Now you can get ‘The Lair of the Clockwork Book’ for your Kindle reader

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

Your eyes may have glazed over in that last post before you realized that I was working on this: that’s okay. I don’t mind. It’s not like I’ve taken down your name and recorded it in a little book where I keep track of my enemies and schedule their amusing, unfortunate fates.

It’s not exactly like that.

So you’ve probably got nothing to worry about even if you don’t rush over to Amazon and get yourself a Kindle edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book. But honestly, just to be absolutely sure, you might want to do that anyway.

The Kindle Edition

See the pretty cover! I’ve always liked the dust jacket I designed for the limited edition hardcover. So I based the eBook’s cover on that version.

This eBook edition is almost identical to the hardcover and paperback editions, except that the illustrations have been converted to greyscale. The great majority of Kindles render pages in grey, after all; and the greyscale image files are smaller than they would be in full color. (There are more than 120 of them!) That makes a big difference in Amazon’s delivery fees, which are paid by the publisher.

The publisher? Well, in one sense that’s me. In another sense, it’s Radio Planet Books. You’ll be hearing more about Radio Planet in the months to come.

The Kindle edition is priced at just $3.99, a big savings over the full color print edition. If you bought the paperback from Amazon they’ll even let you buy the eBook for $1.99 – provided they’ve figured out that the books are linked. I’m not sure how long that takes.

You don’t use a Kindle? An ePub version will also be available, but probably not until June or July.

Oh, and at the end of the book there’s a bonus sample from Patently Absurd, my collection of illustrated stories about the Retropolis Registry of Patents. You’ll hear more about that later, too.

Captive breeding population of ‘Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom’ about to be released into the wild

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

Having nearly completed their prolonged breeding program, these rare Advance Reading Copies of Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom are seen here, in New York’s historic Flatiron Building, as they await their release into their native habitat. It’s a happy day for the book’s well-wishers everywhere.

At the same time we can’t forget that hunting season for these books looms just ahead: starting on June 13 anybody – with or without a hunting license – is authorized to capture the book at will.

It’s hoped that these copies, slated for delivery to trade publications and reviewers, will help to promote the book’s ultimate success in what we hope will be a friendly, welcoming environment.

The Files of the Retropolis Registry of Patents will conclude in ‘Patently Absurd’

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

For the first Wednesday in more than six months, there’s no update today for a story at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. And that’s not an accident: it’s all part of my nefarious plan for the Files of the Retropolis Registry of Patents.

Yes, Mister Bond: you just sit there in those nearly unbreakable chains, and I will tell you everything.

We’ve seen some major changes for Ben and Violet after the events of Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory and Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror. Those changes lead us into the conclusion of the series, which will appear for the first time in a collection called Patently Absurd.

That will collect the entire series together in one illustrated book in print and digital formats. The launch for the book and its new imprint will be fueled by a Kickstarter project during the summer, following the release of Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom.

I’ve had a lot of fun with this series of stories. They follow the everyday lives of ordinary people, both human and mechanical, in a place that’s extraordinary… to us. But it’s just home to them, of course. They take its mad science and its unique difficulties in stride because, at the end of the day, the thing that really interests and worries them is office politics. Like I said: ordinary people.

My plan for the series has always been to collect it, and that’s the reason why the stories have departed from the format I set for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. There’s more text to go with each illustration, for one thing. That makes the print layout a lot simpler than it was for the earlier book.

And the black-and-white illustrations for Patently Absurd, because they cost less to print, will make it possible for me to sell the book in more markets.

So those of you who’ve been following the stories can look forward to their conclusion later this year or early in 2018. We won’t talk too much about Patently Absurd until after Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom is released. (That’s on June 13!) But it’s out there. Or it will be, anyway.

Also, I’ve added preorder links for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom in several places, like this one, even though the retailers’ cover thumbnails are (still) pretty awful. I continue to hope that we’ll get that straightened out.

‘Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom’ has a real release date; also, a new blurb from Lawrence M. Schoen

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

I just realized I’ve never mentioned that Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom now has a release date that we can believe. It’s June 13! That’s the day we need to think about.

