There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.

The process of putting together an issue of THRICE Fiction seems simple... the editor hands you a stack of stories, you paste them into a document, you add some pictures, and BLAM! a magazine is born.

Except it's nowhere near that straightforward. And most of that is my own fault.

When R.W. and I first began discussing how THRICE was going to work, I had a very clear direction I wanted for the design of it all...

• Stories would never be interrupted. There would be no "please turn to page 24" in the middle of a story to distract the reader or interrupt the relationship the writer was building with them. I positively hate that, even though I fully understand the need for it... namely, it offers the designer a heck of a lot more flexibility in filling up pages when they can chop stuff up into little pieces. But since I don't go there, laying out an issue of THRICE Fiction is ten times more difficult than it has to be. It's like a massive puzzle that takes days to get figured out how things fit together.
• Stories would be accompanied by art. While there's always give-and-take, the one absolute R.W. and I agreed to early on was that THRICE Fiction as a literary magazine would always be centered around the written word. But since we wanted a visually appealing lit-mag, we also wanted to accent every story we publish with pieces of art... maybe even letting in a cartoon or two. And, if the right piece comes along, perhaps we could have one "art spread" featured each issue. Of course, finding all that art is a massive challenge, and many a deadline has been stretched trying to find the right visuals for a story.
• The layout is dictated by the story. I have four story templates with three variations each. How a story is presented is solely dictated by which layout it fits into for the best readability. Most times, I don't even read a story while laying it out. Which is a long way of saying "every story we publish is treated equally." This is an intentional process designed to avoid playing favorites with our writers. Sometimes it works that a story gets a full-page image. Sometimes a story gets just one small image. Other times a story gets a ridiculous amount of art thrown in... because that's what fits. I can count on one hand the number of times I've changed a layout because a story "needed" something different upon reading it. This "rigid" layout structure is design to keep things fair and make sure the focus is on our stories, but it's a lot more work than if I were to just dump things on a page and designed it to fit.

Of course, had I known three years ago what I know now... I probably would have done things differently. A lot differently. I'd hack stories apart, add art only if I could find it, and just cram stuff in any which way. It would have made my life much easier going forward.

But then THRICE Fiction wouldn't be THRICE Fiction, so I guess everything happened as it was meant to all along.

Which brings us to Issue. No. 9...

Download the issue for FREE by visiting the THRICE Fiction website!

As always, the cover was a struggle. Originally I had done painting for it, but I had already done the past three covers and really wanted something different this time. I was working on an alternative, but that didn't come together this time around, so I was back to my design again.

Until...

I remembered an incredibly talented artist named Katelin Kinney that I was lining up for Issue. No. 10, and decided to throw a Hail Mary pass in her direction to see if she might have something available. Lucky for all of us, she was perfectly happy to let us borrow some works for her portfolio, and we ended up with this amazing cover to close out our third year. It's a photo art composite titled Seed of a Soul, and the reaction to it has been overwhelmingly favorable, so thanks, Katelin!

On the bright side, you're half-way there!

This is PART 2 of a two part series on the art found in THRICE Fiction Magazine Issue No. 8. Needless to say, you should probably read PART 1 before continuing if you haven't already.

Or don't... either way, I get paid the same.

Anyway...

When last I left you, we were half-way through the magazine. Kinda. Because while I now have the luxury of going through the issue page-by-page, it doesn't work that way when putting the book together. Absolutely nothing is done in-sequence. Especially this time around, when things were running so late that I didn't have time to reach out to as many artists as I would have liked. Lucky for me, THRICE-regular Kyra Wilson painted two beautiful last-minute pieces she was able to work into her schedule... then Ira Joel Haber came along with his wonderful body of work that really saved my bacon! If not for him, this issue would have slid into September for sure! So, to both of these gifted artists, my heart-felt thanks for your help.

And now, on with the show.

The art of THRICE Fiction No. 8 continues after the jump...

Stand back, it's a big one!

Laying out an issue of THRICE Fiction is like putting together a giant puzzle where all the edge pieces have been removed. Stories have to "flow" into each other in a way that keeps the reader engaged, yet still manage to make them feel like separate entities. You'd think that the more stories you have, the easier it would be to fit the pieces together because there's more options to choose from. You'd be wrong. It's actually quite the opposite. It's the choice that drags things out and makes things hard. If you only have a few stories, then the way they should fit together is more obvious. With a lot of stories? Well...

