Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
My flash fiction short story "The Secret of the T-Rex's Arms" was just published in Smashed Cat magazine, illustrated by my wife Sandi Billingsley. Check it out!
-the Centaur 
No, I'm not doing 24 Hour Comics Day 2 weekends in a row ... but my buddy Nathan Vargas is. He's the other half of Blitz Comics and through an odd set of circumstances involving the Alternative Press Expo we ended up signing up for a 24 Hour Comics event at Mission Comics 1 week before today, the official 24 Hour Comic Day. (And I completed mine!)
I owe too many people too many things (fixing my wife's computer, finishing edits of "Steampunk Fairy Chick", finishing a draft of STRANDED, doing an interview, scanning last week's comic, etc) to do 24HCD again, but after tonight's Doctor Who finale I did drop by around midnight tonight with donuts and good cheer.
We hung out, gave donuts to the security guards, and watched some Batman fan film. Then, while the toiling artists toiled, I spent some time cleaning up the images from last week's 24 Hour Comic Day (which I had scanned while watching Doctor Who). I just finished, it's only been two hours, but it already feels like another 24HCD!
However, I'm happy with the results, and will do 24HCD again next year. I particularly like the dual page spread from Stranded, but I'll hold it back until I get the whole comic uploaded to Dresan.com and will instead tease you with the first page of the novella:
Onward! Upward! Homeward, for me!
And best of luck to the toiling comickers here in Sunnyvale!
-the Centaur 
24 Hour Comics Day can be quite the intimidating challenge, especially if you haven't done it before. Because Nathan Vargas and I had tried it before and failed, we started thinking hard about how to succeed - and I in particular started thinking about timing: how to break down your hours, how long you typically take breaks, and so on.
To keep myself on track, I started writing down panel timings as I was working, an almost unconscious decision that soon turned into a policy. As a result, I produced a nearly complete timeline of events of a successful 24 Hour Comics Day.
Everyone's method will be different, and this may not apply to you. But it shows at least ONE successful approach: preparing ahead, bringing good food, other refreshments and adequate supplies, getting planning done early, keeping each page tight, noticing that you're falling behind, finding faster ways to do things, taking breaks to stay energized - and never, never, never giving up.
And that's it. I'm pleased to see that even with adapting the novella on my side, I still finished early enough to absorb the 3-4 hours I took getting the story straight on the previous two 24 Hour Comic Days, so I think the technique would work even if I didn't have a story to tell. Knowing how many stories I have buzzing around in my head, that's never likely to happen - but if you're a 24 Hour Comic purist, it's good to know that preparing ahead, carefully tracking your page timings and shooting for 45 minutes or less per page is a technique that can make you succeed. Best of luck on your own comics! -the Centaur (Anthony Francis) Crossposted at BLitz Comics.BEFORE THE EVENT
T-Minus 1 year: Fail to finish 24HCD ... Again. Resolve to take more life drawing classes. As a result ... actually took more life drawing classes and practiced. T-Minus 4 months: Reminded by Nathan about 24HCD. Started to panic. Nathan mentioned he was thinking about how to succeed this time. I started thinking about that too. T-Minus 3 months: Drunk guy at a comics booth at the Sub Zero festival hears us talking about 24HCD. He suggests we should do a tutorial. We go to Slave Labor Graphics, find out they aren't set up to host a full 24 hour event. A tutorial or boot camp starts to sound like a better idea. T-Minus 2 months: We decide to do the boot camp. After a marathon brainstorming session where we came up with the name BLitz Comics, we start meeting every Wednesday, producing tutorial materials. T-Minus 1 week: We do a runthrough of the bootcamp. Around this time, we find out that 24HCD at the venue we've chosen is not October 1 but September 24 ... 