It’s winter. I am a solar-powered Southerner living in Seattle; I’d rather use what little energy I have on drawing new comics than on shipping stuff.

If you want a copy of the Tarot of the Silicon Dawn, you can get it on Amazon or most other online booksellers.

If you want a copy of Decrypting Rita, I should be doing a Kickstarter for the omnibus (and a small run of book 3 for those who have 1/2) sometime in winter 2015/spring 2016. Keep an eye on the comic’s Twitter, Livejournal, Facebook, or its RSS feed. Or follow my twitter/blog/etc (links here). I’m pretty sure I won’t shut up about the Kickstarter when it happens.

I dunno, this just sort of happened this morning. It’s a human version of that dragon lady I like to draw myself as. Which is distinctly not quite the same thing as a self-portrait.

Mostly this ended up being more experimentation with faux airbrush techniques. I’ve been thinking about those a lot lately what with deciding that’s how Absinthe should look. Blurred shapes, the occasional gradient, and a mezzotinted rectangle over the background, but not the foreground. Also a few shapes with the ‘grain’ effect applied, one of which is an opacity mask to fade out the foot.

About a half hour, not including the time lost when Illustrator crashed and kindasorta managed to save some work, that I had to cut and paste back into the original document because I have a thing about retaining file creation dates that I should really let go of. It’s really been unstable lately and that’s kinda maddening.

These three books.

I picked them up in my teens as they came out. And to be honest, a lot of what got me interested in them were the covers. These crazy hyper-designey things, featuring this handsome, androgynous-looking person looked like nothing else on the shelves.

What was inside turned out to be pretty nifty, at least to fifteen-year-old me: that androgyne turned out to be the titular Skeen, a star-trading woman who had been betrayed by her partner/lover, and ended up taking a one-way trip through a gate to a medieval fantasy world full of assorted aliens. She journeyed across that world, making various friends and enemies, and eventually made it back to her home reality, where her various fantasy-world friends got to bounce around between the stars. It was written in this somewhat affected but often appealing style. And Skeen was a character type I’m always a sucker for when done well: the silver-tongued scoundrel traveller, who cons and charms their way across a strange landscape. She was more than a little bit queer, as well. I mean, look at that butch lady on the covers.

There’s a moment somewhere in the middle of Skeen’s Return that taught me something important about telling stories. One chapter name suddenly goes on for four pages full of bold, all-caps text, during which Clayton stepped outside of her otherwise rigid attachment to the title character’s third-person viewpoint, to fill the reader in on some important backstory there was absolutely no way Skeen or her her friends could know. (Secret rituals of one of the alien races that populated this lost world, if you’re curious.)

And then later on, she does this again, and talks directly to the reader about the fact that she was sitting at a fork in the story: Skeen was lying near death, and Jo was having a lot of trouble deciding if she was going to pretty much completely recover, or die, or have a complicated recovery where she occasional lapsed into fever and madness, ‘kind of a Drunken Master thing’, to paraphrase Jo’s description of that path. She concluded this with the suggestion that the reader might, perhaps, pick one of those options, and keep that version running in their head, see how it diverged from the one Jo chose.

Not that I didn’t already love these books before I got to those bits, mind you. But something about casually stepping out from behind the curtain and addressing the raw problems of Telling A Story and Wrangling A Plot endeared these to me even more.

Like most of the other books I treasured, they were lost in Katrina.

Today, I made my occasional check to see if they’d been republished as e-books. They haven’t. Jo Clayton died in 1998, well before the age of e-books. And I sighed, and supposed I’d keep an eye out for them in used bookstores for several years, and eventually be able to re-read them and see if they were any good.

And then I remembered that I live in the age of the Internet, went on AbeBooks, and found used copies of them in stores in Indiana and Texas. And while I was there I also found copies of the first four books of Clayton’s earlier series, “The Diadem”, a space opera about a titular piece of headgear that contains the memories of multiple people. I had the eighth volume of that and found it kind of pleasantly befuddling.

These books will be arriving at various times over the next month. Will I enjoy them as an adult? Who knows.

Merry Christmas, future Peggy. I got you some lady-centric pulp sci-fi!

If you are using a Wacom tablet as your primary means of controlling your Mac, you may have noticed that you can’t access your Keychain any more – when something wants access to it and pops up the “type your keychain password” dialog, the ‘always allow’ and ‘allow’ buttons give you absolutely no response when you press them.

