Category Archives: Journal

This is me rambling about me, mostly. Current stuff: home, family, my head’s on fire… that kind of thing. This also includes everything imported from LiveJournal.

Crossposted, Journal

Force Multiplication is in The House

Sandra and Keliana ushered a couple of pallets of books into the Hypernode Warehouse late last week. This is the first time we’ve taken delivery of books when I haven’t been there to crack open the first box and huff the concentrated scent of new books.

Keliana Tayler, with stacks of boxes full of thousands of books
Keliana Tayler, with stacks of boxes full of thousands of books

The warehouse isn’t particularly exciting, and is downright deficient in terms of how photogenic it is. These aren’t the reasons why I do book sketching at home, but they certainly add weight to the argument.

On Friday, Sandra and Keliana hauled a big stack of boxes into our front room (which is now a bit larger with the absence of a 117-year-old piano¹) and set up my signing and sketching station.

Our front room, classed up with a raggedy folding table and stacks of boxes.
Our front room, classed up with a raggedy folding table and stacks of boxes. And a popcorn bucket.

I haven’t gotten started on that part of the project yet. I’ve got about three months of outline to nail down, and then three weeks of comics to script, and then I’m allowed to start work on signing and sketching.

That probably means Tuesday².

We’ve said that your pre-orders for Force Multiplication will ship by July 25th. The odds are pretty good that we’ll beat that date. I like having the wiggle room, though. It lets me pace myself, and my hand, which seems to wear out faster with every book release. Slow and steady may not actually win the race, aphorism notwithstanding, but it does ensure a healthy finish, and I’m quite happy to settle for that.

¹I should blog about that. It’s a poignant story, and worth more than a footnote.

²Most of the work on the outline is already done, furiously hand-written in my sketch book. I need to transfer it to a nice CTRL-C/CTRL-V medium so I can make sure all the bits are in the right order.

 

Crossposted, Essays, Journal

Check That Metaphor, Counselor

Context: I had Jury Duty on Wednesday. We’re done now. We reached our verdict at around 5 pm after deliberating for about an hour, and with that done, all the sequestering and no-talking stuff is done too. The judge gave us permission to speak freely about the case.

The defendant was charged with “possession with intent to distribute.” The defense claimed that he was going to use all 250 doses of meth himself. The prosecution claimed that this was actually unheard of. They also pointed out that, according to the law, even  if he only planned to share, not sell, and was going to share just one dose, that’s still intent to distribute.¹

When arrested, the defendant did not have all of the other paraphernalia of drug distribution in the car with him. Just 25.681 grams of chunky, uncut methamphetamine. Distribution would require baggies and a scale, and a full operation would be evidenced by cutting agents, a client list, and some wads of $20 bills.

I’m getting to the metaphor soon, I promise.

The prosecution suggested that these things would likely be left at a facility, where they could be used in secret on a large flat, stable surface, exactly like none of the surfaces found inside the car. The absence of the other stuff in the car simply meant they hadn’t found the facility yet. (They never found a facility, and whether or not they looked for one never came up from either team of attorneys, which seemed WEIRD to me, but maybe these things go missing all the time.)

The metaphor: In closing arguments the defense attorney said “if you’re going to bake a cake, you don’t leave all the ingredients at home, and then go shopping for an oven.”

It’s cute, but okay, stop.

If you’re going to bake a cake, some of the things you need are re-usable, but some are consumed with each cake. You go shopping for the stuff you run out of. A digital scale is the sort of thing that is very sensibly left at home when you go shopping for the key consumable ingredient in your business.

That was my exact thinking when she broke out the oven metaphor. Literally, the moment she said “oven” my brain said “your metaphor works better against you² than it does for you.” During jury deliberations I found that pretty much all of us had that same thought.

The point being, if you’re going to use a metaphor, you go shopping for the one that isn’t pointier on the end you’re going to hold it with. Same rule if you’re shopping for swords, probably.

 

¹  I see the logic in that law, but I can also see how it can easily be abused in its application. That said, I am not a lawyer, even if I am now a part of the system.

² I was pretty disappointed³ with the prosecuting attorney for not reversing the metaphor during his rebuttal. I’ll grant that it is possible that he trusted That One Juror Who Said He Is A Cartoonist to make the reversal during deliberation. Lawyers trusting juries to be clever seems like a stretch, but trusting me to fix a broken joke is a slam dunk. 

³ Technically, I did not go to court today to be entertained by the attorneys. I went to court FOR GREAT JUSTICE and that’s usually only entertaining on TV.

 

Crossposted, Journal

Serendipitous Departure

I really like it when I get the chance to properly say “thank you.”

On Thursday I discovered, after walking around the Phoenix Convention Center, that my barely-bruised-but-no-seriously-I-smashed-it finger was swelling up just enough to put pressure on a nerve. This was resulting in severe hand pain, plus a pulsing conduit of fire that played merry hell with the neurochemicals I depend on in order to be happy.