1 day after our boot camp. Panic. T-Minus 18 hours: Last minute trips to University Art to buy notebooks, pens, pencils for the boot camp (which will also be used at 24HCD as well). T-Minus 15 hours: BLitz Comics hosts its first 24 Hour Comic Day "boot camp" at Kaleid Gallery. The camp includes a 45 minute tutorial (that ended up going on for an hour and a half) and included 2 1-hour drawing exercises. I learn precisely what I *can't* draw in just 1 hour. T-Minus 12 hours: Boot camp concludes. Hours of packing required. Get to bed at 3:30am, get up at 7. T-Minus 3 hours: Pick up Nathan. Trek to Mission Comics begins with a hearty breakfast at Stacks, a trip to Starbucks for coffee, and a trip to Safeway for bagels, cereal, tangerines and bananas. T-Minus 1 hour: Traffic jam. Panic should be in full swing now, but we just had coffee, a hearty breakfast, and have gone through boot camp. No worries. T-Minus 1 minute: Pull in front of Mission Comics; Nathan runs in with our art supplies and I leave to go find parking.24 HOUR COMIC DAY BEGINS
11:00AM, September 24th: Driving around for parking. Find a great place. 11:15AM: Arrive at Mission Comics. Nathan has found primo spots halfway back the main table; we're sitting opposite each other but are in easy view of the window, door, bathroom and 10,000 comics. 11:21AM: PLANNING PHASE Start comic with a planning page. Consider two ideas; decide to go for broke and adapt my novella "Stranded" rather than wussing out with the stick-figure "Story of Blitz Comics" which I had already done a 1-pager on anyway. 11:30AM(ish): Skim novella I'm adapting, especially chapter headings. Decide on a rough breakdown; can probably draw half the novella. Pick a good stopping point. 11:38AM: Did the 24-page thumbnail sheet. Laugh at my foolish notion that I can draw half the novella. Some things that take a line in the novella need a full page; other things that take a full page don't even need to appear at all or need to be completely rewritten. Added talking animal to the plot as the only way to make the story work (it's OK, it's a robot). Break down the pages into approximately the first third. 12:13PM: Done planning. Total planning time: 52 minutes In my experience, it can take 2-4 hours to plan if you don't have a story in mind (the first two years I had vague stories in mind but no novella in hand to adapt). As it turns out, that extra 3 hours of planning would not have hurt me. 12:13PM: START PAGE ONE Did a space scene (not recommended from the boot camp!) as the first image. 12:30PM: Panel 1 Done. Blacks are surprisingly time consuming even with wide Sharpie. 12:45PM: Panel 2 Done. More blacks, more time; starting to get worried. 01:08PM: Panel 3 Done. Damn spacecraft again. Almost no blacks, but it took longer. 01:34PM: Panel 4 Done. Closeup of a character in a pose I'm bad at. Argh. Total page time: 1 hour, 15 minutes. Did some calculations; need to DOUBLE my page rate to succeed. 01:37PM: START PAGE TWO No black space vistas on this page at all. Maybe easier going? 01:43PM: Finished roughs for the page. 02:10PM: Panel 1 Done. Getting a grip on figures, sound effects, word balloons. 02:25PM: Panel 2 Done. Needed to know fuse ratings to fill in detail on the end of a fuse pulled by central character. Decided to use phone instead of computer to look it up - the answer was "in kA" and 207 is a good super-high number. This worked so well I resolved not to turn computer on until I was "way ahead". 02:39PM: Finished Panel 3. Liking this "draw people from the back half obscured" trick. Total page time: 1 hour, 2 min. Need to pick up pace by at least 20 minutes. 02:39PM: START PAGE THREE One huge panel, but 4 characters and some perspective. 02:48PM: ~10 minute break + boxing in outer panel border. 02:58PM: Central character outlined 03:02PM: Dialogue outlined, drawing characters around word bubbles. LOVE the technique! Had to spend more time looking up the appearance of a bird's eye for a drawing. In hindsight, I'm glad I did that rather than wing it, I had to draw that bird eye on a helm maybe a dozen times or more over the comic. 03:22PM: Page finished. Finally ahead (ish) but not really: hour 4.5 with only 3 pages Total page time: 43 minutes. Counting the 9 minute break. 03:22PM: START PAGE FOUR Back to a multi-panel page with black areas. 03:34PM: ~12 minute break. 03:39PM: Panels done. Realize my target time (45 minutes) is 4:07. Oh shit. 03:51PM: Roughs done for Panel 1, a closeup of a character's face. 03:58PM: Panel 1 done. Came out rather nice, perhaps the nicest face in the comic. 