Starting on Wednesday: Doctor Petaja’s Parlor of Peril

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

So in The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett we’ve encountered the Retropolis Registry of Patents; and while we were there we met Ben Bowman, Investigator, and Violet, the robot secretary who really ought to be an Investigator… and who intends to make that happen by any means necessary.

Office politics can always be a bit on the risky side. That’s never been more true than in the Registry of Patents.

Violet is resourceful and dedicated and – although she’s quite a nice mechanical person who makes an excellent cup of coffee – nobody’s ever mentioned to her that thing we call the Three Laws of Robotics.

But in addition to Violet’s next move on the new Registrar we’re going to see what can happen when one mad scientist floods the Registry with stack after stack of preliminary patent applications; we’ll wonder what that might mean, especially for the whales; and we may even find out what’s so important about the Registry’s regulation #527b. (Hint: it’s not the one about the "Procedure For Requesting Laboratory Egress".)

All this and more will be revealed in the weekly installments of Doctor Petaja’s Parlor of Peril at Thrilling Tales of the Downight Unusual. It starts on Wednesday.

This week: Welcome to the Retropolis Registry of Patents

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

After a long hiatus, the serial stories at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual begin again this Wednesday.

This is a series of short stories – illustrated in glorious black and white! – which will run from six to ten weeks each.

We begin on Wednesday with The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, in which we meet several people we’ll come to know in the series while we get our first look at the inner workings of this important, undervalued department of Retropolis’ City Government.

The serials will update just once a week; but because each update is around 1000 words you’ll get bigger weekly chunks of story than you saw in The Lair of the Clockwork Book, which updated twice each week.

Here’s the complete schedule for the year:

• The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett (June 15)
• Doctor Petaja’s Parlor of Peril (July 27)
• Fenwick’s Improved Venomous Worms (Sept. 7)
• Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory (October 19)
• Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror (November 30)

And after that? This schedule carries us into February 2017, so forgive me if I haven’t figured that part out yet.

I will be a little bit mean to you: the Registry of Patents stories are meant to conclude with a final story that will appear only in print, probably late next year. Still, after Vault of Terror there may be another story lined up. It just won’t be a Registry of Patents story.

I’ll probably have figured that out before the end of the year. In the meantime, enjoy what’s coming this Wednesday… and every other Wednesday for the rest of the year.

A mysterious graphic snippet of mid-2016; things that are coming soon; and the stories of James White

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Yeah, I’m just building the World of Tomorrow, the way you do.

I know it’s been quiet on the blog front; as always that means I’m working really hard on something you can’t see yet. It’s nice. But why believe me?

We’re getting ever closer to June 15th, that happy day when The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett will begin its serial run over at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, and that’s just the beginning of a series of illustrated short stories that will continue through early next year. Most of those are in the can already, so you can tell they’re not what I’m working on right now.

What I am working on right now is related to the World of Tomorrow as you see it up above. That’s as much as you get, for the moment.

One thing I’ve been enjoying recently when I’m not building Retropolis is a long-running series of medical science fiction stories by James White. I don’t know how I missed them before, but that’s just made it more fun to find them now.

The stories takes place in and around Sector Twelve General, a massive multi-species hospital that hangs in space. The staff and their patients come from a bewildering number of species – so much so that they’ve adopted a four-letter mnemonic system for identifying themselves – and each story centers on a medical mystery. There are uncooperative patients as big as continents, and frightened patients who’ve never seen the members of another intelligent species before, and sightless beings who communicate telepathically, and a gazillion more.

The first stories date from the late 1950’s, but they continued to appear for decades. One interesting thing about reading them now is that you can watch the cultural shifts in our own world while the author evolves and grows. It’s great stuff; you should try it.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: a mildly informative update

Filed under Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

If you’ve been wondering what’s going on with Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, well… so was I, for awhile. I thought I had reasonable expectations for how speedily the publishing industry moves. In this I was mistaken.

But March and April have seen a sudden burst of activity, a new release date, and the slow transition from my recent no expectations to my current cautious reserve.

The book’s new publication date – which I still consider a pleasant daydream – is March of 2017.

