I started on the 19 interior portraits. The first four done are for the stories "On The Midwatch", "Dead End", "Empire State" and "It's For You".

Watercolor, 14 x 20"; Winsor & Newton paints and sable brushes; Arches hot-pressed 100% rag paper, 160 lb.. Begun 6/26/10, completed 7/3/10. This was the second painting I attempted for this cover. The first one had a different idea for the sky, and was not working, so I abandoned it (I love ripping an expensive piece of watercolor paper into little pieces!) and started again on a fresh sheet. Second time was the charm, and the execution went quickly. I still have to get the painting professionally photographed. This one was done with my little Kodak digital. (P.S.: no rubber cement or mastic were used in the creation of this painting!).

I will be reviving White Noise Press for an experiment. I have nineteen short stories, thirteen that were previously published in places like Asimov's, MZB Fantasy, Dragon, Cemetery Dance and others, and six that are new, that I will be compiling into a small (275 pages) story collection. I will paint the cover illustration, do full page interior illustrations for each story, and lay everything out in a large, trade paperback format. The nineteen illustrations will be individual portraits of major characters in each story, sort of a Grant Wood/Main Street idea. I plan on getting an ISBN number for the book, so I will be able to sell it through B&N and AMAZON, at an affordable price. There is a printer in the area who does excellent work, and I am looking forward to working with them on this project. No numbers, no letters, no limitations. I will also create an e-book version in the most popular formats that I will sell through those venues as well. Obviously, this is a labor of love. I can't imagine any publisher would be interested in doing it, surely, but I have the capability to do every aspect at least decently, so ... what the hell. I will be 56 next month, and life is just too damn short.

I have all of the stories either already in original digital format or scanned from their original magazine appearances, and am currently going through each of them, line by line, copyediting to homogenize my ellipses, em dashes, italics, etc. This is the hardest and most time-consuming part, I think, but it is also fun to revisit these stories, some written while I was still in my 20s and early 30s! I was pleased to see they held up. A few published stories did not, though, so they did not make the cut. It will be an eclectic mix of SF (6 stories), fantasy (3), horror (6) and dark suspense (4), and hopefully I will be able to sell a few copies. 

Contents

• Introduction by Norman Prentiss
• Killer
• On The Midwatch
• It's For You
• Along the River Lethe
• Dead End
• Up In The Boneyard
• In The Stacks
• Eats
• Turn of a Card
• Empire State
• So Much For The Competition
• Three Wizards
• Dead Eye
• Bushido
• A Death in the Forest
• The Can Man
• The Prince's Birthday
• Room To Let
• Island Funeral
• Story Notes
• And In The End

What is up over there? I have suddenly been visited by several folks from that site. I have never done illustration work for any RPG company or publisher, so I'm curious.

Ahhh. Back in the 1987 I sold a story called "The Prince's Birthday" to Dragon Magazine, owned by TSR. That is an RPG.net connection.

I recently completed a short novel called "The Bone Worms" that is currently being considered by a small press publisher. Here is a marginally formatted PDF version of the manuscript that was the end result of an original idea to just change the font from Courier to New Times Roman (done), then try to homogenize my "em" dashes to just the single long one (not done!), then change all the underlined words to italics (done, well, as many as I could find!), then, what the hell, change the line space "#"s to big dots, and then the major year, section and chapter headings to a "boneyardish" font, and then single-spacing it and then, realizing I had created an e-book, going the final yard by turning it into a PDF document.

Welcome to Philadelphia in 1983, and Detective Sergeant Francis Lomax's nightmares:

The Bone Worms