04:02PM: Panel 2 done. 04:11PM. Panel 3 blacks done. Great music from band "07" is playing over Mission Comic's sound system. 04:16PM: Page finished. Total page time: 54 minutes. Almost on schedule. 04:16PM: START PAGE FIVE More panels, 5 this time, but no black areas. 04:21PM: ~5 minute break. 04:24PM: Pencil panel borders done. 04:27PM: Ink panel borders done. 04:40PM: Panel 1 done. Realize my human profiles suck. So do my full figures. Ugh. 04:49PM: Panels 2-3 done. 04:55PM: Panels 4-5 done. Total page time: 39 minutes. Not sure how I pulled that off. 04:55PM: START PAGE SIX More space vistas! And crosshatching! 05:04PM: ~9 minute break. 05:05PM: Pencil borders done. 05:09PM: Ink panel borders done 05:11PM: Dialogue done - needed adaptation from novella. 05:16PM: Frame 1 roughs done 05:31PM: Frame 1 blacks done 05:38PM: Frame 2 done 05:45PM: Frame 3 done 05:53PM: Page finished. Total page time: 58 minutes. Black backgrounds will kill ya. 05:53PM: START PAGE SEVEN 05:55PM: ~2 minute break ... then pizza arrives! 06:38PM: ~43 minute dinner break. Yum! 06:39PM: Pencil border. 06:43PM: Ink panel borders. 06:48PM: Roughs. 07:10PM: Panel 1 "done". 07:19PM: Further polish (it's a large and important panel that introduces Serendipity, the protagonist). 07:29PM: Panel 2 done. 07:36PM: Panel 3 done. Total page time: 1 hour, 43 minutes. 07:36PM: START PAGE EIGHT 07:53PM: ~17 minute break (flagging a bit?) 07:54PM: Pencils. 08:00PM: Panels 08:08PM: Panel 1 rough / dialogue. Realize we're in hour 10 now. 08:24PM: Panel 2. 08:38PM: Page finished. Total page time: 1 hour, 2 minutes. 08:38PM: START PAGE NINE 08:54PM: ~16 minute break 09:06PM: ~12 minute break (someone came by to talk?) 09:08PM: Panels penciled. 09:13PM: Panels inked. 09:18PM: AAARGH! Blocked. PHUQ IT. 09:26PM: Panel 1. Some of the facial positions are hard. Screw it. 09:35PM: Panel 2. 09:44PM: Page finished. Total page time: 1 hour, 6 minutes. 09:44PM: START PAGE TEN 09:50PM: ~6 minute break 09:52PM: Penciled panels. 10:00PM: Inked panels. Realize it's hour 11 (actually 12, but never mind) and you should be working on page 12 or more. Cut it in half! 10:11PM: Panel 1 done. Damn black space around spaceships again. 10:28PM: Panel 2 outlines done. Was intimidated by this crowd scene, easier than I expected. 5 people and 4 ghostly background outlines - 9 people total! 10:34PM: Panel 2 done. 10:40PM: Page finished. Total page time: 56 minutes. 10:40PM: START PAGE ELEVEN 10:46PM: ~6 minute break 10:47PM: Pencil outlines. 10:49PM: Panels inked. 10:57PM: Dialogue for all panels inked. This really helped, but as I found out later, I was reading in columns but other people read left-to-right, so this was a flaw. Zoned out around here. 11:14PM: Panel 1 done. 11:28PM: Page finished. Total page time: 48 minutes. 11:28PM: START PAGE TWELVE - on a roll, no break. Thought it was hour 12, actually hour 13. 11:34PM: Panels and dialogue complete. Met Google guy, should contact later. Also found out about Mobcomics, a comic publishing platform. 11:38PM: Panel 1 done. 11:44PM: Panel 2 done. 11:51PM: Page done. Total page time: 23 minutes. That seems almost impossible! But it happened, in part because I was skipping pencils or just doing light pencils on certain characters. 11:52PM: START PAGE THIRTEEN 12:00AM: Break. Didn't even realize it was midnight and September 25 now. Did realize it was not hour 12 but hour 13 (not true, actually hour 14 had started). "On Schedule" ... NOT! :-) 12:07AM: Script complete. All those people who are complaining that by adapting a novella I'm "cheating because the script is worked out already" can go jump in a lake. It isn't that simple. That's why they call it ADAPTING, folks. 12:21AM: Page done. Total page time: 29 minutes. This page went fast because it was primarily diagrams and dialogue, no figures - this is the point where the crew of Independence realizes that they're screwed if they don't land. 12:22AM: START PAGE FOURTEEN 12:32AM: ~10 minute break. 12:45AM: Panel 2 done. 01:03AM: Page done. Total page time: 41 minutes. I don't know it yet, but I'm just about to get caught up with where I "should" be to finish on time. 01:03AM: START PAGE FIFTEEN 01:04AM: No significant break, really. 01:14AM: Panels done. 01:38AM: Page done. Total page time: 35 minutes. I don't know it yet, but I am now officially AHEAD. 