clearly i have too much going on. my concentration is shot lately.

the new Reconstruction style is gradually finding its way (the lettering is slowly improving now that my pen and i have come to some terms). today's page is transitiony, but we're getting somewhere, i promise. next monday's page is one of my favorite so far. something to live for in case anyone needs it!

i'm also finding that the new style is doing what it needs to do: shortening the production process by hours and hours. directly putting the words on the page has shaved about half an hour off the drawing time because there is less fretting about composition (about which i am lousy). i drew a page last night and one this morning. i could probably pre-ink both of them before i leave for work, paint them tomorrow, and do the finishing over the weekend, completing both of them in about three and a half to four hours. that's half the time it took me originally to complete a single page! color me impressed at the difference it's made and only about half and hour at the most is spent futzing with the scans.

in other news, i need to finish projects shuffling off to Comic-Con from the Here There Be Monsters Press this year. lots of work to do on that front.

and yeah, i'm still in the middle of writing a novel (slowly, slowly). while In Pursuance of Said Conspiracy is on the back burner (boo hoo) until the summer is over, i still want to try to have a raw draft of this novel finished in the next few months. i'm reading Hanging Henry Gambrill as research (which i desperately need for this one), and though it's a good book, it's a bit slow going and i have a lot still to get through. unfortunately, a lot of my novel depends on my reading this book, so there are plot points i can't finalize until i've finished it. i'm going to try to spend at least some part of the coming weekend dedicated to barreling through the 400 pages i need to cover (ughhh).

i know. i brought it on myself.

( me rambling on about Mobtown )

of course, you know the best part of all of this is that i get to invent a 19th century volunteer fire department company, which i have been wanting to do the whole of my life.

: D



the other reason i initially
chose Baltimore as a setting was
because it was home to the nation's
first (and at the time, only) Dental
College. from inception, Lewis was
destined to become a dentist ~ at
least that was what i wanted

my flist is increasingly becoming an rss aggregator. many of the fabulous bloggers i have met here have left for sunnier skies. guess i'm really glad i didn't renew my account after all.

despite the length of my flist there's only a handful of you intrepid friends left. hello friends! we appear to be entering a waning stage of lj. i'm trying to hang in there, but my own posts are getting rather thin.

like for example, i am posting today because it's Update Day over at Reconstruction. hello Mr. Morse! good bye Mr. Morse! (i have a feeling we'll see him again).

i don't really have much else to say (and i have to go do some final tidying this morning, so best scoot). every time i say i will be back later to post more, i never get around to it, so i won't even say it.

happy monday intrepid flist!

: D

i finally got a listing on OnlineComics.net! and a random fan as well!

: D

er...now maybe i ought to work on the actual comic?

beautiful rainy day. blackberries for lunch. rosemary chicken for dinner (life is good!)

my desk just isn't looking any better yet (but no worse, thank God). i have no idea how picky fire inspectors are, but i hate the idea of my landlord coming in here and wondering what sort of nest i am building.

i really like where i live ~ in case i haven't mentioned it. my landlord is very laid back, the downstairs neighbors are practically invisible, and though i haven't shared many interior pictures of my domicile, it is beautiful and spacious. even though i don't use the second bedroom for anything (it's empty except my dining buffet, which i don't need here), i like having it just to feel there's room to grow. my kitchen here is larger than the one in my house back in texas.

i am almost done cleaning. fell off the coffee table trying to take a picture of my couch, so you get no pictures of the rest of the house, but here's my workspace.


cleaning has made me appreciate my home here. a thing as simple as replacing a missing light bulb has made the place bright and new for me again.

now if i can just get motivated to put away the laundry and clean the floors (yuck ~ floors are the one thing i don't really care for doing).

( a couple more under the cut )

thank you again to faynudibranch, who sent me the fabulous poster of Tudor Hall. i framed it a couple of weeks ago and tomorrow i'll see about hanging it (though i am wary about falling off any more furniture).

i am going to see about clearing that other desk of mine! lots of project stuff i want to get to tonight, but the cleaning's gotta happen as well!

happy sattidy all!

: D

i had the most amazing orange ginger pork chop for dinner. it was sooooo good. i'm not kidding. this was a pork chop broiled in the ovens of nirvana by the hands of seraphim. pigs are lining up to martyr themselves just to make this pork chop, it's so good. i feel like making a "pork chop" tag just to commemorate this day and for all time.

i've always loved pork chops. but i never knew it could be this good.

