My brand-new page is now up at Patreon

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

If you’ve read my last post you know already that I’m in a difficult situation; you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m trying out some creative solutions to my problems. The first of these is a page at Patreon where you can to subscribe to a monthly supply of content.

There are tiers at $1, $5, $10, and $15. The highest-level patrons will get something from me every week, while the $1 patrons will see just one of the updates.

The big benefits of the $15 level are (for the first year or so) print-resolution Celtic knotwork greeting card images. They’ve got transparent areas so that you can add your own images to sit inside the borders’ frames.

Whenever I run out of those (or when you get tired of them) I’ll come up with something else.

The rest of the content includes unpublished or obscure stories, some illustrated poems by me and by dead people like William Butler Yeats, and some first drafts (which I don’t usually share) with my own notes that explain what’s wrong with them. There are also some less-classifiable things that date all the way back to the 1970’s.

I hope you’ll have a look at the page and consider supporting my work at one level or another. I’ll try to make sure it’s worth your while!

The tale of woe I never told you

Filed under Can't Stop Thinking, Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual

(I’m not sure how to tell this one briefly, or with much humor. Sorry about that. It’s just not a brief or funny story.)

In my twenty-some years on the World Wide Web I’ve read many, many tales of woe. People reach the end of their rope and appeal for help, and I don’t blame them for that: it’s just that I’m not sure it does any good. Not in the long term, anyway.

There’s probably a brief period when folks chip in whatever they can. But I’m always left wondering what the long term effect is, once you expose your vulnerable underbelly and admit that you just can’t make it on your own. Doesn’t that change the way people think about you? In a bad way, I mean? And, once they’ve helped, don’t they expect you to just be okay now?

This may be testosterone talking. But the result is that even though I have a Tale of Woe I’ve always kept it to myself.

That’s changed today. I can’t afford to care what you think any more.

It all started so well

I left the games business earlier than I planned, back in 2005, because I simply couldn’t face another project. The games business really is a place for the young, and it could be I’d had a bad run of luck; but whatever the cause I was just too burned out to keep going on that treadmill of bizarre decisions and endless crunch time and, in my case, plenty of responsibility without any authority at all.

I had an exit strategy: to find an inexpensive home where I could live and build up my online business and pursue only those projects that no one but me was likely to create. This is a pretty good description of what I thought I was here for, but which I’d found so hard to do while working for other people.

So I bought a fixer-upper of a house and started to fix it up; not quickly, but steadily, since I was building up my business at the same time.

It wasn’t easy. But it worked! By 2008 it seemed like everyone on the web was linking to my Retropolis Transit Authority T-shirts and man, oh man, were they selling, that summer!

The thing I laugh about now is that I remember thinking that pretty soon I’d be able to afford health insurance.

I have a dark sense of humor, you see

Soon after I had that thought, I discovered that I had cancer.

The surprise was that it wasn’t lung cancer. I’d been a smoker for many years. But this was one of the other cancers, one that grows slowly, way down in your guts. You don’t find out about it for a long time.

Apparently you don’t find out about it until you start thinking about health insurance.

I seriously considered foregoing treatment. I really did. Though things were looking up, I couldn’t possibly afford the cost of my care. And I still argue with myself about whether that would have been a better choice.

Anyway, I was talked into treatment by medical professionals. The idea was that if I couldn’t afford it, there would be financial aid for me. And to some extent this was true.

But remember how business was looking up that year? It was, and in addition I had set aside the money for my income taxes. This is a thing that the self-employed do. And so, at the time I became sick, I was not indigent. I just didn’t have enough money to cover the costs of the tests, radiation, surgery, and post-surgical care.

We beat the cancer, which was great. (It’s still gone.) But first the bills wiped me out, and then they kept on coming.

The cost of beating cancer

Even at this length I can’t describe to you the full horror of what it’s like to deal with the US health care system when you don’t have insurance. That’s a story in itself.

But in the end, late in 2009, I finally had a single medical debt on which I could make monthly payments. And I kept making those payments until just a few months ago.