01:38AM: START PAGE SIXTEEN 01:55AM: ~17 minute bathroom break 01:58AM: Panels done. I now realize my hour count was off and this is hour 15. 02:06AM: Panel 1 done. 02:15AM: Panel 2 done. I am digging that it's hour 16 and I'm progressing on page 16. 02:23AM: Page done. Total page time: 45 minutes. We may win this thing yet! 02:23AM: START PAGE SEVENTEEN 02:31AM: ~8 minute break 02:34AM: Panel borders 02:45AM: Panel 1 done ... digging that it's STILL hour 16 and I'm on page 17. 02:54AM: Panel 2 done. 02:58AM: Page done. Total page time: 35 minutes. I am now officially a page ahead. 02:58AM: START PAGES EIGHTEEN AND NINETEEN - DUAL PAGE SPREAD 02:59AM: On a roll, jazzed that I have finally gotten to a dual page spread, will LEAP ahead now. Sure, it's a gigantic outer space vista that requires some actual diagramming and thought, but its SO COOL that I'm going to go from just about ahead to way ahead in one swell foop! 03:07AM: Borders and sketch done. 03:16AM: Inks done. 03:39AM: Blacks done. 03:47AM: Page done. Total page time: 49 minutes. I am now TWO pages ahead. 03:47AM: START PAGE TWENTY 04:04AM: ~17 minute break. 04:21AM: Panel lines done. 04:28AM: Page done. First (and only time I had to use whiteout) because I was inking and not sketching. Total page time: 41 minutes. I am now THREE pages ahead. 04:28AM: START PAGE TWENTY-ONE 04:35AM: ~7 minute break 04:43AM: Script done. Repeat note to snarky guys who don't know what "adapting" means. 04:44AM: Boxes done. Wow, that was fast for that many panels. 04:51AM: Panel 1 done. 04:54AM: Panel 2 done. Largely skipping pencils now. 04:57AM: Inks on Panel 3 done. 05:04AM: Panel 3 blacks done. 05:09AM: Panel 4 inks done. 05:13AM: Panel 4 blacks done. 05:26AM: Panel 5 done. 05:31AM: Panel 6 done, page done AND IT'S STILL HOUR 18. Total page time: 1 hour, 3 minutes. 05:31AM: START PAGES TWENTY-TWO AND TWENTY-THREE 05:33AM: ~2 minute break. I am so glad I put in two dual page spreads. And this is my favorite page - a redo of the very first drawing I did of Serendipity two or three years ago, before I even knew her name: a young centauress with her barrel draped in tapestries, bouncing along a field of wheat towards a castle beneath a gas giant floating in the sky. Had to completely redo the drawing, but ultimately this was the point of the story. 05:38AM: Border done. 05:48AM: Sketch done. 06:06AM: Page done. Total page time: 35 minutes. Woo woo on dual page spreads! 06:06AM: START PAGE TWENTY-FOUR 06:13AM: ~7 minute break. The last page is a huge single panel "to be continued". Go for it! 06:41AM: DONE and DONE! Total page time: 35 minutes. DONE and DONE! Total comic time: 19:20 minutes!AFTER THE EVENT
Not timing it. Chilling out. Futzed around for an hour or so, talked to people, texted my wife. Took a nap around 7:40 to 8ish, then read a comic I'd bought during one of my breaks. Chilled out a while, looked at other people's finished and unfinished comics, then when Nathan finished, bought one more book, thanked Leef of Mission Comics and went to get the car. We packed up, had a great breakfast at Mel's, and I dropped Nathan off at his apartment right at 11am - two 24 Hour Comic Day victors.
Nathan Vargas and myself are facilitating a 24 Hour Comic Boot Camp at Kaleid Gallery in downtown San Jose tomorrow, September 24 from 7pm to 11pm.
For those that don't know, 24 Hour Comics Day is a challenge held each year to create a 24 page comic from scratch in 24 Hours. Nathan and I have tried this five times between the two of us, and we've been discussing techniques to succeed over the last year.
Then a drunk guy manning a comics booth at the Sub Zero festival overheard us saying that and said we should put on a tutorial. And since we have a policy of always following the advice of random drunk guys when it sounds like they are serving as a hotline for God, we said OK!
Our work has produced a pretty nice 24 Hour Comics Day Survival Kit which is now getting distributed to a lot of 24 Hour Comics venues. And it's free under a Creative Commons license! So you can download it and use it on your own.
But we're going one step further and providing a "Boot Camp" where we'll help participants create a 2 page comic, involving discussions of comic theory and 2 hours of drawing exercises. So please show up and enjoy ... or at least check out Blitz Comics and our survival kit if you want to survive 24 Hour Comics Day.