If you bring up the Console and try doing this, you’ll notice an error popping up when you try to press ‘allow’:

11/4/15 1:24:02.755 PM SecurityAgent[893]: Ignoring user action since the dialog has received events from an untrusted source

This is because Apple has added means to prevent applications creating “synthetic clicks on keychain prompts” to get access to your keychain without your authorization. Which is all well and good. Except it would be really nice if they would, you know, pop up an error dialog saying that this has happened, and which program provided the offending clicks, instead of silently doing absolutely nothing when you press the ‘allow’ button.

Sadly, the latest versions of Wacom’s drivers do not fix this. I tried both the latest drivers for the Intuos3/4/5 (I have a 3 on my desk and a 4 in my travel bag), and the higher-numbered latest ones for the “current Intuos Pro”; neither of them solved this issue. Nor did visiting the Security and Privacy pane of the system prefs and manually adding /Library/Applcation Support/Tablet/WacomTabletDriver.app to the list of apps allowed to control my computer.

So I guess now if I want to do anything involving the Keychain, I need to reach around my desk and open up my computer to use the trackpad to click on those buttons. Fun!

(When I’m at my desk, the computer is closed and plugged into an external monitor, you see.)

Anyway. Mostly I am documenting this so that someone else with the same problem can have some hope of figuring it out faster; I blew most of my morning on tracking this down.

And as a side note – holy shit there are way too many Wacom drivers on their driver download page. There are seven categories of drivers that all have the exact same version number (6.3.15-1), and I have a strong suspicion that same driver will actually work with pretty much anything that connects via USB – supposedly I should be using a different one with a lower version number (6.3.11w3), but I’m using the 6.3.15-1 just fine now. What the hell guys, consolidate that shit.

Edit. 28-Dec-2015: There’s a new version of the driver, 6.3.15-3. It’s still not a trusted input source.

It’s daylight savings time! Cue grumbling about how much it sucks.

Given: The abrupt shift of an entire hour is discombobulating and stressful.

Given: We would still like to shift our schedules to have more daylight in certain parts of the workday.

Given: An increasing percentage of our timekeeping devices have enough smarts to keep track of the time of year, and apply daylight savings without human intervention.

Thus, a modest proposal:

Why don’t we spread that hour-long shift out over a month or two? Every day in September and October, we lose a minute – the clocks leap directly from 12:59 to 1:01. Every day in February and March we gain a minute, with the clocks going from 12:59 to 12:60 to 1:00. Maybe we could even add in a little more now and then to get rid of leap years. Or at least leap seconds.

Shifting every day like this would be incredibly onerous in the era of mechanical timekeeping devices you can only change in one direction. But this is the digital age. Mechanical clocks and watches are increasingly becoming an expensive bauble that denotes prestige. Hordes of people don’t even wear a watch, preferring instead to rely on their smartphone to tell them what time it is.

The obvious problems: luddites who still vastly prefer mechanical clocks, and the need for a Y2K-sized effort to change all timekeeping software.

I am not sure if I am joking, or if I am entirely serious here. I know I’m not stoned yet this morning. Let me work on that while I go change the clocks on the stove and microwave.

The most important part of making comics is coming back to them. Comics are big projects. A short one will take at least a few days. A long one? Well, I spent 4.5 years on Rita.

Some days were good days. I’d have easy, fun pages to do next and I’d tear through it. Other days? Complicated pages, or distractions, or winter depression could cut sharply into my output. There were times I get nothing drawn for several days in a row.

I didn’t berate myself when it happened. And if all I got done on the comic was a half hour’s work? That was still a half hour of progress that wasn’t there when I woke up. And I felt good about that.

Solo comics are a Sysiphean effort. You will have to figure out ways to keep on coming back to them. Especially if you are a distractable slacker like me.

Of course, there are lots of other important parts. Learning how to tell a story, learning how to draw, how to promote it, how to get it printed, all kinds of stuff. But the biggest thing I had to learn was how to just keep on working on it.

Some people will tell you to set a schedule and stick to it. Me? I set one of “aim for two pages a week, don’t fret if life gets in the way”.

Oh yeah. And never draw apologies for being late with a page. If you only have a half hour to work, put it towards the next page instead of to drawing a pretty “sorry no page today”. People who care enough to subscribe to the rss/twitter/fb/tumblr feed will see new pages when they happen with no work on their part; the days when you had to train people to check your site themselves are long gone. If your time and energy is ultra limited, spend it on something that counts.