Busy and Bent

Sigh....bad blogger, bad blogger (smacking myself on the wrist as I write.)

The thing about drawing for a living is when the heat is on - deadline heat - there is little time for much else. I have to admit, I google myself, it's true. And I find that people do read this blog (surprise, surprise). And then I feel guilty because I haven't posted anything for days. It's an odd and viscious circle, totally created by my own mind.

I digress. I always digress.

Here is an opening to one of my favorite unfinished novellas Bent Highway. It lingers in my mind, and some day I am going to finish the damn thing. 

 
Bent Highway

My Zippo clacked open and a thin blue flame danced under the coffee spoon. I wasn't thinking of anything – just watching the reflections and the metal turning colours. I wondered if I had the guts to put the hot spoon to the barely scabbed over gash that grinned at me like it was about to break wide open and gush red ants.

That's the sort of crazy shit that'd been going through my brain for over a month. It tumbled in there with what I could remember from the past year of driving long stretches of road trying to escape boredom and bad road coffee.
The handle of the spoon was getting warm in my hand, so I figured it was ready, I'd cauterize the mother, then I'd be damn sure nothing would bust out of there.

"Honey, what in the hell are you about to do?"

I jerked back, slammed my lighter shut, and plunged the spoon into the coffee. It sizzled in the murky brew.

"You need a warm up, you just give me a call."

The waitress had to be pushing forty-five but her hair spilled across her shoulders like she still could turn heads at the Seven-Eleven. A badge dangled off one of her pointed breasts and shouted at me Dandy Diner, and underneath, in a curled script that made me wince, Janine.

She poured the coffee into the cup with my rocket hot spoon.

"Good and hot now. Anything else?"

I shook my head. I waited for her to say something about a rough night or some other corn-pone inquiry – you out slamming cougars against the rose bushes again – or some crap like that. I shouldn't be too hard on poor Janine. She's probably got a trailer park boyfriend with a pack of cigs rolled up his sleeve, a tattoo that says bitchin' and a piece of shit car he treats better than her.

The thing was, between the black patches of my memory and the pictures that were soaked in fluorescent dye in my head I couldn't tell if I had a rough night, day or past week. Truth was, I couldn't recall fuck all.
 

draw...draw...draw

 

Draw pardner' - well, that's what I am doing anyway. Working on my big project gives me time for little else.

Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately, I am trying to figure out how to put spaceship thrusters on an RV from the future. Not a bad way to make a living.

Eight O'clock, Sunday

A shout for today - my story Eight O'clock, Sunday went live today at the zine Insolent rudder.

This story has a sentence in it that I really like... so much so that it appeared first at Kelly Spitzer's site.

Whoever said...

Whoever said that work slows down in the summer probably wasn't an illustrator. In my other life as an illustrator (this blog talks about my writing life, go here if you'd like to see the art life) summer can go only two ways. One: it does slow down and I can putter around playing home handy dude, or hit the highway for a road trip - though, with the price of gas, the frugality of a road trip is no more. Two: I get a big honking job for an educational publisher.Two has happened again. It's a great job, it has a spacey theme, an Art Director I really enjoy working with, it is in comic book style (48 pages of comic art!), and it pays well.

 So it means for me mostly an indoor summer, crank up the CBC and the air conditioner, chain myself to my drawing table and get at it. Now, I know that I will still get out and ride my bike - it's a great way to clear my head. And I still plan on taking in two folk fests, so don't fret alligator tears for me Argentina.

My writing will have to slow down, and that I will miss. But the nice thing is it will all be finished in Sept. and I know that I'll be itching to write.

I've got about seven more minutes of downtime this Sat. morning before I get at it.

So cheers and wish me luck.

(The above whale illustration was from last summer's big project.)

Find work you like

 

I am usually on the lookout for articles on Cormac McCarthy - so I'm not sure how I missed this Rolling Stone interview from Dec. 2007.

 He suggests that the event that caused the apocalypse in his novel, "The Road" was a meteor hit.

I also love this:

But all this talk about the end of the world has made him appreciate more than ever what he has. "There is for a man two things in life that are very important, head and shoulders above everything else," he says. "Find work you like, and find someone to live with you like. Very few people get both."

This is a wise guy.

I am currently reading Suttree, which is called in the interview his most autobiographical book. If so, man, he has lived a life.