Okay. I’m thinking about it. I don’t know what you’re doing.

We’ve been through the line and copy editing passes, and though I’ve yet to see a galley with all the illustrations in place it seems like the book has begun to make its stealthy, mysterious passage through the world. If you define “the world” as “people who know my editor”.

The reason I think this is true is that there’s a new review in the book’s feed from Macmillan.

So, yep. Robotastic. And charming, a word that’s been used to describe the book before. I never suspected that it was charming, and the idea took some getting used to; but I’m on board with it now. Charm away. Get all charming, book. Go forth and be charming. On June 13. In bookstores, and everyplace else.

Starting Wednesday: Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror

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

What do you do after you’ve dropped a building on your boss’ head? Well, in many cases, you rethink your life. There are also those who dance around the building, singing about it. But we pretend we don’t know those people.

Even at the Retropolis Registry of Patents there are several approaches to this kind of trauma. Violet, the Registrar’s secretary, is in the “rethink your life” camp; Investigator Bowman is off on a tangent of his own. He’d just really rather not have to spend any time down in the Registry Vault (the “Patent Registry Models and Samples Repository”).

Nobody likes to go down there. It’s full of the working models and prototypes for every invention that’s ever come out of Retropolis’ Experimental Research District. If you get posted down in the Vault, you can’t help knowing that at any time something really dangerous and irreversible is likely to happen. And when it doesn’t happen? Well, there’s a statistically identical chance that it’s going to happen now. That sort of thing can wear you down.

Really dangerous and irreversible things almost never happen, of course. Almost never.

Meanwhile the Registry is expecting its new Registrar (again) and so that’s what’s on Violet’s mind. She’s made a resolution not to do anything to this one.

We’ll see how that goes, starting on Wednesday, in Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror.

Starting Wednesday: Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory

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

This Wednesday marks the beginning of the fourth Retropolis Registry of Patents story at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.

This time, Violet and Ben Bowman have to deal with the problems of Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory. This story stands apart from the earlier Registry of Patents stories because it’s told almost completely from Violet’s point of view. Ben is active, but offstage, for nearly the entire time.

And this gives us a chance to take a closer look at Violet, and her quest for a promotion, and what that kind of promotion means to a robot who was designed to be a secretary. If her single-minded devotion to her goal seemed excessive earlier, you may find that it’s both more and less excessive than it seemed. Or you may find that she’s the most horrific employee a manager could imagine. A lot of this depends on your perspective.

There’s a cameo appearance by Grace Keaton, courier and graduate student; there’s an air traffic emergency; there’s an example of the lingering, malevolent feuds that can rise up to divide neighbors, especially if each of those neighbors is a mad scientist; there’s an imminent, terrifying threat to a fishing vacation; and there’s an office betting pool, because it’s an office.

It’s an almost ordinary day at the Registry of Patents. Starting Wednesday!

Two views of Ben Bowman’s office at the Retropolis Registry of Patents

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

I learned the hard way not to build complete environments for my illustrations. If you’re making a game – with free-floating player characters and cameras – you really want to build the whole thing. I mean, you don’t want the player to turn around and see that the world stopped while no one was looking.

But I’m not building games any more. And I found, often enough to notice, that if I built a complete and seamless set for a picture I would spend forever on it; and at the end the results wouldn’t be as good as if I’d worried only about what background I needed for the pictures I was actually making.

There are exceptions. I built a complete in-the-round set for Doctor Rognvald’s lab in Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves, for example; but I was going to be rendering a lot of pictures in that one environment. So it made sense.

I’m working now on the last illustration for Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror (coming in late November!). Up to that point we’ve closed every one of the Registry stories back at Violet’s desk in the Registry of Patents. But there’s a Reason why that changes here, and for that same Reason we will spend a lot of time in Ben’s office when we come to the sixth and finalish Registry of Patents story.

So I’ve built three whole sides of Ben’s office. Will we ever see the back wall? No idea. That may be where he’s stashed his televideo phone: I couldn’t find it anyplace else.