-the Centaur 
Who are you? Good question. I'm Anthony Francis, and I write stuff and make computers jump through hoops for a living.
What have you done? I'm most notable for the EPIC award winning urban fantasy novel FROST MOON and its sequel, BLOOD ROCK, which are about magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost and are therefore hopefully both more interesting than my ~700 page PhD thesis on context-sensitive computer memory. Also on the computer side, I've done some exploration of robot emotions.
What are you doing next? Forthcoming in the Dakota Frost series is the third book, LIQUID FIRE, and this November for National Novel Writing Month I plan to work on HEX CODE, the first in a spin-off series featuring Dakota's adopted daughter Cinnamon Frost.
Are you working on anything other than Dakota Frost? I've also recently completed a rough draft of the first book in a new series, JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. A short story set in this universe, "Steampunk Fairy Chick", will be included in the forthcoming anthology UnCONventional.
What are you working on currently? I'm also currently working on a fourth new series with the working title STRANDED, a young adult science fiction novel set a thousand years in the future, featuring a spoiled young centauress who must rescue a shipload of children who have crashlanded upon a world she wanted to claim as her own. This story's set in the "Library of Dresan" universe from which this blog takes its name and which was setting of my very first unpublished novel "homo centauris", which I am now happily milking for its 57 billion year backstory.
Anything else? I have a flash fiction story called "The Secret of the T-Rex's Arms" to appear on the Smashed Cat Magazine. I've also published one short story, "Sibling Rivalry" in the Leading Edge Magazine. I have a webcomic, f@nu fiku, on hiatus. And I'm actively involved with helping people succeed at 24 Hour Comics through tutorials that I and my friend Nathan Vargas have put together at Blitz Comics.
Is that enough questions for now? Yes, it is. Please enjoy.
-the Centaur 
IT'S HERE.
BLOOD ROCK has arrived at my home. Order the latest installment in the tale of Dakota Frost at one of these fine booksellers:
and of course, on Kindle.
Crossposted on the Dakota Frost blog.
-the Centaur 
The Street Mrkt fair is an independent art festival held at First Fridays in downtown San Jose. There are dozens of small booths each with an indie artist's unique artworks, including my wife, Sandi Billingsley's work under the Studio Sandi banner.
There's also an ArtCar festival in a nearby parking lot, a spoken word artist as MC, and a sequence of live bands.
I really love the funky, eclectic flavor of the San Jose art community. It reminds me a lot of the Atlanta art scene, which was just exploding when I left. It's real, earnest, and odd, but not pretentious, and people have a lot of fun here creating and soaking up creation.
The Street Mrkt fair is going on right now, August 5th, until 11pm. I've heard rumors it will also be at the next First Friday, September 2nd. Check it out!
-the Centaur 
At Comic-Con I catch up with a lot of old buddies, particularly one of the Edge who's solidered through many drafts of my early stories.
He's got a script he's working on, and is making a lot of progress. In contrast we know a friend who's written a dozen scripts and is making no progress at all. Why?
One of the conclusions we came to is that it's important to accept criticism of your work. Timely feedback is critical to improved performance - but you must respond to it.
I think writers should put down all their dumb ideas and then convince everyone that they're brilliant. Your quirky ideas are your contribution - I mean, who'd think a story about a naked blue guy and a homeless vigilante investigating a murder would make one of the greatest comics of all time, but hey, that's Watchmen.
But you've got to sell those ideas. "Ideas are a dime a dozen, but a great implementation is priceless." So if you show someone your story with a naked blue superhero and they don't buy it - you have to fix your story.
That doesn't mean you take out the naked blue guy, even if your critics want you to. It's your story, and just because it doesn't work for someone they may not know the right way to fix it. It's up to you, the author, to figure out how to solve the problem.
Readers give bad advice about how to fix stories because people are notoriously bad at introspection. If someone gets a funny bad feeling about the manuscript, they may latch on to the most salient unusual feature - not realizing it's the bad dialogue or structure which gives them indigestion.
But authors are also notoriously bad at accepting criticism because they take the criticism as a personal attack. But if you get criticism on your story, you've done a great thing: you've produced a story that can be evaluated.
Authors are also bad at accepting criticism because they have fragile little egos. But you can't afford to explain everything away. If people are complaining about your story, they did so for a reason. You need to figure out what that is - and it's your problem, not theirs.
