich folks live -- I may or may not get in but I was all over that. And there was some swell stuff at the reading, good poetry and prose and people. My social skills did not fail me. I wasn't a jerk or a feeb or a creep.

And the Milvia Street reception gave me a very gratifying series of ego boosts. People I respect admiring my work? A genuinely good writer thanking me for how much I taught him? Getting an invitation to join an elite writer's group that has a totally different approach from my beloved Monday night mob? Getting hugs and attention from attractive women? (Not that the other hugs and attention weren't swell but there are hugs and there are hugs.) Getting gruff praise from the gray emminence behind the multimedia arts program? Seeing my work projected ten feet tall? Finding a number of readers for the novel?

My back feels like shit and my sciatica is giving me that lovely barbed-wire tickle and I am exhausted. But tell you what -- I'm feeling good right now and I'm gonna ride this mood as far as it'll go.

I Swear I'll Have A Real Post Up Tomorrow.

Go print this and stick it on your fridge. Now!

People who know me know how true this is...

The Soft Pink Hands of the Parasitic Class.

When I was a manual laborer my hands had a thick ochre rind on their palms. Honestly, I could have made a few bucks by having guitar picks or spectacle frames carved from the horn on my hands every couple of weeks. When I grew frustrated with the idiot ape politcking of those around me I could take a shipping pallet out into the back alley and wring it like it was a fucking washcloth, reduce it to splinters inside of five minutes -- no martial arts, just brute animal strength and a willingness to accept abrasions, punctures and the breakage of small bones -- and then stroll back onto the work floor thoroughly refreshed.

Now my hands are soft and pink. White-collar hands. But I just noticed that I have... well, you can't call it a callus. But there's a thickened patch of transparent skin on the base of the pad of my right thumb.

It's from hitting the space bar.

I'd like to think this means I'm still a worker.

Blogcessive Compulsive.

Ruth Leaf taught me how to make linoleum cuts. You can find her site over in my links -- check it out and get an eyeful of some real art. Not everybody gets a mother-in-law of this caliber.

So I've had a problem over the last few days. On Sunday I installed a hit counter on this page and, well...

I can't stay away from it. It's like having a loose cuticle or an itchy scar -- I keep picking at it. I figured maybe a couple of people were looking at this, maybe I was talking to myself. But there were a few more people here than I was counting on -- and the next day there were more. And more.

Then I started posting the Jurassic Fight Club review and on my peewee scale the numbers went through the roof.

But the numbers are deceiving -- it looks as if most people are here for zero seconds. So the typical citizen takes a quick peek and hits the back button when their eyes start to blister. On the other hand someone in Texas was on for more than nineteen hours, so I'm assuming he (or she, of course) left his computer on while he crashed and then went to work.

The map function is ultra hypnotic. Someone in Singapore took a peek? South Africa? Puerto Rico? (Speaking of which, I really want to eat in Singapore and Puerto Rico, while South Africa's Permian fossils call to me...)

Anyone who's curious is welcome to take a look at the numbers -- just click on View My Stats under the hit counter.

So. People are starting to notice this. But who are they? What do they want, aside from more TV reviews?

And more importantly, when the time comes for me to conquer the puny Earth will they heed my call to arms?

Inquiring minds wish to know!

My first series!

Another graphics element -- I used it in a grayscale illustration in the first issue of Swill.

As soon as I stuck my head in the bar I knew I was making a mistake. The place was packed and noisy and full of happy young people, a breed of human I can do well without. I started to withdraw when the bartender caught my eye and held up his hand and waved two fingers toward himself.

Damnit.

I pushed my way through the crowd and the bartender gestured again, moving me further down. That’s when I saw that there was a big chunk of territory at the end of the bar that was completely vacant except for a beefy beef-colored guy in a Hawaiian shirt and a dark-green fedora. He had a tumbler of something clear and fizzy in ice, a shot glass, a sweaty silver shaker and a red plastic bucket sitting next to him on the bar and he wore an expression of exceptional mildness.