But apart from that mysterious back wall, we can see here the not-very-large office where Ben Bowman spends his days when he isn’t out in the field. He’s got a lot of books and manuals, stacks of files and boxes, and two whole card catalogs of… well, he doesn’t really know what’s in those. He never looked. I think there’s a pastrami sandwich somewhere in the right-hand cabinet, though.

There are industrial safety posters, because, well, of course there are; a science reference poster; and a blackboard. Also, I really like his carpet and I wonder where I could get one like it.

There’s a contrast between this working area and Violet’s. Ben’s a messy organic person, while Violet is mechanical and… not messy. But there’s also this: as a secretary, Violet’s desk is no more than the gateway to the Registrar’s office. She doesn’t really have a space of her own. So part of the difference we see is that Ben has staked a claim on his space, while Violet is still scheming to get an office where she might do the same thing. At that point, how would Violet’s office look? It’s an interesting question.

But I can guarantee that we won’t see an answer to it any time soon.

Starting Wednesday: Fenwick’s Improved Venomous Worms

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

So there’s that dream. It’s one of those dreams that’s so commonplace that it seems like everyone has had it, and maybe more than once: you find yourself back at school, standing in front of an entire room – or even an auditorium – full of students, and you’re about to speak when you look down and realize that you’re not wearing any pants.

This is not about that dream.

That dream is commonplace; it’s not worth our time.

Let’s imagine, instead, that the school we’ve returned to is the hellishly competitive, hellishly dangerous, and, in general, just plain hellish Retropolis Academy for the Unusually Inventive. This is the prestigious alma mater of every mad scientist in Retropolis. On graduation, students are propelled into the Experimental Research District where some of them will prosper and the other ones won’t be talked about very much. Not after the mess gets mopped up, anyway. Unless it’s a really amazing mess.

Awful as this is, it isn’t awful enough to compete with the no-pants version of the story, of course. And the good news is that there are pants in this version.

But that’s the extent of the good news. The rest of the news is that there are gigantic venomous worms, an unseasonal invasion of mole people, some devices that in all honesty should be better regulated, and very little respect for the guest lecturer. This is full contact, extreme higher education we’re talking about here.

And it starts this Wednesday, in Fenwick’s Improved Venomous Worms, at Thrilling Tales of the Downight Unusual.

The great big post about my great big cover for ‘Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom’

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

If you were following along a couple of months ago, you probably know that at that time I was working on the dust jacket art for my book Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom.

I couldn’t show it to you back then. That’s because the auspicious moment for a cover reveal is determined during ancient, eldritch rituals around the smoking braziers and in between the ragged and unsettling tapestries of the towers that brood over the isle of Manhattan.

Yeah, that’s really how they do it. They’re old school, over there.

But last week my editor showed off the front cover and wraparound versions of the dust jacket. So here it is – front cover above, and the whole dust jacket below.

The Old Cover

If you’ve been following along even longer you may remember that I did a cover design for the book, back before it even was a book. It looked like this:

I really liked the vintage paperback palette and the detail of Rusty hanging on to the rocket in a kind of homage to Josh Kirby’s Discworld covers. But I also figured that if a publisher wanted the book, some other artist would end up doing the cover… because cover art is another matter that’s decided during those archaic festivities that I mentioned above.

So I was happy to learn that even though Tor didn’t want my original cover, they did want me to do a new one.

The New Cover

In March I got a rough description of the cover they wanted, and that’s more or less what you see on the front.

But because it was to be a wraparound jacket I had all sorts of room to show the rest of what they wanted, which was the city of Retropolis; and I took advantage of the situation by doing on the back cover what I really wanted to do: a whirlwind of characters in another light homage to Josh Kirby.

Because nothing says ‘humor’ better than a crowd of frightened people who are running for their lives.

But, hey, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Roughs

First I worked up a series of roughs: there were six of them. Like most of what I do, these roughs started in 3DS Max and were finished (rather lightly, for the roughs) in Photoshop. They were very, very preliminary.

For complicated reasons it seemed like it would be better to offer fewer choices than that, so I cut it down to two. Of those two they picked the rough that I liked best. You can see that one below.

