Update Feb 10 2015

 

Riverside Drive, Los Angeles 2000

Yeah, I missed yesterday sorry. Actual deadlines and a bunch of frenzied work on the main page of my website (that being highway-62.com) kept me from doing any updates. But hey, paying work before that which does not pay. Blogging sure doesn’t. (But then neither does my writing, he said as he looked over his Amazon returns for the year). I’d probably be better off running a Patreon, but that’s just not the way I work.

Speaking of writing, a bit of it last week. Rewrites on “Through the Limbs”, that being a near-future SF piece that combines consumerism, rebellion and Ballardian horror. I expect there to be a *big* audience for that one. Did a fair amount of work on the upcoming STRANGEWAYS graphic novel, entitled THE LAND WILL KNOW. Some very good work coming from the artists involved on that one. Some pretty okay scripting from me. But let’s be honest, people buy those for the art and then get drawn in by the script. It’s comics, I get that. The writers are important, but they only really drive fan business on the big characters. Breaking new stuff is a slow and frustrating process.

This week has been me going through Froot Loops detox, a return to 3D modeling and animation, which I used to be pretty good at, musing on the nature of low-resolution digital photography and low level simmering panic. Regarding Froot Loops, kids, just don’t get into them. They’re bad for you and they make you feel bad afterwards. And honestly they’re not that tasty to begin with, but I couldn’t resist a box bigger than my head for the low price of five bucks. My loss, my regret following.

Jumped back into Lightwave 3D, as I had a job that required me to dummy up some stuff which would be way too hard to do in Photoshop, and honestly, it’s an interesting set of tools to work with. I used to be a professional animator, and while there were some happy accidents, I never got to work on jobs I was ever that pleased with (rushed production schedules on MAX STEEL and DAN DARE saw to that). Add to that how badly the studio was doing at the end of the nineties/early 2000s and it was an educational experience but not a fun one.

These days I’m much more interested in the abstract and even hermetic/esoteric. I’ll probably turn the tools towards those ends as I monkey with things, maybe with an eye towards making more Identify 9 cover art, but the time for music has been pretty short lately. Just don’t expect renderings of your favorite superheroes or whatever. I’m done with the obsession with the photoreal. Once was a time that I chased after that muse, though.

Space Marine Dreadnought, modeled in 1999. Dig the sunbeams.

Ah, photography. Spent some time thinking about the old photos I took pre-Leica, and how small and pathetic they are (my earliest with a Kodak DC90 only being 2200×1500 pixels in size) compared to the truly monstrous pictures I can take these days. Those years will be marked by jpeg compression and small file sizes (as well as muddy focus) in the same way that Kodachrome reds will mark the fifties through the seventies. Won’t get a chance to take those pictures again. The time is locked up in those images, never to be unpacked again. Can’t create data where there isn’t any, y’know. I might make them bigger, but no sharper.

This week’s movies have been THE WILD BUNCH and UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING. Both are amazing motion pictures in their own right, THE WILD BUNCH in particular (though probably not the best that Peckinpah, did – that’s got to be BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA). Both reach way past their pulpy men’s action surfaces and bring out some real.

Probably will finish up revisions on “Through the Limbs” for submission to actual magazine audiences. I’ve kinda given up on writing shorts to put on the Kindle store. New markets won’t touch ‘em even if you haven’t sold a single copy. Reprint markets might, but my luck with those is spotty at best. Speaking of which, I did do a lot of revisions to an earlier fantasy piece entitled “The Bulwark” for inclusion in an anthology last week. I’m expecting nothing, but sure would like it to get picked up. Following “Limbs” I’ll finish shaping up “Chunked” which is a pretty personal story, strangely. I suspect that one will make me a lot of friends if it ever gets a wider audience. Yeah, expecting people to do better never makes you popular, confirmation bias imperative and all that.

Back to work. Currently listening to: Roxy Music Live in 1972.