[does a snoopy "sup-sup-suppertime" dance all over the house in post-pork chop ecstasy].

anyone on my flist who has a Lunds in their neighborhood should go immediately and get a pork chop of their very own. and if you don't live near Lunds, you should get in your car and begin a pilgrimmage now. they won't last!!!

no seriously, it was a really good pork chop. like, it never made it home. i ate it in the car before i'd driven five blocks from the store. it was scandalously good. i almost ate the bones.

uh....

here's another picture of Fort Snelling! cool huh? yeah, that's really why i am posting.



this guys just wishes
he had a pork chop

i don't really like how today's page came out, but it happened to fall within the fugly transition, so here it is. we get to meet Mr. Morse (upon whose hair i made improvements) for the first time. the lettering here is still kinda wonky. i'm having a life and death battle with my pen at the moment.

i'm also fighting with the scans. the original painted pages are so pretty and bright (maybe bright isn't the word: dense with color). they look washed out on screen by comparison. i'll have to do some futzing with that.

well this is a kvetchy start to the morning! on a cheerful note, i'm doing laundry!

: D

i'll probably be posting later on other matters. so prepare your flists!

p.s. i lost internet connectivity last night, so i have a whole lot of catching up to do with my flist.

it's finally happened. i have completely lost control of my desk. last night i sat down to work on Reconstruction and couldn't comfortably angle the clipboard in a way that made painting easy. of course, instead of clearing the desk, i just forced myself to make do. because God forbid i disturb the tower of i don't know what. and that's the worst part of it. i'm not even entirely sure what's in those piles at this point. a lot of photocopies, i think, and notes, and scanned microfilm. last night i was trying to baste together reconstructed pages of the Evening Star from 1865. and of course i did the scans wrong, so i am missing two lines in the middle of the pages (argh!). fortunately i still have the microfilm reel, so i can write in the missing lines tonight or tomorrow (but i am such an idiot).

i'm glad i went to the trouble of ordering this newspaper for a couple of reasons: it's the local paper for crying outloud! what was i thinking for blowing it off originally? and also, it's given me a few interesting new tidbits to work with (one description of sam arnold's father crying in the courtroom was rather heartbreaking).

i was really tempted to include a bunch of random local news things in my outline, but restrained myself (fascinating as they were), given that the monstrousness of this project is already too much for even me to handle at this point.


the good news is that this desk will be completely wiped clean this weekend. i've got the summer projects moving in (for the Here there Be Monsters press) and so everything is getting put on hold until late July. well, by "everything", i really mean In Pursuance of Said Conspiracy, which means i can get most of this stuff off my desk until then. this is not the way i wanted to do it, but life has a way of dictating the priorities. i have to write Issue No. 5 of Eleison in the coming week (yikes). thankfully i have a story in mind. just have to commit it to paper now.

in painting: Reconstruction shouldn't suffer for the schedule change (i hope). i'm a little bit behind, but the style change is gradually making it easier. i also have something more like a draft to work from (instead of winging it like i was doing for several pages there ~ shouldn't have done that, but oh well, it's all a learning process).

new projects: ooo exciting ~ my brother and i are going to launch a webcomic of some sort in late June/July hopefully. i want to title it The Orchard, but that sounds so prosaic given the subject matter. this will be an online exclusive about Death, War, and Bacon (for those of you who aren't familiar with my obsession with war and breakfast, please see Grantcakes). it will star Death, a soldier, and a pig (right?), and will likely be a meditation on themes familiar in my work for those who know it (fidelity, honor, and estrangement chief among them). stay tuned for more details!

in reading: book updates later. this post is already long and jumbled!

i have fallen tragically behind on my flist. i'll try to catch up, promise. yesterday i read my list without logging in so i missed all the flocked posts. der....

i've been reading a lot of books on what i would categorize as "American terrorism" (19th century-style, of course). finished three books this weekend (two of them rather short). dunno if any of these would be of interest to anyone on my flist, especially since i don't necessarily recommend two of them. first up:

Victims: a true story of the Civil War by Phillip Shaw Paludan ~ The problem with this book isn't that for its 130 pages it's quite the dense, lumbering behemoth (reads more like a academic dissertation than anything else). The problem is that it sets out with a thesis that it cannot seem to prove.

The narrative starts off really strong with a very good overview of the community of Shelton Laurel, but by the time it arrives at the killings, the ambiguities of guerrilla warfare have been presented in such a way as to render me undecided on what actually went down. People were killed. Probably without cause. But while I couldn't possibly condone summary executions on any level, one has to wonder at the fear and frustration (and utter incompetence) of those who ordered and carried out the killings. We see it time and time again: some small thing that sets off a chain of events more extreme than warranted. The maze of offenses and retaliations in this arena in particular are incredibly hard to untangle.