With my slightly swollen hand hanging by my side I was miserable and depressed to the point of being almost non-functional.

My friends suggested that maybe I should get a sling, and this seemed like a great idea, except that I was in an unfamiliar place, in a hotel, and was deeply depressed. I scraped up just enough presence of mind to talk to a hotel staffer who was doing crowd control around the elevators. Her name was Erica.

Erica put out a call to see if the hotel had any slings. When they did not, she hailed a cab for me, and handed the cab driver a voucher that would get me to CVS. She handed me another voucher which I could use to summon a cab to get me back to the Hyatt once I had what I needed.

The cab driver, a very friendly man whose first name I can’t remember the spelling of, and whose last name was Singh, zipped me over to the CVS pharmacy, and told me exactly what to say when calling for pick-up.

At CVS I found what I needed, strapped my arm into a sling, and began feeling better inside of about two minutes. Rather than call for pickup I walked the four blocks back to the hotel, and I arrived happy in spite of the blistering heat of the Phoenix afternoon.

I left a thank-you message for Erica at the desk. One of her aides (apparently she is a staff member with an office, and aides) left a message for me the next morning, but I didn’t get it until late Friday night, and Erica had gone home for the weekend.

Monday morning, before I hailed a cab to Sky Harbor, I checked at the desk to see if Erica was back in the office. She was, and she very enthusiastically greeted me, asking if we could get a picture together. I agreed, and then I took it up a notch by drawing a picture of Erica as an airborne, first-aid-kit-carrying superheroine. It kind of made her day, but really *I* was the one whose day was being made. I like getting to properly say “thank you.”

I collected my luggage and hailed a cab. The cab driver looked familiar.

“Did you drive me to CVS on Thursday?”

“You are Mister Tyler?”

(close enough.) “Yes!”

I shook his hand in both of mine and thanked him. Once aboard I said “this time around I will get to pay you for the ride myself,” and he laughed. I may have overpaid him a bit upon arrival ($40 for a $15 flat-fare ride,) and that’s no substitute for being able to draw a picture, but it would have to do.

I don’t like being injured, and I don’t like needing to ask for help from complete strangers, but once the crisis has passed (my hand no longer hurts my brain now) I very much DO like being able to express my appreciation for that help to some new friends.

It is Monday, and the serendipity of this morning’s departure has set a pretty high bar for the rest of the week. I got to say “thank you” to Erica and to Mr. Singh, and I’m still smiling about it.

Crossposted, Journal

The Twelve Archetypes

Renee Collins, one of the author guests at FanX,  walked into the green room shaking her head in mild disbelief at an encounter she’d had in the hallway. Someone had pitched his writing tutorials to her, and when she said “no thank you” he said “if you’re a writer, then you obviously know the twelve archetypes, right?”

Our table’s response was a mixture of wide-eyed surprise, and eye-rolling at the bad behavior. And maybe just a little embarrassment. For myself, I know of the archetypes, but I don’t have them memorized, and I certainly don’t work from that list while creating a story.

So I put myself in Renee’s shoes and role-played my answer:

“Of course!” I began ticking things off on my fingers “Joan of Arc, Arc de Triomph, Noah’s Ark, Arc Reactor, The Ark of the Covenant…”

We burst into laughter, and everyone at the table began shouting suggestions. We swiftly added Archimedes, Archaeology, Arc Welder, and Archipelago, and then lost some steam.

“Come on, folks! That’s nine!” I said, feigning panic while waving nine fingers. “We just need three more!”

I think Monarch, Archaeopteryx, and Arkham Asylum finished the list off.

This morning I got to wondering if words, terms, and names with the “ark” sound in them could be usefully mapped onto the actual Twelve Archetypes. And by “usefully” I mean “as a mnemonic.” For instance, “Monarch” maps pretty directly onto “The Ruler,” and if you’re thinking about the end of the 1st Indiana Jones film, “The Ark of the Covenant” can correspond nicely to “The Destroyer.”

Unfortunately, some of my favorites, like Archaeopteryx  and Arc Reactor, are harder to plug in. Or at least, I had to stretch them so far that it was easier to go looking for other words.

Here’s what I came up with:

  1. Innocent—Joan of Arc
  2. Orphan—Archipelago (because islands. Eh?)
  3. Warrior—Arc de Triomph
  4. Caregiver—Noah’s Ark
  5. Seeker—Archaeology
  6. Lover—Marc Antony
  7. Destroyer—Ark of the Covenant
  8. Creator—Tony Stark
  9. Ruler—Monarch
  10. Magician—Parkour
  11. Sage—Archimedes
  12. Fool—Arkham Asylum

It’s by no means a perfect list, but now I’ve got it out of my system. And I’m sure it will fail completely when used as a mnemonic.