The bartender smiled at me from behind his mustache. If I get much balder I’m going to have my scalp depilated and get a tattoo of his comb-over.

“Come on, hoss,” he said. “You’ve got to meet the latest. Get him while he’s here cause he’s going away fast.”


So on Friday I was feeling well enough to work -- but I didn't want to do anything I was supposed to do. Instead, I had a short story that wanted to get out. Seven pages later it was done and I'll be thrashing it over with the writer's group tonight. (Remind me to introduce you to the writer's group some time -- nice batch of folks. We are a diverse bunch to say the least...)

It's got the same setting and a couple of characters from The Little Things (currently available both on-line and in print form, see the Swill website over in the sidebar) and I realized that I've solved a minor problem that's been bugging me for a while.

I adore science fiction. The second book I was exposed to was Red Planet by Robert Heinlein and that was it. I was hooked.

But SF hasn't been an easy thing for me to write. See, the way I look at it is that if you're gonna write SF you need to make some kind of scientific speculation part of the package -- if it's just an excuse to give us weirdness you may as well just write fantasy.

But when I've tried to do this in the past the ideas ate the story. The fiction went away. And then I wrote The Little Things and found a way to make the ideas the center of the story. Make them into bar stories make the POV character part of the audience.

No more elaborate setups, everything is explained to the POV character and thus the audience, and best of all the idea is the story.

Bar stories are great. But I hate bars -- and that was the key element that really made things congeal for me. By making these stories unpleasant experiences for the POV character and by making the bartender into mean-spirited bully-ish asshole there is conflict built into the situation from the get-go.

This is a formula. That's appropriate here -- I just want an outlet for the goofy little riffs I come up with as I graze my way through the sciences. My ambitions for these stories are quite humble.

But they're gonna be fun.

The thought that triggered this entry?

Rational thought does not come easily or naturally to humans. Our brains are great for making up mythologies -- but achieving an understanding of the world and ourselves is an uphill struggle.

It's not what our brains were made to do. They've been doing brainscans of people making decisions. It looks as though most of our thinking takes place in parts of the brain that we share with fish and lizards -- what we regard as rationality gets very little play.

So what would happen if you had a brain that was made for rational thought? Here's a hint -- it doesn't go as well as one might hope...

The Damned Novel, part Four.

I'm getting sick of this image and yet here it is again. At least I've got something to bitch about.

So at that point I started writing the last volume. And I got a good ways into it and trashed what I'd done.

Twice.

What had happened was that I'd set up some situations and characters that weren't gelling. Large chunks of classical and Scandinavian mythology were crowding their way into a one-room unfurnished cosmos.

So I tried something that had blocked me every time I'd tried it before. I sat down and started working on an outline.

There's a dispute regarding outlining and both sides of it are dead right -- in a limited way. The outliners say that it's stupid to start a trip if you don't know where you're going. The free writers say that outlining is for hacks. There are even rumors that some people will mentally outline a story and then claim they'd written it without a plot. I ain't got the balls for that.

My position has come to be an ecumenical one. I free wrote at first but then when I was totally, utterly at sea I sat down, reread everything, took notes, and made a list of all the dangling plot threads. Then I figured out how to tie them all together.

And then I had a solid outline for the third volume. At which point I realized that I'd save myself a hell of a lot of revision if I went back to the beginning and made the first and second volumes line up with everything that was going to follow.

More than two hundred manuscript pages of notes and outlines later I started in on the job. This was the point at which the setting and characters really congealed; the mythological characters were transformed into my characters, the workings of the fantastic elements became thoroughly locked into the story...

I just hit the sixty-thousand word mark this week; I'm aiming for a hundred, since I read on John Scalzi's blog that Tor likes their manuscripts to weigh in at a hundred thousand words. Fine with me; that's about the length the work seems to want. Volume three is solidly outlined; volume two has a solid ending but the story still needs some massage.

When the first volume's done I'll give it one more massage (compress chapters two and three into one chapter, finesse the details foreshadowing Matt's metamorphosis...) and then send it out to fresh readers. After that it'll be one last line edit and off to the rounds of agents and publishers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you say. But what's it about?