And although I didn’t realize it at the time, that rough is the cover you see now at Amazon, and at Barnes & Noble, and everyplace else where the book’s mentioned. Now that the cover’s been revealed we should eventually see the real cover show up in all those places. I’m eager to see that happen.

The Layers

At the rough stage I still had no idea what my polygon count would be in 3DS Max. (Over seven million!) But it was obvious that I’d need to handle the scene in multiple layers. In the end, there were at least six of these layers. (It’s hard to be exact, because there were problems that showed up only when I’d rendered the scene at a high resolution – so I went back, near the end, to render out my fixes for those.) At the very end I put all the layers together in Photoshop, where I did all kinds of retouching on them until they were a picture.

The biggest single task was the city in the background. For the rough I’d just pasted in bits and pieces of my existing city backdrops to get the building masses about where I wanted them. For the final I had to model new buildings and arrange them all into a layout that made sense. So of the six weeks I spent on the picture, I spent two in the city.

Lighting is always a large task, and here I was lighting about six separate scenes that needed to match. I know this sounds simple: but this isn’t photography. I’m not documenting. The lighting all had to look correct, but in fact it’s subverted and bent in countless ways that better serve the picture.

The simulation above doesn't really show you what I was working on; I often went forward and backward through the layers, and as I worked, of course, I hadn't done any retouching. But you can see what pieces I was working on, even though they look much prettier here.

The Big Picture

Finally, while the dust jacket is large - it's about twenty-one inches across - I wanted it to be even larger. So at its full resolution the picture will become a poster and an archival print at about thirty inches by fifteen.

I really enjoyed working on this, which is a strange thing to say about six weeks of incessant minor changes and test renderings; but there it is.

The dust jacket is a set of panels that have to work together as a single picture, but which also need to stand on their own when they’re seen on the book: the front and back flaps, the front and back covers, and even the spine will be seen as separate pictures once the dust jacket is folded around the book. It’s a really interesting challenge.

And that set of pictures has to show the shopper what the heck this book is about.

By that I don’t mean what happens in the book. It’s more a question of what the book is like.

So, the way I see it, this is what my book is like:

Oh! And you remember that old cover design? It turned into a pretty great title page. Because we waste no part of the animal.

Mysterious graphic snippets of mid-2016; also, panthers and employee handbooks

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

If today’s mysterious snippets center on themes of escape and retaliation, that’s all due to August’s attempts to melt the Secret Laboratory around my ears. But I’m on top of it! It’s so seldom I get a chance to test my latest experiments on an entire month.

But apart from that these are more glimpses of things to come for The Retropolis Registry of Patents – in one case, not until the end of the year.

The fifth story in the series won’t begin until late November, and it’s a long one that will continue on into February. Which is nice, from a calendrical point of view, but if you do the math you’ll realize that I have to do more illustrations for that one (Ten! Count ’em! Ten!). And I’ve just finished the fifth, so the rest of the calculation is left as an exercise for the reader.

Meanwhile, this week things are about to take a turn for the more peculiar in Doctor Petaja’s Parlor of Peril.

In some ways I thought that Doctor Petaja was a perfectly good introduction to the series – maybe even better than The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett – but I like the way we meet Ben and Violet in Brackett, so I decided to let it stand rather than have us meet them after they’ve gotten to know each other. Maybe I’ve given in a little to Hollywood’s addiction to origin stories.

Example? Robert E. Howard never wrote an origin story for Conan. Conan doesn’t need an origin story. You know exactly who he is once you see him hit the world sandals-first and sword foremost. But each time Hollywood’s tried to adapt the poor Cimmerian they’ve felt that they had to explain to us how he got that way. Which, like I said, is completely unnecessary. How does a panther get that way? By being a panther.

Panthers aren’t impressed by origin stories. Panthers watch you become entranced by an origin story, and then they leap down out of a tree and eat you.

Aaaaand that’s totally out of left field, for which I also blame the August heat, and with that I had better let you go.

But keep an eye on Doctor Petaja this week. It may help with issues of job training and questions of whether you should really read the employee handbook.