I’d been wiped out by the just the first few months of bills. Since I was still uninsured, I now had to meet other monthly expenses as a result of my surgery. My income rose and fell, but those costs were consistent, and I always met them. That meant acquiring other debts along the way.

Obviously, I wasn’t fixing up the house any more. (You can tell).

For nine years I’ve been staying ahead of it all with some success. I even wiped out my non-medical debts once or twice.

But during those years my income has also been dwindling. There have been brief reversals, like the Pulp-O-Mizer’s fifteen minutes of fame, or the book advances for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. Still the trend has always been down, in a month-to-month,white-knuckled race toward the date when I’d qualify for Social Security.

This year I lost the race.

This is why I’ve been quiet

Some of you noticed that I withdrew from the web once Patently Absurd was published. There was nothing I could say that wasn’t horrible, and of course I was trying one thing after another to turn things around.

It was rude of me to avoid responding to those of you who contacted me. But it seemed like the alternative was worse. I didn’t want to lie, but neither did I want to tell you the truth: so I’ve been saying nothing at all. That’s probably worried some of you, and I’m sorry.

As the year’s progressed I’ve defaulted on one bill after another. I’ve finally reached the twin hurdles of my property tax and my mortgage payment.

It seems certain that I’ll lose the house. I will likely try to sell it; but I don’t think I’d even get my equity back. And as for what I’ll do when I don’t have a house, that’s another difficult question. My mortgage payment is actually lower than any rent I might pay. So, yeah, there’s that.

I have to say… for a guy who’s worked on a hopeful future for the last twenty years I don’t seem to have any hope left for myself.

What does this all mean?

You can’t fix my problems. I don’t expect you to.

But this is still the best of all possible times for you to buy original art (especially!), merchandise from Retropolis and The Celtic Art Works, or copies of Patently Absurd.

I guess my hope is that if I manage to make it through the next few months, and I sell my house and most everything else, I’ll find some way to scale back and survive for a couple of years longer. The first tier of Social Security may not be much, but it’s a lot more than I have coming in now. That lowest tier is still two long years away.

So… this has been my Tale of Woe. I’m sorry I had to share it with you.

It’s a day at the races for ‘Patently Absurd’

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

So it’s release day for Patently Absurd, and that means heavy drinking a release day race. Right?

Because even though A Day at the Races isn’t anybody’s favorite Marx Brothers film, it’s still a dang site easier to deal with on my blog than Duck Soup or Horse Feathers.

I mean, the last time I had Duck Soup over I had marching soldiers singing “Hail, Hail Freedonia” in here for days. Actual days.

So we’ll stick with the races this time.

Booklist was first past the post this time with their review:

It’s all lighthearted fun and wild invention, but Schenck takes a serious turn in the final story, which brings touching depth to his main characters. A great follow-up to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom (2017).

But they were soon overtaken by SFRevu:

Patently Absurd may not be serious science fiction, but it’s great stuff, and it’s stuffed with the tropes that made the pulp era pulsate like a mutant alien squid, albeit with a nod towards modern sensibilities. Maybe, in its own way, it is serious science fiction, camouflaged as whimsy. No matter what you decide to call it, it’s fun.

And then, like a death ray out of nowhere, came Paul Semel’s interview with me:

I wanted to do something with ordinary people whose jobs made them interact with the mad scientists in the Experimental Research District. So I thought about accountants. I don’t think about accountants that often. I mean, you don’t, do you?

The field’s still wide open: it’s anybody’s race at this point. Look! There’s Utopia State of Mind, racing ’round the bend! And you can’t forget the Toronto Star, where they loved Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom; that review will be here on Saturday. (Hey, this is a marathon, not a sprint, okay?)

And of course the real main event on release day is that you can buy the book now in all of the usual places. And once you read it, don’t be shy: please, please, please review it at Amazon, and at Goodreads, and wherever else books are reviewed.

The ‘Patently Absurd’ Kickstarter project aims for its second stretch goal

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

Well, it was uphill all the way for our first stretch goal, if by “uphill all the way” we mean up and down and up again; but we finally made it, and we’ve got just over a week left to hit the second stretch goal.