That date is looking more likely these days because the sales department has taken an interest. At some point their interest will turn into intent, penetrating looks directed at any part of the book that isn’t moving toward the release date, and once those intent, penetrating looks start darting around I think we can be pretty confident about the date. Nobody wants to get looks like those.

I’ve finished a couple of rough layouts for the book jacket and I expect I might start getting some looks of my own once everybody’s had a chance to see them. The dust jacket designs were a genuine blast to work on: they’re wraparound designs, so each one is a big picture that’s made up of five smaller rectangles that also need to work on their own. I really enjoyed working on them.

No, you can’t see them.

But I am looking at them while I’m typing – which is actually pretty difficult – and I can tell you that we’re probably going to have a pretty nice cover.

In the meantime we can look forward to The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett, the serial that should start up in June at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Purloined Patents will kick off a series of short serials that’ll run into February of next year. So there’s a lot to look forward to, in just a little while.

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: now an international sensation

Filed under Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I can’t guarantee what kind of sensation that is; and if it’s the sensation of clammy tentacles slithering into your ear, well, I refuse to take responsibility. That’s on the record.

But I just ran across this announcement from the St. Martin’s Press catalog of upcoming titles. It delighted and surprised me, and I enjoyed that sensation. So maybe you will too.

Between you and me and the entire Internet, that’s not the release date; and when I did a quick count I came up a little short on jet-packed heroes, plucky rocket engineers, and bubble-helmeted canine companions – though maybe my editor wants to talk to me about them. Could be a subtle message.

But despite those discrepancies, nice to see!

More graphic snippets of early 2016; now explained!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Twice, since December, I’ve posted some mysterious cropped images from things I’ve been working on (here and here); and each time I’ve posted them without any explanation. Today makes the third time. But today, guess what? I’m going to tell you what they are.

Starting in June I’m going to serialize a series of short stories at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Now, the Thrilling Tales site is mostly known these days for the Pulp-O-Mizer. That’s because I haven’t run a real serial over there since the conclusion of The Lair of the Clockwork Book. But that will change in June, when you’ll see the first of five stories set in the Retropolis Registry of Patents.

That’s a department of government that oversees patent registrations for the city’s Experimental Research District, from which all Mad Science flows; but the Registry also has a secret purpose that Registry Officers and Investigators never mention in public. Because that’s what you do with a secret purpose.

I just finished the first draft for the fifth story; twenty-one of these stories’ thirty-four illustrations are also done. After the fifth Registry story there may also be a stand-alone story, but you won’t see the conclusion of the Registry of Patents series until they’re all collected in print and eBook form sometime next year.

That collection will contain all six of the Registry stories plus three or four other stories about Retropolis. They’ll all be pretty profusely illustrated.

I’m making some format changes for this series. Past Thrilling Tales have featured updates (that is, web pages) with a wide variation in word counts. That’s caused problems when it came to laying out their print editions. Some serious problems. So this time each week’s story update will run pretty close to one thousand words, with an illustration.

That makes the book layouts much easier to handle even though it still results in one heck of a lot of illustrations. Which, seen one way, is nice. But it means that my nose has been pressed into my monitor for the past few months; and my nose is likely to stay there for awhile longer.

The new stories will also feature illustrations in black and white, as you’ve been seeing. The cost of the full color illustrations in my earlier books put a lot of limitations on where and how you can buy them. Also, I’ve decided that Black and White Is Cool.

So that’s it. That’s what I’ve been doing, and what I’m still doing, and you ought see it for real in June when we begin with The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett.

Unexplained graphic snippets of early 2016

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

If you’ve been following along you may remember that late last year I posted some snippets of illustrations; and I posted them without any explanation at all. You may have hoped that by now I’d explain them.

In this, you would be wrong.

Instead, here are some additional unexplained graphic bits and pieces.

Unexplained graphic snippets of late 2015

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Here are a few little graphic non sequiturs; they’re just tiny cropped bits of some things that I’m working on. Because I felt like almost showing them.

My work here is done.

The first 1024 words for The Untitled Sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom

Filed under Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Here’s a rare photograph from the lower level of the Secret Laboratory, showing most of the first 1024 words for The Untitled Sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom.

My favorites? “Giraffe”, “Unmentionable”, and “Lotion”.