So, if you get criticism on your story you don't think is fair, you get one --- ONE --- chance to explain yourself. If your critic doesn't immediately get it, then --- even if you don't agree --- say, "Yes, thank you, I'll take it under advisement."
Then put it in your trip computer and remember it for later. If others see the same thing, you have a problem. If you personally start to feel even slightly the same way, you have a BIG problem.
But your biggest problem is not taking criticism at all. Me and my friend have encountered a fair number of leaders whose egos are so fragile they've insulated themselves from all criticism.
You can still achieve some degree of success in an echo chamber if you're willing to critique yourself and you have high artistic standars. But usually it just makes for unnecessarily flawed stories, movies and products - and an unnecessary slide towards the dustbin when your ideas stop working.
So if you're lucky enough to have someone who reads your pre-baked work and gives you feedback, listen carefully, explain at most once, and take the criticism gracefully. Your art will be the better for it in the long run.
-the Centaur
I'm back at San Diego Comic-Con again ... my con home away from con home (my con home being Dragon*Con). Comic-Con is also where I get to visit with 125,000 of my closest friends.
Like Dragon*Con, San-Diego Comic-Con has grown far beyond its original roots. The
con is about far more than just comics: it's now a full bore genre media event.
They've got sexy space girls ...
... sexy space guys ...
... and everything in between.
And lest there be any doubt about what I meant, here's what I took the closeup of in that last tableau ... I am a roboticist after all:
While I'm here, I'll not just be renewing my creative juices ... I'll be working on the final proofs for BLOOD ROCK, which is due the day after I get back.
If only I had a way to get more time...wait, maybe I do!
Wish me luck!
-the Centaur 
Axually by the time you reads this am already atz the con now - but just befores I waz completely discombobulated from cats:
Anthony Last night our home was invaded by a quiet, timid but quite feral cat. 2 hours trying to locate the capture him - no dice, he was a wily fucker. Then 3 hours cleaning the pee he left behind when he bolted out the door. Emailed that I wouldn't be coming in and got to bed at 4:25am. Sheesh. Donna OK...while I am sure that REALLY sucked, I have to admit I also am still laughing. Sorry that happened...Febreeze works well. Anthony He's an adorable little cat. He's also a master of hiding (he tucked himself into the tiniest possible space in a bottom bookshelf) growls if approached closely and smells of pee. I think he's been causing my other cats to spray. I'd be laughing too if the situation wasn't so serious - just last night I lost two books, half a dozen magazines, some papers, and possibly an heirloom kitchen table I got from my grandmother to pee. The behavioral effects on our other cats are so severe one's on Diazepram, the other's on Prozac, and we're thinking of getting rid of them. I'm locked out of my own library most of the time because we can't let them get in there. I went out for coffee for an hour and a half and found the black cat on top of some clean laundry. Donna Oh no!! I take it all back... No longer funny :( I hope it gets better! Anthony There's some small amount of funny, I admit it. When not gnashing my teeth, I like to remember that it's better than a kick in the head with a golf shoe! William Good lord! I think you need the Cat Whisperer. Cortney Decoite O. My. That's almost as bad, if not equal to, a burglar. My deepest sympathies. John Have you ever tried a kick in the head with a golf shoe? It's not so bad. My eyes are still crossed and I'm falling down a lot, but I don't think it has anything to do with the kick to the head...Iz funny in a lolcats trainrecks kind of way. Don't worries, will not get rid of teh cats. But just catching the ups now. Response will be the slow, please be the patients. -the Centaur
Qumana is a good blog editor, but it's got two unfortunate interrelated problems: it isn't quite compatible with how I put images into posts, and you can't publish posts as drafts. I just found that out - I think perhaps I confused Qumana's interface with a blog posting app I have on my Nexus S - which is why some you may have seen a brief flash of a post in your RSS feeds that will instead show up later.
Saving posts as drafts on Qumana won't cut it - I need to upload the draft to WordPress as a draft and make manual modifications before publications, which I can't do in the current interface. So I'm going to back off from using Qumana a bit. It's still good for composing drafts offline, but I either need to dig through their manual, update it to a latest version (if applicable) or find another editor that works better with my process.