So there's a lot of new information here and that's fabulous, but the way in which it's presented left me feeling like the author meant to take a strong stance against the killings, but actually failed to make the point that this was a bona fide war crime. While I accept that the burden of guilt is on the prosecution's head to prove (and they don't prove anything beyond reasonable doubt), it's hard to judge anything in a case in which a degree of reason is entirely lacking on both sides.

A good springboard for further investigation, but between the heavy-handed and too-often discursive writing style, and the failure to effectively make its case, I was disappointed.

for a super-short overview of the "battle/massacre", you can read a quick summary here that gives a somewhat fair context for understanding the events that lead to the heinous deed. they call it a "battle", but in fairness, i think the bushwhacking feud was really too dirty on both sides to be called a battle proper. "massacre" more accurately covers it, regardless of the circumstances by which it came about.



i ain't saying it didn't happen.
i just don't think paludan proves that it
was done without provocation.
this seriously weakens his case that these
men and boys were "victims" as opposed to
obstructive patriots and/or partisans.
on a lighter note, in completely unrelated news, if you haven't read this article on a recently authenticated picture of W. A. Mozart, you oughta, because it's pretty cool. i especially love the closing:

One of Mozart's friends described him as a man "in whose personal intercourse there was absolutely no other sign of unusual power of intellect and almost no trace of intellectual culture, nor of any scholarly or other higher interests." Yet that same man was to music what Shakespeare was to theater.

How can we turn this mysterious and unsettling fact to use? What lesson can it teach us? One thing comes to mind at once: humility. You don't need a portrait of the composer of "The Marriage of Figaro" to know that next to him, nobody looks smart.

click here to check it out!.

overall i didn't get as much done as i'd hoped, but it was nonetheless a good weekend. ate blackberries for breakfast, concocted salads with exotic tomatoes.

( blowing off a wee bit of steam about the kentucky derby )

spent sunday at Fort Snelling. had a grand old time. mebbe i post more pictures later.


overall was out a lot this weekend, which always takes more energy than it gives. as a confirmed closet anchorite, public appearances are a huge drain.

in writing: beginnings and endings.

last week i wrote twenty one pages from the beginning just to get back into the voice. this week i wrote twenty five pages from the ending. i have to write endings early in the process. they give me a target to shoot for. i rarely rewrite them, though how i get from beginning to ending is prone to all manner of digressions, etc.

i think i like my ending. the last couple of beats are giving me fits, but overall, i like the way this thing winds down. because this story is essentially the beginning of a long, long battle, it's hard to find the right note that will finish this both "resolved" and yet on the edge of the next adventure. we'll see if i can pull it off. i'm pretty confident that it doesn't suck, so we're facing the right direction at least.

all that and it's update day for Reconstruction. we're getting into the weirder of the transition areas. it's going to be a little bumpy for a while. i don't really like what i did with this scene (basically condensed it into three pages, which is pretty dang condensed). but i am hoping with the new style, i won't be so prone to trim the edges. we'll see in the next couple of weeks.

in reading: will prolly make a separate post later about the reading i've been doing. interesting stuff. a lot of american terrorism in the 1860s. it's actually been kinda depressing, but very educational. let's just say my vision of this world just got a whole lot darker.

finally, much much much cleaning still ahead in preparation for the fire inspection. i've only managed to clear out the kitchen and pantry area and i am already exhausted. i'll do it little by little this week and then throw myself into it this coming weekend. bleh.

happy monday all!

: D

thursday. update day. you know the drill.

as promised, here's the house.

if sufficiently impressed, feel free to vote.

meanwhile, just got word the fire inspector is coming on the 12th which means i'm spending the upcoming weekend cleaning, etc. given the amount of books, paper, etc. in this place, i am sure it is entirely too "combustible".