If we get there, this is what happens: I have the funds to arrange a Kirkus Indie review; and everybody who pledged over $50 will get a memo notebook with the Patently Absurd cover art on its own cover. These are nice little notebooks, as I can tell you from my personal scribbling experience.

It’s a harder goal to reach, at $1900, but we may have the urgency of the project’s end on our side. It’s coming up!

So if you have friends or if you see strangers who might like the book, this is the time to tell them all about it wherever you find them: on Facebook or Twitter, or at your own blog, or at GoodReads or LibraryThing or, in fact, anyplace at all.

It’s the larger pledges that will benefit from this stretch reward, so I’ve added a new set of ten “Collector II” rewards at $65. They’re just like the original Collector rewards except that they cost a bit more. That’s so you early adopters have a reason to look smug. If you need one, I mean.

(For the rest of you, that $65 gets you a signed, printed advance copy of Patently Absurd; a matching eBook of the same; an eBook edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book; a pair of custom bookmarks; and a signed hardcover copy of Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom; plus a memo notebook, if we hit the second stretch goal.)

In other news, today I should see my third proof copy of the book. The last one was pretty great, but I’m still fiddling with color profiles for the cover.

A squinty, twitching update on ‘Patently Absurd’

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

As I said in my last post, I’ve been busy; I still am. I’m working on my tenth illustration for Patently Absurd since the end of June.

It’s not a bad average when you do the arithmetic, but I spent twenty days on the picture we see here. That’s slowed me way down since the beginning (the first five pictures went very quickly) but I knew what I wanted here, and it was obvious that it would take a bit of time.

Sometimes what you need is a little, cluttered shop filled with the things that clutter little shops, and if all those things are unique and new then your next twenty days are pretty well spoken for.

I kind of expected it to take twenty-one days. So if you squint a bit and tilt your head just right, it looks like I’m ahead of schedule.

That’s why I look a little squinty and twitchy just now.

It’s not working, though. When I lose the squint and straighten up my head I can see that I’m far behind where I’d hoped to be by now. So it’s likely that the blog will remain quiet for awhile longer.

I think it was one of Tim Powers’ characters who once said “If it was easy, they’d have got someone else to do it.”

Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom

I was pretty happy to see this latecomer of Switchboard reviews at Sci-Fi Fan Letter. Among other things, there’s this:

I loved the characters in this. Dash is so much fun, and Nola’s got a good mix of spunk and intelligence. The Campbell kids are… something. They were both great and terrifying to follow.

The world-building was great. The switchboard is sort of an internet, if history had taken a different path. The priests of the spider god were fun, and kept the old school pulp feel. The robot League and the interactions between robot and human people show a positive future that’s often lacking in modern SF and something I enjoyed seeing.

The book’s done very well over at Goodreads, with forty ratings and twenty-six reviews; at Amazon it has a good, solid rating, but only twelve reviews.

Hint: those Amazon reviews are really helpful at the Amazon site. So if you’ve read Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, consider adding a review at Amazon. Thanks!

The Lair of the Clockwork Book

I’ll close with a reminder that you can get an eBook copy of The Lair of the Clockwork Book for $2.99 (a dollar below list price!) at Radio Planet Books.

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.

A poster for the Retropolis Courier Service

Filed under Works in Progress

Deliveries seem simple, don’t they? Pick up Thing A from Place B, then take it over to Place C. But it gets surprisingly complicated if Place B is clear on the other side of the City of Tomorrow, hundreds of miles away; and if Thing A turns out to be a Cardiophilic Moisture Eliminator, well. Boy Howdy! You’ve got all kinds of trouble.

That’s why we leave package deliveries to the valiant, well-trained delivery persons of the Retropolis Courier Service.

We’ve all admired their splendid livery, and we’ve envied them their compact, high-flying scooters; we’ve gratefully handed them our (usually non-Cardiophilic) packages, and we’ve taken their speedy deliveries from faraway parts.

Very few of us have sent anything into – or out of – the Experimental Research District. But if we have, or if we do, it will be a specially trained Route X Courier who makes sure that package arrives at its destination with a low, low incidence of unpleasant side effects. Special rates apply.

So here we see Grace Keaton, a Route X Courier herself. She seem to be the poster person for the Courier Service.

