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.

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.

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?

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.



( Bigger Picture after the cut )

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.

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?

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.

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!

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

I've been drawing a wombat every day for the last month, and the people who have seen them have been ecstatic about them. So now there's a site.

The Daily Wombat

And a t-shirt based on one of the most popular wombats:

Part of the reason I don’t write in my blog more often is simply that I am extremely conscious of its public nature, and I don’t tend to presume that anyone cares about my nattering enough to bother filling someone’s feed with my daily routine. Someone recently pointed out that by subscribing to a feed or adding me to their friend’s list, they show that they do in fact care, and want to read my blather.

Here’s my problem, and I think it is one that is holding back my writing in general. All writing is artifice. Every word we write is, in some sense, a pretense, a pose. I get very self-conscious about the constructed nature of my writing. I try to simply experience the scene, and record it, but I always see the wires. It makes it difficult to lose myself in the story, because I worry too much about whether or not the reader will similarly notice that the castle is merely a façade of paste and plaster.

Avoiding that self-consciousness is, I think, the key to succeeding with my writing. I feel like the writing equivalent of an anorexic, staring into a story and seeing different words, awkward words, where others insist everything is fine.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

So this old man is going through our dumpster, and my boss goes out to see what’s going on.

He’s looking for boxes, pulling the empty cardboard boxes out of the dumpster, and stacking them to take with him. My boss decides to be nice, and offers him some of our extra boxes that haven’t made it out to the trash yet… But those boxes aren’t good enough. He refuses the free (and non-trashed) boxes, and continues to rummage around in our dumpster for stinky, stained cardboard boxes.

Did I mention the pharmaceuticals company next door is using our dumpster?

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

Here’s a design I did for Ziraxia recently. It’s available for sale (only 16.99), and every Shadow Factory shirt that gets sold gets me royalties and helps my day job. Also, some of the shirts on the site kick ass. ;P

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

I just put up a new design up on Ziraxia, incorporating some of Kat’s art for the site. Bob’s just too damned cute NOT to be on a shirt.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

There’s this idea that I’ve been running across a lot lately… A sort of antithesis of the ”Appeal to Authority” logical fallacy, wherein a person’s criticism of a book is discounted because they’ve “never been published,” and are therefore not qualified to judge the work of someone who has.

I’m running into it a lot in the wake of Robert Jordan’s passing, and it’s ridiculous. Certainly, there are people who are not qualified to level criticism at a book or its author(s)… You see them on Amazon all the time, complaining that a book is something it quite simply isn’t, or that the book sucks because the author wasn’t solicitous enough in some online encounter. I’ve even seen people over there complaining about a scene that just doesn’t exist in the book they’re reviewing (in at least one case, a scene that existed not only in another book, but in another book by a completely different author.) But to assume that someone isn’t qualified to hold an opinion or act as critic based on the fact that they aren’t published (or, if they are, that they aren’t as successful as the author in question) is a straw man. As for the David Argument of “4 million Chinese people can’t be wrong,” well… yeah, they can. As much as I argue that some things are actually successful because they are good, it’s never a sure bet that something is good simply because it’s successful.

I just don’t buy that you have to be a writer (or a particularly successful writer) to recognize when something just doesn’t work. At some point, even a writer has to become a reader.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr., aka Robert Jordan, has died..

I’ll admit, I was never really a fan of his work. I can’t speak to its quality, because the first book simply never grabbed me. I know that a lot of people (including many of my friends) enjoyed his work immensely. I feel a sense of attenuated loss, a kind of echo. Despite not being affected by the man, or the stories, in any measurable way, I feel this strange sorrow. I fear it isn’t an altogether flattering empathy with humanity, or anything of the sort. My knowledge of the man and his work is purely academic, but I feel a certain amount of respect for him, simply because he affected the number of people that he did.

Every post I’ve seen by a fan has had this furtive undercurrent of “what will happen to the Wheel of Time?” Each of them feels that it is inappropriate to mourn the loss of the writer in this, the loss of the man. But I think in large part, this is the best tribute to the man. He spent a large proportion of his life creating the Wheel of Time, and though he did not finish it, that it has affected his readers enough that they are (in no small measure) mourning the loss of the word, the story… It is a tribute to the work. I am, a bit selfishly, glad that I never did get into it, because I don’t have to suffer this loss as keenly. However, it is also a tribute to Jordan’s fanbase that the “what will happen” mentality is being treated as inappropriate. Despite their love of the words, each and every one is entirely aware that a man was also lost.

Farewell, Mr. Rigney.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

Every once in a while, I’ll post designs I’m fond of from some of the designers over at Ziraxia.

For example:

Ok, granted… That one is by me, but I really like it. ;P

How about this one?

Who wouldn’t want to wear one of these, really?

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

GameSpy has an interview that goes a bit more into what to expect from Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. I’m not sold on the D&D Insider subscription idea, and it seems like there’s a trend toward player-created resources being co-opted by the company that creates the game, rather than leaving it to grassroots efforts like, well, Ex Libris Nocturnis. I find that a bit worrying, to be honest. Not just because I run ELN, though as much as certain competitors have attracted some of our users, the revamped forums at White Wolf’s own site didn’t exactly help. ;P

Anyway, fan sites have always been an integral way of making players feel like they are giving something back to the greater community of gamers, and getting recognition when they do. That they were never as large, or all-inclusive, is actually a positive, because the sheer scale of what Wizards is proposing not only makes it harder to be noticed, it is more intimidating for a new person looking to contribute. Not to mention that, if Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Forums are any kind of indicator, a central (and though I hate to use the term, mainstream) gathering point demonstrates John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory quite handily.

I guess we’ll have to wait for December’s Races and Classes preview to find out much more.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

I’ll actually write up some stuff shortly, but for now, I just wanted to link to Kat’s Flickr Page, because it has a bunch of pictures of us at the con.

I’m actually working on a short story. And I picked up Changeling: the Lost. It’s really good so far, but I’ll write up a real review for Ex Libris Nocturnis as soon as I’m done.

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.

So you may (or may not) have noticed I’m posting again. I’m actually working in web design again after what seems like forever, and I’m spending a lot more time working online. I also haven’t had a lot of time to write anything, so I began to feel a bit atrophied, intellectually and creatively. I feel like I’m starting to open up again now, with the work I’m doing on Ziraxia. We’re shooting to launch the pilot program this Wednesday. If you’re reading this, you should keep an eye out. It’s going to be fun and cool, and hopefully successful, so I can continue to work on it.

I’ve been having these dreams of an old woman. Her skin is dry and dusty, and precisely the color of mice feet. Her hair is unkempt, long and surprisingly thick for her age. It hangs like sheets of granite, shot through with calcite veins. She sits in a faded burgundy velvet chair, in a dress that is so faded and worn that it has become colorless. She never speaks, or rather, she has not spoken yet. Every dream I’ve had has been pregnant with the waiting. The possibility of speech is almost stifling. Maybe she’ll talk to me soon. 

This entry is crossposted from Fragments of Shadow. Go to the original.