: o p

happy may day all!

just ain't updating like she use to...i've been busy elsewhere, i s'pose. and inattentive to my flist (geh ~ sorry).

yesterday, i got in the mail a cheap copy of Eisenschiml's Why was Lincoln Murdered? i didn't want a paperback reprint and i didn't want to pay $20-30 for it, so i found a copy on eBay for $4 which was great. of course, it's what $4 will get you in an Eisenschiml these days. it's about as good as my copy of Weichmann's drivel, which is to say it's a readable piece of junk that's still all in one piece but wouldn't win any beauty prizes. that's about what i need. Eisenchiml is, sadly, almost relegated to the same fire-pile as Gutteridge these days, but given that it is the grandfather of all conspiracy theories, i think it's worth reading. i have a soft spot, too, for it, because i am pretty sure it's one of the first Lincoln conspiracy books i ever read (hopelessly warping my perceptions for many years, alas). as Burkhimer says in 100 Essential Lincoln Books: Eisenschiml "is both influential and incredibly bad at the same time." what's not to love?

unfortunately, it's not in the public domain, so i can't just cannibalize it like a lot of other sources i am using. but i am considering creating a hysterical conspiracy theorist-historian character to wreck havoc in the meta-theatrical layer of the world i am trying to create (based on Eisenschiml and maybe one or two other serious fruit loops). he can hang out and play poker with Washington in Carrera.


"The past is so often unknowable
not because it is befogged now
but because it was befogged then, too,
back when it was still the present.
If we had been there listening,
we still might not have been able
to determine exactly what Stanton said.
All we know for sure is that
everyone was weeping,
and the room was full."

meanwhile, here's a great article about Czar NastyOwlFace's epitaph at Lincoln's deathbed from the New Yorker Angels and Ages: Lincoln’s language and its legacy by Adam Gopnik. this is for those of you obsessed with the sort of minutiae that makes history so bizarrely compelling.

this is a pretty woggly page, but we're moving along. i originally had a very dense script for this page and basically hacked it to the point. we'll find out later if anything i cut was critical. meh. but stay tuned because on Thursday you get to see the finished drawing of the Morse house, a sketch of which i posted way back when i launched this thing (eep!).

i know i said i would work on some vote incentives. i'll try to get to that this week.

hope everyone is starting their day off right!

: D

the transition is looking kinda hairy at the moment. this is the last page i did in the "old" style. so things are going to be sorta weird over the next couple of weeks. hopefully not too weird.

and then maybe i will start putting up some vote incentives.

: o p

i'll update with something more substantial later. i feel sorta buried under a buncha stuff today.

p.s. i used to like those bubble links with the popup pictures, but they're starting to get on my nerves now. like the mouse gets stuck on them and you can't get them out of the way. bleh.

so this is the direction i'm sorta going in. it doesn't look much different now probably, but it's evolving and will probably continue to change as it stabilizes.

in deference to some concerns about the sepia tinting, i went ahead and kept the sepia paint, but have left it unfiltered (so the outlines are black, etc.). i think it will be a fair compromise. the pages won't look slick because i'm not adding any digital overlays (though when we get to night scenes, i'll probably cheat and add them because God knows i can't paint scenes in the dark.

i'll get better at the lettering also. i have nervous hands so my balloons are kinda monstrously hideous, but i'll work on improving those as well. my mistake here was using a template to pencil in balloons that i then tried to go over with the pen. i do much better if i just freehand the dern things. i don't care if they aren't perfect, but i do want them to look confident and intentionally misshapen rather than woggly like this.


the nicest thing about this? the time between scanning and posting was negligible. i fixed a few stray lines and adjusted some lettering just slightly (it was obnoxiously off-centered). but otherwise, i just cropped and posted. easy as pie. and that's what i really want: something i don't have to work on so much on the computer.

so yay all around.

i do have to trade in the ink on my calligraphy pen for some india. you can see how it ran on Lewis's collar there. and we can't have that.

p.s. this panel is on page 18, i believe, so it's four pages away and you'll see it again in a couple of weeks.

: D

first of all, it's Update Day at Reconstruction. i feel i have to apologize for the page because i rushed it (massively rushed it). so i had a sit and think about why i was feeling ill-disposed to work on it and i came to a couple of conclusions (always the conclusions!).

( these are specifically about the webcomic )

i have missed a lot on lj this past week, but i understand congratulations are in order to bachsoprano, cathellison, and yapidka for success in recent creative ventures! whoohoo!

: D

i am way behind. yesterday had a near-death dog emergency (she's looking better today; i have her on a home hydrator catheter thing. if i can get her to start eating in another day or so, she just may pull through). needless to say this has occupied mt every waking thought (and most of my attempted sleeping ones as well). so i am groggy and out of it and i haven't read my flist for two days except a brief scroll through yesterday morning, for which i apologize. i will try to get to it today.

meanwhile, it's update day at Reconstruction (and there goes the last of my buffer, so it's going to be an interesting weekend ~ geh).

here follows some assassination trial nonsense mostly for my own record-keeping, but if you want to read my blithering, ( feel free! )

today's picture is another mugshot. this is George Azerodt's cousin, Hartman Richter, who was arrested with him after the assassination. Richter spent a good spell in the Arsenal prison and Hartranft seems to have shuttled him around quite a bit and wrote numerous letters to Hancock saying: this guy's not on trial, can we take off his constraints? etc.


scores of people like Richter, Celestino (a "known" spy), Willie Jett, most everybody who worked at Ford's Theatre, for example, and all of Booth's brothers (they would have arrested his sister Asia as well, but she was too pregnant, so they put her under house arrest) were "apprehended" shortly after the assassination and held without charges (just on suspicion) for far too long for it to be Constitutionally legal. but the government gets to make up new rules in such cases, apparently.

sound familiar?