-the Centaur 
An exchange from Facebook:
Anthony: Just finished a rough draft of JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE ... my fourth completed novel! Wallace: Anthony it is great that you have 4 what are they? We know Frost Moon, blood Rock, what was the 3rd? Barbara enjoyed putting them on audio. Anthony #1 is one you haven't heard of ... HOMO CENTAURIS is my first completed novel written in the early 90's. The next two were FROST MOON and BLOOD ROCK ... the third one in that series, LIQUID FIRE, is about 75% done. THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE is the first in a new series. P.S. The working titles of the next three Dakota Frosts (4,5,and 6) are SPECTRAL IRON, PHANTOM SILVER and SPIRITUAL GOLD. The working titles of the next next three (7,8, and 9) are something like SPIRAL NEEDLE, HELICAL LANCE, and CIRCULAR KNIFE. And the working titles of ... I'll stop there. I can keep going, but I won't ... don't want to spoil the surprise. I've already mentioned some of the later ones online. :-)Assuming I get that far ... no, I'm planning to get that far, and farther, God willing. -the Centaur Pictured: piles of notes between caffeine fuel and my computational engine.
I just completed a rough draft of my fourth novel! My first steampunk work, JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, clocks in at 90,000 words of completed story!
[caption id="attachment_1128" align="alignnone" width="580" caption="The Title Page and Draft History of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE"]
[/caption]
Here's another excerpt for those who like a tease ...
With Patrick’s blunderblast slung over her shoulder, Jeremiah whizzed through the streets on her autocycle, discharging its cylinder flat out, its teakettle scream and clanking frame adding another layer of mist and noise to the steam and bustle of Boston. Her legs were tensed, her knees bent against the pedals, half to jump the cycle over curbs, and half to keep the juddering vibration from the cobblestones of Beacon Hill from rattling her tailbone clean off. She squealed to a stop before the Moffat’s, pulled the cylinder and tossed it to a street urchin. “Top me off?” she asked, hopping off onto the sidewalk with a whirl and pulling her bag out of its basket in one smooth motion. “Yes, ma’am,” the boy said, taking the cycle. His eyes lighted on her vest, her denims—and on the big brass buttons on her lapels, a steering wheel, sword and airsail overlaid with a stylized V. “Are you an Expeditionary?” Jeremiah smiled. “Yes,” she said, ruffing his cap so that tufts of blond hair showed. “Maybe one day you’ll become one too. Polish the brasslite a bit and there’s a second shilling in it for you. Quick now; I won’t be long.”I've got some cleaning to do and a whole 'nother draft before the beta readers can see it, but still ... on to LIQUID FIRE! -the Centaur
There are disputes about those figures, of course, but at ~105 calories a banana, you're getting roughly 143 times your daily allotment of 2000 calories, so probably you should cut back anyway.
-the Centaur
P.S. One BED (Banana Equivalent Dose) is 0.1 microsieverts of radiation. XKCD claims that 100 millisieverts of radiation is the lowest dose linked to increased cancer risk. Take that with a grain of salt ... but do the math. The following time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I mean, I do know it was my option to read, but I really thought youd have something fascinating to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about one thing that you would fix in case you werent too busy in search of attention.Too bad this comment was posted on an image ATTACHMENT. :-P So there was no whining to comment on. Even if I follow the comment back to the article, it was about the importance of not whining when things go bad and moving on with your life. Tracing back the link revealed that no, there was no real person behind this: there was an apparently fake blog that was actually an invitation to some kind of ad network. Apparently they keyword matched the text of my article with the comment in an attempt to get some attention. So: nice try, but bad spammer, no backlink. -the Centaur In more detail, my methodology: my moderation software asked me about this comment. The comment was not obviously related to an article and was badly written, so I drilled through to the referenced post and found it was an attachment. It's entirely possible that someone clicked on the parent article, which did reference whining, then clicked on an attachment in an attempt to post an irritated comment. But the person's email address was for an ad network, the linked-to-blog seemed to have unrelated articles, and on my second visit to the blog the ad network tried to take over my whole screen (yay Google Chrome for saving me!). People don't generally have email addresses that are the same as spam networks, so I classified the comment as spam. It was a new kind of spam, so I'm posting about it. UPDATE: Ooo, ooo, I forgot the best part of the methodology: do a search for a long phrase in the spam to see how often it appears on the internet. You can't do too long - the spammer may be using software that introduces slight word variations - but if it's long enough to be unique and it still shows up everywhere, you're virtually guaranteed the comment is spam. I don't care how repetitive a commenter is, nobody is going to write "The following time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one" on "About 847,000" pages, according to Google.
I've been having a problem with my old MacBook Pro where the screen's bleached out ... at first I thought it was my ASUS monitor, but the problem is also happening on the MacBook's screen itself, so it's got to be a problem with the laptop.
The problem came to a head when I tried going from the MacBook Air to the Pro to print out the reading script for BLOOD ROCK and I could barely read it onscreen ... and noticed the problem in several other programs I'd just used.
