Goth Mom Knows How to Suffer

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You don’t understand me! You’re probably not even my real mom! You probably kidnapped me from my real mom! My real mom is probably Marilyn Manson! Or Bela Lugosi!

It’s slightly troublesome to me that I really have no clue where this comic came from. Usually there’s some gamete of an idea–an event, an action, a memory–that spawns each comic. Yeah, there was the sort of goth PTA mom in last week’s cannibalism comic, but that connection came to me afterward. First was just the idea of a goth mom offering an upset kid absinthe and laudanum (the eyeliner idea came later, too, on the realization that even goth mom wouldn’t start with the hard stuff). Then the thought of how the kid of a goth mom would respond (exactly like the kid of any other mom) and then the Taylor Swift thing (her music is just so joyful, even when she’s petty or angry) and finally goth dad, who, naturally, will always assume the worst. Maybe that was a line out of an Addams Family movie or something like that. But what could be worse for goth parents than a kid who listens to upbeat pop?

Not sure what they’ll do now that they assume the worst. Search the kid’s computer for evidence of a Pinterest account? Arrange an intervention? An exorcism?

I happen to know a fair number of goth parents and they all seem to be doing a pretty good job of it. They can dress their kids in skulls and pentacles until they’re about 5, and then the kid turns around and only wants to wear polo shirts or pink tutus or something like that. It’s hard to rebel against goth mom. But goth mom expects your betrayal. She’ll love you even if you become an investment banker or a priest. Goth mom understands that the world is cruel and nobody understands you. Goth mom understands that better than anybody.

Dragon Comics 140

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Or unmelted cheese, I would imagine. Any cheese, really.

Another little slice of life here in Dragon’s Cave.

By the way, the trick to homemade mozzarella sticks is to freeze the cheese after you’ve breaded it but before you fry it. Otherwise, it melts before the outside gets crispy and loses its shape and leaks out everywhere. Of course, some people like that sort of thing.

The experimental breading is basically just pakora batter without the spices: garbanzo flour, water, and salt. Very tasty. Makes light and fluffy mozzarella sticks. Pleasing to children and other cheese-eating organisms.

 

Brave Back-to-School Bulletin Board

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The great thing about this is that, the more you doubt it, the truer it is. Theoretically.

Once or twice a year, my insomnia gets so bad that it comes full circle and after a week of falling asleep around dawn, my circadian rhythms get pushed back so far that I literally miss my window of opportunity for that night and never get to sleep at all. Last night hurt. Probably by 10 a.m. or so I could have slept, but at that point it makes more sense to power through for another 12 hours and get back onto a schedule that puts me in alignment with the majority of humans.

But I had to make a bulletin board! On zero hours of sleep! Fortunately, I had hung the orange background Friday and cut all the letters Monday, so I just had to reinforce the background, space and attach each individual letter, and then get some graphic elements. Due to the no-sleep, walking-around-basically-hallucinating situation, the lion cubs somehow came out half the size they were intended to be but by that point my brain was done. I scarcely felt competent to hold scissors, let alone pilot a car, and I really needed to use the reserve for the driving part, since The Man randomly stopped by, hung out for a while, and then left the Girl in my keeping.

So, I feel like this design could have been 10 times better but I also feel like it’s good enough, and if I get tired of looking at it I can change it later. School starts Thursday in my district (the kids to the south went back last Thursday; the kids to the north, including the Boy and the Girl, start next Thursday). The teachers all seemed to like it.

Normally this is a weird color combination for me. I don’t care for orange unless it’s food and typically I only like secondary colors if they’re right next to their primaries, but it’s just as with the mandalas: I forced myself to choose a different color (orange, to go with the yellow lions) and then convinced myself that purple would stand out against orange, and it really did.

So Many Books, So Many Books

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I mean really, in the grand scheme of things, what’s one more unread novel?

Back in the wild days before the internet (and, not coincidentally, before I spent 5 consecutive years doing literally nothing but studying books and how to write them), reading a couple novels a weeks came very naturally. Now it’s a big deal if I read a couple a month. Even graphic novels start to pile up; there are 2 on my desk right now, that have been sitting there for 6 weeks. I read 2 graphic novel (digital format) yesterday and one hard copy the week before. Tonight I was trying to finish up this very weird Roger Zelazny book I’ve been pecking away at in my down time all month, but I just couldn’t push through to the end.