Yet, it is what it is.

RW Spryszak and I made the decision early on that the size of the magazine would directly relate to what we have to put in it. If we only received two stories that were "right for us" then that issue has two stories. But we never accounted for THRICE getting as popular as it has. RW is getting hundreds of submissions each issue. Hundreds. Our odds of getting great stories that are "the right fit" for us have exploded.

So I ended up with an issue that was 84 pages which I then had to pare down to 70. Because things start getting expensive after that.

And since THRICE shows no signs of slowing down, we've adjusted our publishing schedule to allow more time. The last thing we want to do is start slapping an issue together haphazardly to meet a date on a calendar, so it was our only option. The good news is that the quality of the magazine can be maintained. The bad news is that our submission window has dropped to one month intervals.

I'm choosing to look at this as a good thing.

Anyway...

Once again I am going to write a blog post about all the art that goes into the issue. But this time it will have to come in two parts. Here is the first half...

RW had an idea for a cover after reading one of the stories he accepted. He envisioned the Brooklyn Bridge all lit up at night in the fog. I thought it was a good idea, except I couldn't find a photo that would work. All my photos of Brooklyn were shot in the daytime, and any nighttime shots I found weren't working. I decided to just up and DRAW the idea, but I could never get it to come together. The Brooklyn Bridge is a very specific structure and people know when you get it wrong. I simply didn't have the time to get it right. Or I'm just not that talented an artist. Regardless, I had to try a new approach.

So night became day, fog became clouds, and away we go.

The photos I had taken from my last visit to Brooklyn were a good start. I wanted the cover image to be on the bridge instead of looking at it, and I had plenty of shots for that. But the clouds were never where I wanted them to be. This meant I had to painstakingly cut out the bridge so I could manipulate the sky as I wanted... namely, having a big ol' cloud at the top for the magazine title to sit on! After I composited the bridge and the revised sky, I was dismayed to find that the cables were falling away, so I then had to paint over each and every one to get them to stand out a bit. After a lot of work, I sent the photo through a couple of Photoshop filters to add a bit of watercolor feeling and, voilà, our cover was born.

Except not really.

Everybody thinks that Photoshop filters are a magic button you press to get cool stuff happening with no effort. And, for the most part, that's true. But I'm never satisfied with the "magic button" approach, so I always end up re-painting parts so that they filter better... or using different strengths of filter on different pieces of the photo... or whatever. In this case I ended up with a photo that had twenty-two separate layers in the final composite to get what I wanted.

As usual, I find myself thinking it would have been easier to actually take the time to paint the thing from scratch.

Oh well.

To read about the rest of the art in this issue, you'll have to take a look after the jump. And I'll see you tomorrow for part two!

Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you.

Though I would never actually want to kill a bear, so that saying doesn't make much sense for me. Unless I'm "getting" the bear so I can give him a hug. A bear hug!

In any event, the March issue of THRICE Fiction actually slipped a day into April, and there are a lot of excuses I could give as to why that happened. But, the honest truth is that the issue just ended up being a much bigger project than usual (54 pages!), and I didn't budget enough time to get things done.

Oh well. It turned out great, so hopefully our readers will think it's worth the wait...

Download the issue for FREE by visiting the THRICE Fiction website!

The cover this time around was a fun one. Fearless THRICE Fiction editor RW Spryszak told me that he kept on seeing "a man standing at a bus stop in the rain" for the cover as he was reviewing submissions. I thought this was a great idea for a Spring issue, so it didn't take any amount of convincing for me to take the idea and run with it. Especially since I could do a kinda tribute to one of my favorite films of all time... Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful My Neighbor Totoro...

But since Totoro is trademarked, I decided to use geese instead. I also thought geese would be funnier.

The original cover image is composited from 23 separate photos from locations like Costa Rica, Maui, Barcelona, Vancouver, Seattle, and Fiji (among others)... plus one very important piece of stock photo art...

The process of stitching all the photos together into a single cohesive image is long and tedious (as I explained in a step-by-step for a past cover here). Once that's been completed, parts were painted over in Photoshop, then run through various filters to add rain and make the image look kinda-sorta like a painting. As usual, it would probably have been faster had I ACTUALLY painted the thing, but at least this way I didn't get any paint on my clothes. Anyway... here's the end result...

