Jackson Art Monday: Peyton Manning

I did a sketch of Peyton Manning during the Super Bowl.

Will there be more Jackson Art Mondays? Probably.

The Monetezation Problem

Charlie Stross writes about the pending troubles with monetization for fiction writers.

This is interesting because we spend a lot of time mulling this over in relation to the web fiction world — how do we monetize — but Charlie Stross, over in the world of legit published authors, is contemplating the same difficulty in his future.

The comments are particularly enlightening, because they show us a set of intelligent people who are confronting this problem for the first time. They have no idea that there are writers like AE who are making their living writing fiction on the web.

I feel like the population of commenters there represents an opportunity for those of us involved with web fiction, but I’m not entirely sure how.

Created for This Week in Webcomics

read the full post at TWIW

adventures in ni serutnevda

“I had a conversation with my mattress this morning.”

Obwhite winced. “How’d it go, man?” He touched Allard’s hand.

Allard took Obwhite’s hand. “It was rough, you know? We’ve been going through some weird stuff lately, and I just feel like it’s time to get it all out in the open, you know?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Obwhite said. “I went through the same thing with my radio. And look at us now!” He beamed.

“Now that you mention it, sir,” the radio squeaked tinnily, “there’s something you might want to see.”

A Story: “After the Fall”

My wife’s world has turned upside down. Last week, I came home to find her standing on the ceiling, drinking coffee.

Read it over at Twelve Stories.

Two Bits

by Ari Collins

---

The time machine strapped his seatbelt and rolled his eyes. “You cannot change the past.”

I pulled off the highway. “I gotta stop the accident.”

“But if your legs hadn’t gotten crushed, would you have ever built me? Hmm?”

“Dunno– What the hell was that?!” I screeched to a stop.

The time machine got out. “That was a little boy’s legs being run over,” he sighed.

---

“I’m not sure this is my street,” she slurred. “It doesn’t look right.” Her arm around my shoulder was getting heavy.

“Does anything look right to you, right now?” I asked.

She turned her sagging head to the side and looked up at me with one half-open eye, drool dripping from her upper lip. “”You look right. If this is my street, you should come in and have a nightcap. In bed…”

“That’s sweet,” I said. “Maybe sometime when you’re soberer.” Or at least cleaner.

She lifted her head to look down the street again. “This doesn’t look right. But I guess it doesn’t look too wrong.”

“Good enough. Now,” I said, “let’s move onto the next step. Finding your building.”

Hey! A blog! What you say? I can post here? Fancy that.

This clip from the Wire (why haven’t I watched this before, me?) PERFECTLY sums up everything you could say about the intersection of business and art. I particularly feel that last great line.

More Stencil Madness

This is a prototype version. A larger, hopefully better, version is in the works.

Stencil Fun

Paul and Barley

[The prompt was to write a story including the first sentence there (taken from a terrible period piece novel). I had ten minutes. You may be able to tell but you will enjoy it nonetheless.]

Paul spent the next two days trying to cleanse his body of the grainy odor that permeated his skin, his hands, his hair, and his nose. It was hard having an addiction to wheat. He would go mad with the desire and break into the local brewery, diving, naked, into the hops. Swimming, mouth open, like that one over-enthusiastic kid in the ball pit at Chuck E Cheese’s. Only, that kid was never naked. Well, okay, that one time he was. But security guards in animal costumes had taken him away, their movements nearly as smooth as their animatronic counterparts in the pizza parlor next-door. Paul had wanted to commend the boy for his bravery. It takes balls to put your balls in those balls. Or in wheat. Or in pie, as his friend Martin would attest. Come to think of it, Paul reflected, maybe he wasn’t so strange after all.