This week alone, I’ve been sent 2 digital copies of novels I know nothing about, by people whom I have every reason to believe are perfectly cromulent authors whose books are totally worthy of being read, along with 2 hard copies last week, sent by authors I know quite well, of books I’ve already read but need to read again for professional reasons.

A couple years back, I spent about 3 months organizing my existing library, which comprises maybe 3000 volumes. It’s very spiffy, mixing a few different systems to suit my needs (most Library of Congress) and incorporating spine labels so I always know where particular volumes are and can always reshelve them properly. But that work doesn’t do anything about the sheer volume of volumes that keep arriving, covering every horizontal surface. I’ve always been OK with being a person who only reads maybe 2/3 of the books she brings home, but lately that number is skewing even less impressively. Maybe if I stopped screwing around on the Internet and playing Pokemon Go, I could clear away some of this work. But that’s not what’s going to happen.

What I’m trying to say is that this isn’t a comic strip drawing, but rather an actual image of me in my office. Please come dig me out. Bring librarians.

Amethyst Mandala

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The crosspieces look like a Chinese finger trap. Today I learned that the Chinese finger trap has a medical application and can be used to straighten human fingers with traction.

Another weekend draws to a close, and I confess that I didn’t start crossing things off my “imperative to do today” list until one hour to midnight. In fact, this month is drawing to a close and I have barely scratched the list of “things I must accomplish before autumn to justify my existence and create even the slightest possibility of personal success.” Maybe I need a manager.

This weekend, in addition to the above face about Chinese finger traps, I learned that one of the things authors are apparently supposed to do upon uploading their books to the Kindle store is get 25 or 50 people to leave Amazon reviews. Maybe some part of me understood some element of that concept, but it literally didn’t occur to me that I was supposed to be asking random, non-writer friends and relatives to give me 5 stars. In a general sense, when it comes to Amazon reviews, it turns out that it doesn’t matter if half of them are written by your mother’s friends from folk dancing and the other half are by the people your Aunt Hattie played canasta with during the Nixon administration. According to my reading, it’s just a numbers game. So any time I spent thinking about how to ask successful writers for endorsement was wasted when I could have been demanding my relatives do the job for me. Although that might necessitate teaching my relatives to leave Amazon reviews, which wouldn’t save me any time in the long run.

What else…got to hang out with the SFWA crew on Saturday, for another thrilling and productive writing party at the Historic Y. It’s just as glamorous as it sounds.

Oh, August, give me strength. And determination. And concentration. And focus.

And, as always, the confidence of a mediocre white guy.

And if you can’t give me that, please consider buying my book, supporting my Patreon,  or ordering my merch.

3D Dragon Comics 3

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And if you mess that one up, just turn over a new leaf and try once more. 

Not much to say about this; been in a weird space but didn’t want to write more depressing comics. It’s more fun to play with your toys, sometimes. Dragons need to go on interior journeys. Dragons need to lay their burdens down and only carry magic. Dragons need some empty space. Dragons need to relax.

Free Range Kids

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Rebecca looked on smugly, secure in the knowledge that her children were safe in their individual kennels while she fattened them up for Christmas. 

More baby cannibalism comics! Modest Proposal jokes never stop being funny. Ditto gags about PTA moms. Together, they’re pure comedy gold.

My Facebook page hosted a long discussion about this family in England where both parents gave up their lucrative careers to live on welfare and raise their children “off grid” without shoes or school or vaccinations or diapers or rules or weaning and is now trying to crowdsource their dream of buying land in Costa Rica so they can live a life of true independence. Cost to you, the non-consumer: $100,000. So far I guess they’ve gotten £47, which is probably £47 more than I would have made if I went on GoFundMe to beg for $100,000 to pay for my dream of self-sufficiency.

There was a lot of argument about the worst part of the story, but ultimately, the most superlative (best, worst, stupidest) part is their inability to recognize the irony of begging for money because you want to be self-sufficient. I’m not linking to their ridiculous story, because they’ve gotten too much publicity already.

