Category Archives: Essays

This is a very boring name for me writing about the stuff that’s on my mind. I strive to make the essays more interesting than the word “essays” and this description.

Three Tweets, because Robin Williams

Three tweets from me.
These aren’t my full thoughts on the matter, but for 140-character distillations, they come surprisingly close.

Banner Tweaking

Here’s a quick comparison between drafts of my GenCon 2014 banners. On the left, the banner I thought was the final one. On the right, the one that we used after I let the design “bake” in my brain a bit.

GenCon 2014 Banner, designed by Howard, using cover art from Privateer Press, Carter Reid, Julie Dillon, and his own hand.
GenCon 2014 Banner designed by Howard. Art by Howard, Julie Dillon, Carter Reid, and artists at Privateer Press
HowardBanner-5x7-2014-WEB
GenCon 2014 Banner designed by Howard. Art by Howard, Julie Dillon, Carter Reid, and artists at Privateer Press

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can you see  the difference? The big change was swapping XDM and SHADOWS BENEATH. For branding purposes, the original layout made it look like SHADOWS BENEATH was a Schlock cover. With XDM running interference, though, SHADOWS BENEATH gets to be its own thing.

I also changed the text effect on my name. The wavy effect was cool, but on a fabric banner it will make people thing the banner is hanging badly. The slight arch with the forward lean (the one on the left) will look much better, especially since people will be looking up at that spot.

This project killed an entire day, and that final tweak was made during three hours I could have spent writing. But I needed to make the tweak, and I didn’t know what exactly it was until I started nudging things around.

Write It, or Live It?

I found the following gem while searching through my old Live Journal posts. Excerpted, it’s almost profound:

My life would seem more interesting to everyone else if I could strike some sort of balance between writing about it and living it, but more and more I’m finding that, when time permits, I prefer to allow my life to seem completely uninteresting to the rest of the world, and absolutely, fascinatingly packed with all the big and little things that make it wonderful for me and a few first-hand observers.

–Howard Tayler

Thoughts on Aughts

There’s an old man who comes to the gym in the mornings. He has a walker with an oxygen bottle, and bears visible scars from open heart surgery and a pacemaker implant. Monday morning I loosened up in the hot tub, and the two of us talked.

I learned that he had his first surgery in early December of 1999. I was reminded of my bout with myocarditis that same month, and how, as I lay in the Intensive Care Unit at UVRMC, the rooms around me were full of what I have come to call “gray people.” Their skin was literally deathly pale, and I assumed that the majority of them were going to die there.

I asked where this man had gone for treatment back in ’99, and he told me he was at UVRMC, and spent most of December in the Intensive Care Unit.

One of those gray people not only survived, but did so for a full decade at current count.

The last decade has been huge for me. I started a new job, rose to prominence, and then quit to do the same thing again. I created Schlock Mercenary, and Sandra and I had two more kids.

All of this in a decade.

I don’t know what my elderly friend at the gym has done with the ten years the doctors, God, and/or the Fates gave back to him, but I’m sure they are precious.

Whine about the “aughts” if you must, but as we begin the second decade of the twenty-first century, know that at least two of us are really thankful for the last ten years.