And that's that.

For a look at the rest of the artwork in this issue, click onward to an extended entry...

Unusually humid and 90° Fahrenheit with more thunderstorms on the way?

Not my favorite weather.

And so another episode of THRICE Fiction has been put to bed. This issue has some amazing stuff in it, arrives wrapped in a beautiful cover by Kyra Wilson, and it's absolutely FREE to download, so what are you waiting for? Head on over to our official site and grab a copy!

As I was on a conference call this morning, I took the time to write up some "Art Director Notes" which discusses my thinking behind all the visuals that are in this issue. If you're interested in that kind of thing, I've put it all in an extended entry. Needless to say, SPOILERS abound, so you might want to go read the issue before you click through...

Put down that Cadbury Creme Egg because Bullet Sunday starts now...

   
• Eggaxctly. I'm rather fond of eggs. I'll eat them just about any way you can fix them, but my favorite way to eat eggs are in a an egg salad sandwich. Which is why Easter is always an awesome holiday for me. Plenty of hard-boiled eggs means plenty of sammiches. But when I think about it, I'll eat eggs just about any way you can cook 'em...

As a vegetarian, I had given up on eggs benedict, but last year I had it made with tofu bacon instead of ham, and it was awesome. Of course, the thing about eggs is that you can't tell if they're a raging salmonella bomb just by looking at them...

Which is why every time I'm served undercooked eggs I wonder if I'm going to get the plague. The last time I was caught in a salmonella outbreak, I spent two days with non-stop diarrhea and vomiting. Which isn't the worst thing that can happen... unless you're on the toilet when you have to vomit. And trying to puke between your legs is something nobody should have to experience twice in their life.

   
• RIP. And so Thomas Kinkade the self-proclaimed "Painter of Light" has gone dark. And while I feel bad that the guy is dead, I can't say I'm too broken up that his output of shitty paintings will stop. Yes, I understand why his unchallenging and mediocre work was popular... it was pretty and required zero thought... but his raging success never ceased to surprise me. I mean this boring crap is what people want hanging on their wall?

Painting ©™® Estate of Thomas Kinkade

I don't get it. But Kinkade obviously filled a need, so more power to him. Hopefully they have plenty of alcohol and things to get drunk and piss on in heaven... rest in peace you crazy bastard.

   
• Oppression. I don't normally post other people's cartoons and stuff, but this is absolute genius...

In four panels, the artist (whoever they are) has managed to perfectly summarize the disgusting hypocrisy that is running rampant through the Hard-Core Right. I am so sick and tired of hearing their whole "persecuted Christian" nonsense. Fighting back against lies, hatred, and persecution is not oppression so get over it. Believe what you want to believe and live your life... then let others do the same. Oh... and at some point you really should read that Bible you keep beating people over the head with.

   
• Nasty. Early this morning I received a nasty(?) comment on an old blog entry that made no sense. It was just a bunch of curse words followed by the words "I love your blog!" Much to my surprise, the commenter left what looked like a real email address. So I wrote and asked what the deal was. Almost immediately I got an automated response asking me if I wanted to make money commenting on blogs. I can only guess this means the company is trolling for trolls? Nothing on the internet surprises me anymore.

   
Now I've got to get back to work... so no more bullets for you!

Time for another BEHIND THE SCENES episode of Blogography!

Thanks so much to everybody who has supported the debut issue of Thrice Fiction magazine! RW and I have been surprised... shocked even... by the number of people who have been kind enough to take a look and give us some nice feedback. In all honesty, I thought maybe 40-50 people would bother to download the thing. Sure it's free, but time is valuable, and I didn't think many people would give it a chance. Even more surprising, a good chunk of you actually bought the printed magazine from MagCloud. We don't make any money off of those sales, but knowing people like the magazine enough to buy it... well, that's better than money!

Okay, probably not... but when you combine all the downloads and printed issues, we've "sold" around 320 copies. Considering we haven't done any promotion outside of our blogs and Facebook, this is pretty remarkable.