It's about rock and roll. It's about what it means to be working class in America. It's about art and artists. It's about friendship, especially the friendships between men and women. It's about both mental illness and visionary spirituality.

It's about the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. It's about love and anger and self-destruction and how people need each other, help each other, and use each other -- and how these categories tend to have blurry margins. It's about the nitty-gritty details of drug use and cleaning toilets. It's about uninsured trips to the emergency room.

It's about life after death -- and how the afterlife is affected by the population boom. It's about monsters and roaring ghosts, farm animals and parents who are becoming quite strange under the influence of Lamarckian evolution. It's about the cosmic being whose duodenum is Heaven's waiting room. It's all about the valve.

But it turns out that if you ignore all the knobs and doohickeys the story itself is an old and familiar one.

"A troubled young man falls in with roguish and unpredictable companions. Through them he leaves his old world behind and travels to a new one, a world full of visions and wonders. While in this world he finds love, undergoes transformations, gains strange powers and in the end uses them to save both worlds."

One Last Thing...

Oaf Fiction Now Available.

Here's the front cover to the current issue of Swill...

Right now I have two short stories up on the net. One is a straightforward piece of reminiscence called Montana Seafood. You can find it at...

http://www.mondaynightlit.com/read-craven3.html

The other is the closest thing to straight-up old-school science fiction that I've done. It's partially a tribute to the tradition of bar stories -- specifically, Lord Dunsany's Jorkens stories, the Gavagan's Bar series by L. Sprague deCamp and Fletcher Pratt, and Tales of the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke.

It's also a salute to my favorite SF microscopic worlds, ranging from Fitz-James O'Brian's The Diamond Lens to Theodore Sturgeon's Microcosmic God to George R.R. Martin's Sandkings.

Go to It's The Little Things by Sean Craven at

http://www.swillmagazine.com/

I've got to admit I'd like to give both of these another run through the mill. As the Ramones would say, why is it always this way?

Filter Follies 1

This version's called Bullethole...

You know what's fun? Get yourself an original image -- in this case a scanned inkblot -- and just play with filters, layers, and modes until you come up with an interesting image. Do a save as, then do it again. Repeat until your eyes bleed -- I did ten or so of these one afternoon and I've been using them as elements in other pieces ever since.

Maybe I should get a fresh batch going -- it would give me an excuse to score filters...

And this is a Map Of The World.

The Damned Novel, part Three.

Here's one of the original images that I composited for the scratch draft cover. I'll probably recreate the whole thing in color for the next reader's draft.

Things were getting more and more awkward, more and more cumbersome. What the hell was going on? Characters from myth began showing up and just standing around, blocking the flow.

And whenever I tried outlining it just kept me from being productive. It didn't work. Nothing added up properly -- lots of individual scenes worked and they didn't go anywhere.

So I decided to take a break from writing and printed up what I'd done and passed it out to the writer's group and some pals of mine.

But the manuscript was too cumbersome. I split it in half, had the halves bound separately at the copy shop.

And while neither was an entirely complete story, the two halves each had their own distinct narrative line with a solid start and end. The second volume was weak in the middle but the first actually read like a novel.

I was writing a trilogy. God help me, a fantasy trilogy. Tolkien casts a long shadow.

To Be Continued...

The Damned Novel, part Two.

So as I worked the novel became more and more autobiographical. I lost sight of what I was doing and started to think I'd finished it long before that was the case.

And the writing was a bitch. As I mentioned in the first post, I found that if I was writing other things it screwed with the novel. And I'd frequently get to a place where I was stuck, had no idea where to go next. My mom, Zoe Bishop, died during this time and that didn't help in the short run.

As an aside, after her death I helped my sister and her husband clean out her house. And when I saw her work space I realized that she was a serious writer-in-training. She never told me... That was a bit of a shock.

(Rest in peace, Mom. Next weekend when the missus is out of town I'll get a pack of Kools and some Budweiser and toast your memory.)