And of course this is a poster, over at Retropolis; it’s also an archival print, and a coffee mug.

Grace is a character I invented for a sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. She’s now had a cameo in Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory and she’ll probably return in the sixth Retropolis Registry of Patents story. That’s something I need to get to work on right about now.

By which I mean I don’t really know, myself. Oh, and if you missed it, you can click on the first image to see it way, way bigger. Or you could just click here.

A T-shirt for The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett; a stealth t-shirt sale; and other news

Filed under Works in Progress

You won’t see the first page of The Purloined Patents of Doctor Brackett until June 15 – that’s a little over a month from now – but I defy the tyrannical strictures of the calendar. And, possibly, rationality itself. So I’ve add some Doctor Brackett T-Shirts over at Retropolis.

I mean, do we serve the calendar? Or does the calendar serve us?

Join me in my little uprising against uncompromising time, won’t you? You can stick it to our oppressors here.

As an added incentive, there’s a stealth sale going on there too. Through May 18 you can save $5 on a t-shirt order of $30 or more by using the coupon code TAKE5NOW during checkout. That code works at Retropolis and the Celtic Art Works, and also on t-shirts you make with my Pulp-O-Mizer.

Defy time and save money!

In other news, I just discovered that there’s an actual pre-order page at Amazon (and only there, I think) for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. No cover image (which is pretty reasonable, since I haven’t done a final one yet) and no real information: just a lonely, blank image in an expanse of pretty much nothing. Still, hey! A pre-order page! It’s neat.

The Curious Incident of the Imaginary Editor

Filed under Imaginary Editor

My imaginary editor strikes from the shadows, as swift as a serpent and as inscrutable as something that defies being scruted. This week, he’s criticizing our book’s point of view.

And this book, whatever it is, seems to have made an unusual choice. I won’t say it’s never been done (not lately, anyway) but these days the idea of a first person narrator who knows all and sees all would be a departure. My preference would be a first person narrator who knows all, and sees all, but doesn’t tell all; or, better yet, one who lies.

Even though I’m almost positive that the imaginary editor is not editing my book, this does touch on Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. That’s because my book has a narrator who is a character. He’s just not a character in that book.

This was such an odd circumstance that there was no room in the book to explain it. And odder still is the fact that within a story, this narrator always refers to himself in the third person. You may have figured that out if you read The Lair of the Clockwork Book.

It’s another one of those weird correspondences I keep finding between the imaginary editor’s notes and the book I actually wrote. But I guess the harder you look, the more you find.

The Imaginary Editor versus Evil

Filed under Imaginary Editor

Well, here we are again. I continue to get weekly notes from my imaginary editor, for reasons that may be more clear if you catch up.

And honestly, after the revelation that my imaginary editor is editing what may be an imaginary book, I’m pretty relaxed about the whole thing. So let’s just look at this in a calm, curious spirit. There might be something we can learn from it.

I can see that the imaginary editor has an interesting point. We give characters tics and foibles and unusual ideas to help us – and the reader – to know that character as a unique person. Some of these are minor; some are extreme.

In a case where a character has an extreme view it makes sense that this should have something to do with the story. (That the miniscule orange octopi really are crawling over her skin; or that the miniscule orange octopi are, in fact, a delusion that’s explained when we learn that unusually large orange octopi from space have released a hallucenogenic drug into the Earth’s atmosphere.) I get that. The character’s peculiar quirk turns out to be essential to the story, often in a way that’s surprising.

But this? I mean, spinach is a force for global evil. This can’t be seen as unexpected, or revelatory, or insane. It’s just a fact.

Spinach infects our parents with some kind of mind control when they’re children. Then it forces them to expose us to its vile influence while we ourselves are young and helpless. It’s kind of like Toxoplasmosis.

Everybody knows this. So what’s the big reveal, here?

Something about this is odd. In my notes for one of the characters in Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom I’m sure I mentioned the truth about spinach: but none of that made it into the final draft. So once again I’m left to wonder exactly what book my imaginary editor is talking about. It doesn’t seem to be my book, but… now and then there’s one of these weird coincidences that sounds like my book. It’s starting to get kind of creepy.