Some of the nicest comments I received were saying good things about the artwork, which is really special to me considering most of it was a last-minute addition. Though, considering most people only see the crappy cartoons I slap together for this blog, I guess anything would be "good" by comparison! A few people had asked about the "medium" I used for the pieces, so I thought I'd do another "behind the scenes" entry to explain how the front cover came together...

I suppose the first thing I should say is that this is not a painting. The painted "look" is just a couple of Photoshop filter effects. So what is it? Just a bunch of photo pieces that have been blended together to create an image based on this sketch I made to show "The End" of the earth...

The first step was to find me a good star-field image. Fortunately, our tax dollars have funded the Hubble Telescope, which has provided thousands of hi-res images to choose from. I ended up rearranging the stars a bit, but this was the image that was most like I had in mind....

All the other photos were taken from my extensive collection of travel photos. That way, I don't have to worry about obtaining permission to use them or get in trouble for copyright infringement or whatever. "The earth" is just a photo I shot in Southern Utah that has been turned upside-down and warped into the shape I needed...

The water was some tricky business. I found a photo I took on Kauai's north shore which made for a pretty good start...

Kind of rough there, but I didn't want to start painting the pieces together until I had the waterfall in place. Fortunately, that was made easy thanks to a photo I took at one of the Walt Disney World resort hotels (don't ask me which one)...

In my original sketch, I had wanted a metropolitan cityscape in the background. The problem was that I couldn't make it look good. And believe me, I tried. I spent a good hour cobbling together skyscrapers in an attempt to get it looking right. But it never did. Rather than waste the rest of my life trying, I tossed everything out and started over. But this time I thought I'd go for something less urban, and found a shot I took last year at Portofino in Northern Italy. Cutting the city out, it fit perfectly. All I had to do was add a reflection in the water and paint in a shoreline, and I was set...

I also cobbled together some photos of flat red rocks in order to make a better surface for the waves to sit on. I thought it looked a little more realistic. Though I suppose "realistic" is all relative when you're talking about a city floating in space.

Anyway... next up was the sky. I wanted a bright, almost surreal sky so that it would contrast nicely with the darkness at the bottom. So I went back to Southern Utah and found exactly what I wanted at Bryce Canyon. Well, not exactly. I had to do a bit of touch-up and color adjustment, but it's still a really cool sky...

After I popped it in the shot, I added a little bit more coastline waaaayyyy in the background to help add some depth.

Time elapsed: 1 hour, 15 minutes. It would have been less, but I wasted time trying to smoosh New York and Chicago into a new city.

Then the fun begins. Hours of Photoshopping all the pieces together so they look like one cohesive scene. In particular, the ocean edge and waterfall. They never really "fit" together, and so it took extensive painting, warping, and blending to make it work. It's kind of hard to see in these tiny images just how much work I had to do, but at full print-resolution size, it's a big mess, and required a lot of time to make happen. I also had to adjust the colors of all the individual pieces so they look like they were in the same shot. It's only a subtle alteration, but it makes a big difference in the overall "feel" of the image.

Time elapsed: 3 hours, 30 minutes.

After that was all finished up, I ran a couple of Photoshop filters on the photo to make it look like a painting and, voilà, a cover was born...

Most of the other stuff in the issue was drawn in Adobe Illustrator, then ran through the same "painterly" Photoshop filters so I had a kind of "look" going on...

And there you have it! Join us in two months for issue #2! And if you haven't checked out issue #1, you can download it for FREE at ThriceFiction.com!

And the day has finally arrived.

Way back in May of last year, RW kindly invited me out to his place for a dinner featuring his delicious homemade pizza. Under a flawless blue sky while drinking beer and talking about nothing and everything, he mentioned his past work in the “zine scene” and his love of writing fiction. On the train back to my hotel that evening, again on the flight home the next day, then again on a near-daily basis for the next six months, one thought consumed me... I used to love writing stories, what happened?

Thus Thrice Fiction magazine was born. And since it was all RW's fault, I made him sign-on as co-conspirator and editor. It was, after all, the very least he could do.

That was back in November. Nearly five months later, and with the help of some great people (and good friends), we finally launched our first issue today...

You can learn all about it over at ThriceFiction.com! (and download it for FREE!)

You can also LIKE us on Facebook!

And now I have to finish packing my suitcase. One of my "favorite" things to do...