: o p

ironichles asked me to take pictures of the sherlock holmes display on the fourth floor of the library where i work. this was a temporary display that used to be in a different library on campus, but i guess they liked it so well, they wanted to keep it around a while. it was much nicer in its original space because it was with its actual book and art collection (a lot of really cool stuff ~ and none of which came over).


it's a hard space to photograph, so these pictures aren't great, but it shows some of the fun little details including holmes' chemistry set, drug paraphernalia, the bearskin rug, the slipper on the mantel, etc. it may be too hard to see, but the stuff on the secretary is fun: telegrams about the baker street irregulars, a photo of a peg-legged man, etc. i couldn't get a good shot of the fainting couch on which the violin is resting. i suppose i could have stood on a chair and tried to do it, but i was shy.

anyway, enjoy!

( more when you click! )

i have been contemplating the wonder that is Edwin Forrest's hair. mostly because, in an era sans mousse and hair gel and various other "product", it is quite the tower of achievement.

also because it's more interesting than anything i have going on personally. don't believe me? take a look for yourself!


anyway, here's the deal. i started out the new year making a big important proclamation to the effect that i would not be making any big important proclamations this year: that i would just stick to my guns, go with the flow, and finish something, even if it was, to my thinking, mediocre.

but oh what a foolish wretched mortal i am. the intensity with which i have been focused on In Pursuance of Said Conspiracy has once again burned me to a crispy soulless husk. i made definite progress with it, but it's clear by the way i have stalled out since last week that i cannot get much farther at the moment. it's just too many details to try to keep track of for my wee, atrophying brain. every time i read the transcripts, i just get dizzy at the thought of trying to adapt them. so much so that i actually considered saying: ah screw it, i won't try to shape anything out of it, i'll just take Poore's transcript and use it entirely (yeah, all 1200 pages of it). immediately upon which one of my few remaining lively synapses sporked itself to death in desperate, horrified protest.

so you can see why Edwin Forrest's hair is so phenomenally interesting. no?

well here's the deal (always a deal, right?): i don't feel like i can quit with everything i have going on right now. Reconstruction updates today (it being monday and all), and i have about two weeks worth of pages left on the buffer before i run out (gah!). i have had a mighty battle this weekend with trying to decide whether to press on with it (at least to finish this one section), but it seems a long way to go ~ and it is. so i haven't made any decisions about it. what may happen is that i switch the style of the artwork midway through (to the annoyance of all). having written the dang thing about 80 times now, i wonder at the wisdom of rewriting it and adapting it into a new medium like this. it may well be the definition of crazy.

i leave you with death in cavalry boots, contemplating the absurdity of it all. my brother drew this last night because he wanted to draw death being contemplative and i said: put boots on him.

so there you have it. i love his knobby knees.

ughhh ~ i'm just not very focused right now, sorry.
so you get another update, at Reconstruction, and some incoherent babbling from me about nothing in particular.

i started scripting In Pursuance on April Fools day and it's proceeding in fits and starts. the good news is that it moves well from scene to scene. the bad news is that this script is losing a lot of the narrative and i can't really think of interesting visual ways to keep that stuff at the moment. that's a bit frustrating, but i guess i can't hope to include every crumb of detail that i would like to.

i will try to make a real post later. my lj account expires today, so well shall see what becomes of this.

: D

some of you probably think sunday is the first day of the week. but it's not! it's not, i tell you, it's monday! today! and welcome to the last day of march (where the heck did the month go?).

in today's update, at Reconstruction, enter Sergeant O.B. and Corporal Payton (you knew it was coming). get used to these guys' ugly mugs. they're in for the long haul. remember to vote if you are so inclined. i still haven't decided whether to take the vote counter off.

the weekend was semi-successful. i inked two new pages and painted two others, so i am cteeping ahead slowly (my buffer runs out soon, though, so i better step up and make sure i don't fall behind!)

: D