A while back, I told a true story at my blog. It's a story that I think explains why I'm usually reluctant to post unfinished works in progress, or even say very much about them, and here it is:

Though I don’t remember this myself I have it on the best authority that as an infant, I just wouldn’t talk. Just wouldn’t. They were actually getting sort of worried about me, till one day I fell down and hurt my head badly enough that blood poured all over my face, and before I could stop myself, I yelled “Get this stuff offa me!”

The first thing I ever said was a complete sentence. The way I figure it, I wasn’t going to say a word to anyone until I’d conjugated everything that could be conjugated in my head so that no one could hear me make a mistake. True story.


I'm pretty sure that story says something about me. I'm a lot less sure that the something is flattering. But there it is.

And on the other hand, I think it's also true that the more energy you expend on telling people what you mean to do, the less you expend on, you know, actually doing it.

On the third hand - assuming we have one - people often do like to know what you're up to, and it can even be motivating to tell a bit about that, to give it a recognizable shape and lock it down in your own mind.

Now I can easily tell you that in the big picture, a few years ago I chose to make a graceful (or at least an effective) exit from the computer games business by moving to a pleasant part of the country where property values and the cost of living were low enough that I'd be able to spend my time working on projects of my own. One (though not the one I started first) was my book of Celtic knotwork patterns. The second is my original story in comic book form, Empire State Patrol.

On the whole, that's what I'm doing with the time I have available after tending my web sites. But it's a very large undertaking because it amounts to a story of three hundred pages or so, in which every panel looks pretty much like the very detailed work you see in my Retropolis posters. And although I've spent quite a lot of time on pre-production for the story there is even more left to go before I'm ready to start making the actual pages that it needs: many characters to make, texture and articulate; many recurring sets to build; many props, rockets and whatnot. It's one very large, very long term project.

It's so much, in fact, that lately I really have wondered if it'll ever get done. But I have an advantage: anything I build for the project is so like my Retropolis work that I can use it in more than one way. Bits of Empire State Patrol's city of Nova York, for example, show up in my print The Clouds Will Soon Roll By.

So I do post some updates on what I'm up to, and you can sometimes infer what's going on behind the scenes if you notice what new works show up on my web sites - and there are side projects, from time to time. Which leads us to...