As I struggled with the story I found that a good way to get past the sticking points was to just have something happen. It was the old Chandler approach -- if things get dull have two men come through the door with pistols.

Not only did that give the individual slow spots a little excitement, it also gave me questions. What is that snake thing? Who's the Deacon? How does the Limbus work? What is the anatomy of a soul?

Questions are the heart of story. What if? Why?

I also began sticking figures from classical and Scandinavian mythology into the works on a similar basis. And when I did that they insisted on bringing the other characters from their dramas with them. The novel began to drift away from autobiography into fantasy.

And the damned thing kept growing...

To Be Continued.

The Damned Novel, Part One.

Here's the retitled cover of the

first reader's scratch draft.

" The first time I saw Lulu and Willy I thought they might be twins, two skinny little white kids dressed all in raggedy black with so many rings in their ears that you could have hung them from a curtain rod. The only difference between them was that her hair grew down in a greasy fringe that hid her dark eyes while his hair was swept up in a bulb like an onion.

They were sitting on the sidewalk on the mall with an empty quart-sized yogurt container on a piece of cardboard in front of them. There was a dollar sign, an arrow, and the word ‘for’ on the cardboard, the arrow pointing to a red circle with an inhaler sitting in it..."

It started out as a horror novella about a garage band's haunted album. When I took it into the writer's group, I was told that the reality and the fantasy were both fine but they didn't work together.

I'd set it in Santa Cruz in the mid-Eighties and used an airbrushed version of my younger self as the point-of-view character. As I worked to fix the problems in the novella it turned out that I couldn't ignore my own story in favor of Lulu and Willy's. What started as a sort of punk rock M.R. James piece was twisting in my hands.

See, during the time the story is set in, my life was...

Well, it was nuts. In every sense of the word. I had everything happen to me from mental illness -- which, depending on your belief system either did or did not include a classic Whitley Strieber-style abduction experience -- to losing my home and winding up living with a bunch of junkies for a month. If you meet me, ask me about the Hell's Angel with cocaine psychosis who thought I was a deaf mute -- whenever he heard me speak he thought it was the Devil speaking through my mouth... That situation came close to getting ugly.

Let's just say that my life started demanding a place in the story.

To Be Continued...

Pterygotus buffaloensis

This is Pterygotus buffaloensis. They found parts of one this year that suggest the specimen in question was about nine feet long. That's too damn big for an arthropod -- and that's just the biggest fossil they've found. God only knows what the real monsters were like. I regret the fact that long after I completed this I found a photograph of the fossilized claws of one specimen look much cooler than the ones I drew -- they were just coated with nice grabby spikes. And thanks to my crappy file management I don't have a version I can correct. Ah me and oh my.

Well, I had my first session in the print lab at school last Wednesday morning and this was the first large-scale print of my work. The print is twenty inches by a bit over twenty-one inches and I've got to say that seeing it was a real moment for me.

The image was rendered using a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop. After making the initial sketch I drew the shapes and laid down a basic field of color in Illustrator, then rendered them fully in Photoshop.

This is a bit of a dry run for one of the art shows that I'm developing -- or rather, now that I've gotten a tiny bit of information on art shows, two shows.

Both shows are going to be based on the idea of producing life-size images of extinct animals for display in a gallery environment. The first show will feature orthogonal images -- either side or back views -- of animals that are small enough to be shown in full on a print that I can fit into my storage drawer in the lab. The sizes of these prints will vary in order to accomodate the size of the animal in a pleasant composition. Right now I'm planning on doing the rendering entirely in Illustrator -- I want to own that program the way I own Photoshop.

The next show will feature parts of larger animals that I'll fit into a standard size, probably somewhere around two by three feet. Again, they'll be rendered at life size. We might see the feet of a big theropod or sauropod, the head of a hadrosaur, a section of a Dimetrodon's sail, etc, etc.

Of course this isn't the first thing I'm going to be working on so far as art shows go -- further information tomorrow.

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...