I was frustrated, but I at last realized it was a MacBook problem and did what I always tell other people to do ... looked it up on the Google. From forums.macrumors.com:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=398461 macbook screen bleached out???? i was comparing it to my new imac 24 2.8 GHZ, well actually the MB is newer, got the imac 3 weeks ago, macbook this morning, i found out that the screen on the macbook is bleached out, i know its not supposed to be equal to that of the imac, but the colors are bleached!!!!! and the brightness is lower than usual, the ones in the store are brighter! In another thread, somebody said to go to System Preferences---> Universal Access, then adjust the slider to enhance the color.Ah, yes. That be it. Thanks, online poster guy! And I notice that the offending feature has keyboard shortcuts:
Very easy to hit these, I wager, if you're using an old-school Microsoft Natural Keyboard with your MacBook Pro and keep forgetting whether the Alt key or Windows key maps to Command (it's the Windows key, in the opposite place of what's on the MacBook keyboard).
-the Centaur 
I thought it might be useful to see the script a bit closer to completion. The script-style "SPEAKER: Dialogue goes here" style is my idea, and the color coding is an idea suggested by my wife (I'd been thinking of it but it was her suggestion that prompted me to actually do it). I also time it, and put time notes in the script when producing the sound bed - the list of music tracks that goes with the dialogue. Previously the time notes were scribbled notes on a printout, but I've got a little more time now so I'm doing it right. Oh, and I've eliminated the Seven Dirty Words - trickier than it sounds as you can't easily do a search and replace.
I prefer to practice at least three times - once to get timing, once with the soundbed, and once for polish. If time permits, I do these on the three evenings prior to appearing on Ann Arbor's show just before going to bed, as there's some evidence that sleep improves memory consolidation (e.g., here, here and here).
But having a nice relaxed holiday afternoon to practice counts too.
See you all tomorrow at 7:20AM on Ann Arbor's Unbedtime Stories.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a screenshot of the reading script.
Crossposted from the Dakota Frost blog. 
Tabbouleh and butter lettuce, veggie burgers in wraps with smoked Tabasco and coleslaw, sweet potatoes with honey, my loving spouse, and a couple of episodes of Black Lagoon: the Second Barrage.
Tabbouleh:
† you may increase or decrease the amount of these ingredients ... a lot
‡ these spices are optional
Rinse the bulgur in water and leave soaking in 1.5x cups of water for 30 or so minutes in the fridge; optionally add the juice of a lemon to the water. Wash the parsley and chop as fine as possible (tip: separate into small, manageable bunches, roll the bunch tightly and hold it, cut with a knife to discard the stems, turn the bunch a quarter turn, and cut again as finely as possible; continue turning and cutting until the bunch is consumed and then chop any stragglers). Wash the green onions, cut off the roots and the frayed ends of the greens, and chop as fine as possible. Wash the tomatoes and dice them as fine as possible. Remove the bulgur and drain in a fine collander.
Combine the parsley and green onions in a large mixing bowl. Add the bulgur to the mixing bowl by taking a handful at a time, squeezing out any remaining moisture before tossing in; you may add more or less bulgur at this stage to your preferred texture. Stir until thoroughly mixed. Add the spices to taste. Add the tomatoes and stir until thoroughly mixed; you may add more or less tomatoes at this stage to your preferred texture. There should be a reasonable amount of juice at the bottom of the mix at this stage. Add lemon juice and olive oil to taste, alternating one to two large tablespoons of juice with oil so the mix never gets overwhelmed. Add any remaining spices to taste.
Serve in a bowl on top of leaves of lettuce, or however you want.
-The Centaur
P.S. For the recipes for the burgers, coleslaw and potatoes, you'll need to ask my wife. :-)
Pictured: the tabbouleh, just after tomatoes are added but before mixing.
Hey there, Cinnamon and Dakota fans ... I'll be reading from the revised-for-print version of BLOOD ROCK on Ann Arbor's Unbedtime Stories on KFJC 89.7 FM for the whole month of July.
Interestingly, this is the SECOND time I've made the early morning trip to Foothill College to read from BLOOD ROCK ... the first time was two and a half years ago and marked the first time I appeared on Ann Arbor's program.
The text has changed slightly, but the story remains the same. I hope you enjoy!
-the Centaur
Pictured: my reading copy of BLOOD ROCK, prior to search-and-replace of the Seven Dirty Words.
Crossposted at the Dakota Frost blog. 