I love creativity. I love art. I love art museums. I love traveling to art museums around the world and experiencing the amazing creatings of beauty and imagination I find there.

And yet... even though I travel quite a lot, it would be impossible for me to see all the museums and works of art that I'd like to see. That's why I'm thrilled that more and more museums are starting to put their collections online. Sure it's not the same as seeing them in person, but it's certainly better than nothing. Especially when you look at the amazing quality of the digital representations they're giving us.

First up is Haltadefinizione, with their astounding hi-res scans of some famous works. You can zoom in so close as to see the actual brushstrokes and cracks in the plaster. Like this breathtaking view of Jesus from The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci...

Or this stunning zoom of Bacco by Caravaggio...

Amazing. Just amazing. And they also offer gallery prints of the various works and selected zoom prints as well. I wish I could afford them.

In equally amazing news, The Vatican has graciously put a virtual "window" into the Sistine Chapel on their site so you can explore Michelangelo's master works of the cieling and Last Judgement (along with the works by other geniuses such as Raphael, Bernini, and Botticelli)...

Even though I've seen these works in person, I've never seen them like this. To be able to zoom in and study great masters in such detail is just too good to be true.

Art deserves to be enjoyed by everybody. Museums who choose to share their treasures over the internet are enriching the world for us all, and I couldn't be more grateful for their efforts.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get lost in some art for a while...

I am not a big fan of the new "Dr. Who" as portrayed by Matt Smith, but when I saw that last week's episode was pretty much being billed as "Vincent van Gogh, Monster Slayer" I had no choice but to set my DVR to record it. Vincent is one of my most favorite artists, responsible for my favorite painting of all time, and the idea of seeing him doing cool stuff in Dr. Who was too much to resist.

I was not disappointed. SPOILERY STUFF AHEAD, if you haven't seen it yet!

Admittedly, my expectations were pretty low... mostly because I fully expected van Gogh to be treated as a novelty throw-away character who was done all wrong. Imagine my surprise when a real effort was made to portray him in a sympathetic and realistic manner. Kudos to writer Richard Curtis for a great script!

The episode did indeed end up being a monster hunt, but that was almost secondary to Vincent's real-life story of torment and unappreciated genius, which was the real focus of the story...

The casting was perfect, as they managed to not only find an actor (Tony Curran) who resembled Vincent van Gogh, but was also talented enough to play the more subtle intricacies of the tortured artist...

The production values were amazing, as they faithfully recreated the world that Vincent inhabited, including his room at Arles...

No detail was too small, as the set designers even added a few touches to make everything seem like Vincent actually could have lived there. Like occasional glimpses of the irises and sunflowers that inspired so many of Vincent's paintings...

And I thought it was utterly fantastic how they took the time to explain the wonderful way that Vincent sees the world. It was like an art appreciation moment...

But it was the ending that made the show so sublimely awesome.

The Doctor, feeling sad that Vincent lived a life of depression and pain in a time when his every effort as an artist was rejected, decided to show him a glimpse of the future. A quick trip in the TARDIS later, and van Gogh gets to see that one day he will be regarded as one of the world's greatest artists. It was a magical scene that righted a terrible wrong, and has to be my feel-good moment of the year so far...

And then came Vincent's moment of vindication when The Doctor arranged for him to overhear what people thought of his work...

Listening the museum curator (played by the ever-awesome Bill Nighy) talk about Vincent in a way that could have come from my own brain was an almost surreal experience...

"In a hundred words, where do you think van Gogh rates in the history of art?"
   
"To me, van Gogh is the finest painter in the world. Certainly the most popular great painter of all time. The most beloved. His command of color is magnificent. He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray. But to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world... no-one had ever done it before. Perhaps no-one ever will again. To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world's greatest artist... but also one of the greatest men who ever lived."

Alas the ending was bittersweet but, where Vincent Van Gogh is concerned, it pretty much had to be...

The entire episode was like a love letter to Vincent van Gogh and his beautiful art, and I loved every minute. Even when he was fighting monsters. Highest possible recommendation. If you didn't catch it on BBC or BBC America, you can grab it on iTunes (well, in the US you can... other countries may vary).

Many thanks to Steven Moffat, Richard Curtis, Edward Thomas, Tony Slater Ling, and everybody else who had a hand in this wonderful episode.