The difference between free range and cage free, in the case of livestock, is that free range animals (chickens, we’re mostly talking about) can go outside, but cage free animals cannot. The difference between free range and non-free-range kids, as far as I can tell is that the non-free-range kids don’t want to go outside.

 

The Hermit and the Coyote, a Cell Phone Case, and Marketing

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Keep your phone warm and fuzzy.

Some people fail. Some people fail spectacularly. Kaija failed mythically, and now she’s trapped in the part of the fairy tale when the monster appears.

When Kaija couldn’t find contentment in the human world, she checked out, turned in the key, and went off the grid. For fifteen years, she’s lived between worlds, hiding in the desert, holding herself apart from nature just as she has from civilization, but when disaster strikes, she finds that no woman is an island. She is dragged, kicking and screaming, to the realization that no woman is an island.

The Hermit is a novel for adults who still love fairy tales, people searching for transformation and magic, readers open to contemporary fantasies with elements of horror and romance, grown-ups who still wish they could talk to the animals.

Not that Kaija wants to talk to the animals–she’s a hermit, after all, and hermits don’t want to talk to anyone–but she can’t make them stop talking her. She can’t force them to quit sharing their fears about the legendary monster stalking the Sonoran Desert. She can’t run away anymore; she’s run as far as anyone can go. If she wants to maintain her sliver of solitude, she’ll have to shrug off the hermit’s mantle, gather allies from both worlds, and go on the offensive to defeat the true monster.

The paperback version of The Hermit will be available this Thanksgiving, but if you want to read it now, it’s already available in the Kindle store ($4.99 for 426 pages of delicious mythopoetic rampage) for your reading pleasure.

If you just love the cover, you can purchase the image of Kaija and her coyote companion on this cell phone case (and pretty much anything else on which you can emblazon images) in my RedBubble shop.

Confidential to all the people who, according to my stats page, woke up this morning, visited QvD in search of a new comic, and got nothing at all: better 15 hours late without a comic than no update, right? If people love my comics as much as they say they do, I hope they’ll consider laying out $4.99 for my book. It’s like reading my comics, but you create the pictures with your brain, so they’re much better drawn, and the word part lasts a lot longer.

 

 

It’s Not Just You

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Clearly, something terrible is going to happen whether or not you open your eyes. 

Halfway through, the realization came to me that this would have worked better as a Monday comic. Although maybe Jim Davis already nailed the “Mondays suck” trope into the ground. At any rate, I never get tired of the “everything sucks” trope. Disaster is definitely imminent, which you can prove by waiting between 1 and 24 hours, during which space of time you will always learn about the occurrence of something disastrous.

I love how the person on the rights’s face came out. The skepticism in the eyes is so great. I couldn’t have drawn that if I tried. I can only draw expressive eyes by accident. I made about 6 attempts on the eyes of the person on the left and gave up. Dots it is. I’m not funny, and I can’t draw. And something truly awful will hit your radar between now and this time tomorrow night. Guaranteed. What are you gonna do? What can you do?

Keep on creating, kids!

Green Cell Mandala

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Sometimes I think: this could be an element of something really beautiful. Or it could be a cross-section of something really horrible. 

Not much to report for this weekend. Added 3 new designs to my RedBubble shop and started to work on a 4th. Wish I understood more about typefaces, about how designers choose lettering for visual appeal, readability, and emotion. Also, how to design specifically for different article of clothing, versus drawing things as they come to me and then sticking the same image on a variety of surfaces.

This is a tidy little mandala, another amoeba type. They really do fall into simple categories.

Sorry there’s nothing of any depth or substance in here. The Rabbit told me she wanted us to make a business plan, and I told her, “You make the plan and I’ll just do whatever you tell me to do.” I swear to god, a woman came up to me at a party this weekend and said, “I had this idea for a T-shirt and I heard you sell them online,” and then proceeds to tell me that she works in marketing. I’m like, Lady, you don’t need my help. You’ll probably sell more T-shirt than me without even trying. I have no idea how to sell things. I just create the.

But, you could buy my book, support my Patreon,  or order my merch if you wanted to prove me wrong.