Books and Toys

I skived off on my regular writing lately to work on other things, namely working on Adventure Kartel. The project is once again a collaboration, I helped to set up back story and craft it in conjunction with Ash. Needless to say we had loads of fun putting the pieces together, when Ash and I get laughing about something we're unstoppable. One of the most treasured aspects of my eighteen year relationship with Ash is that we've never stopped laughing or being able to see the funny side of life, I think that's really important in the grand scheme of things because there are times when being creative for a living can be really hard.

Adventure Kartel was launched this week via 3A, our magnificent, best toy company in the world! It's a totally new universe for us to play with and right now it's one hell of fun sandbox to roll around in. Although we've been thinking about the Adventure Kartel back story for about a year, (a short period of time for us in the creative realm), the main stories for the fiction side came to us when we were up at 3am with our teething baby. Our tendency to offset stress with laughter probably contributed to this. Regardless, we're not finished yet and there's still plenty more work to go.

Loreless is shaping up to be great fun and we're excited for people to read it and work on the Emigre continues. For those of you have emailed and asked about the Emigre, it is being published in France by Editions Daniel Maghen. The first edition will be in French.

The Art of Discovery

The transition to the perfect studio space took place this week. We'd looked all over, as far as 50 kms away from home, scoped numerous buildings, (and spoke to even more real estate agents) and then it happened! 

We discovered early on in our search that there are buildings in the city where we live that do have dedicated artists' spaces, mainly spread out over two select buildings in what is considered to be the downtown art district however... there are more artists than spaces and there's a waiting list as long as your arm... not waiting for artists to get sick of painting and move on but for the artists who have been in these spaces for the last thirty years to give up the ghost and die. Charming I'm sure!

The flood in the downstairs studio gave way to an indoor water feature and a bucket, good feng shui maybe but not conducive to work and so after searching high and low we decided to give the old studio search one last try on new listings day and we're blown away by what we found on offer. One of the artist spaces did come up last week but the place was a concrete coffin with no light and then we went to tour a building on the outskirts of the city that we'd strangely never noticed before in any of our travels.

The building is 100 years old, highly decorative and fully restored. We stood inside and looked around speechless at what we'd found. The other artists are welcome to their 40sqm artists' spaces, you could swing a large number of cats in the new studio and that's just the way we like it.

I must say that I was a little sad when the first studio easel made it's way down to the new studio, I was kinda hoping it wouldn't fit in the 4WD, it barely made it with the front passenger seat down, it's so big and solid. Ash posted a pic of it on his blog standing solitary in the new space, it looks at home there, here the centre strut was scraping the ceiling, there it appears dwarfed.

Air, Water and Loads of Frustration

We’re Mac fanatics in our house, always have been, probably always will be, my first experience with a Mac was with a sturdy Mac Classic (complete with flying toasters) and unlike the PC’s I was using at the time, it never broke down. Likewise, it’s a very rare day that anything we’ve ever purchased from Apple breaks down. When we lose something it’s usually a hard drive (and we expect it because we abuse them).

Monitors, desktops, iphones, ipods, love them, love them and so when I saw the ad for the (at the time very new and upcoming) Macbook Air, I thought to myself, “Ooh, I’ve got to have me one of those!” Skip forward a year and bit…

My original Macbook a heavy, white brick of a thing, four years old… still works. My imac with its emotive movable screen (draw a face on it and it would make a nice looking robot), happy, smiling with it’s white bubble butt, five years young and still works… my Mac book Air… I woke up the other morning to find it curled up in a feotal position on the floor whimpering: “I’ve lost another key and I can’t get back up.”

My Macbook Air is the Scarlet O’Hara of the Mac range, everytime it doesn’t get it’s own way it throws itself down the stairs. It’s the supermodel of the computer world, skinny, expensive and vacuous with the outlook of a fragile ninety year old that forgot to take their calcium supplements. One fall and it’s a hip replacement!

The other day someone loaded up YouPorn on my screen for a joke, only it didn’t work cause my Air only plays video now at 1.5 frames a second. (Yeah you’ve seen one slow moving fleshy white butt you’ve seen them all, whatever). Oh and there was no moaning, fake or otherwise either… the volume hasn’t worked in months. My Air got it’s cable in a twist the way some people get their knickers in a twist, never a good thing.

I love Ash’s Mac the best, it’s the strongman of the Mac family, so many processors and so much memory it puts anything else PC or otherwise in the house and studio to shame. Its a giant metal beast of a thing, so heavy you need to bend at the knees to lift it. Turn it on and the thing practically grunts - but it too diced with death this week when it needed to be rescued from the aftermath of a rainstorm…

And here comes the water folks, a crack opened up in the ceiling above the rear door in the studio and we had an honest to goodness flood. Electricity and water don’t mix and given that we’ve had this particular door fixed twice before we were less than impressed with the outcome. Luckily we managed to pull everything out of the room around the door before things turned ugly but we’re still using buckets even now.

In a perfect world, fluffy bunnys would take care of telemarketers, a professional chef would sleep in the kitchen cupboard and jump up at a moment’s notice and everything that annoyed us would be summarily nuked, just because. Sometimes though you just have one of those weeks, where water comes in, computers don’t work and the schedule just flies out the window… Say La Vie!

In other news we’re back to working on mini fiction and its not WWR related….

Here we go, here we go, here we go...

All right so I woke up this morning and realized, damn it! It's that time of year again. For all of you who don't know what the hell I'm on about... well it's convention season all over again. I mean just when you think it's all over, all you have to do is turn around and heck it's mid May!

One day you're celebrating Christmas and then the next your inbox is full of emails saying: Hey! Have you booked your tickets yet? And it's all scheduled you know? Hell some parties we know are already pencilling in their yearly bar fights. (Brief note to the uninitiated, those big guys that hang around in the bars in downtown San Diego are actually U.S Marines - it's not Cosplay for GI Joe fans and they are trained to kill you should you piss them off).

Ash schedules only one fight in the square circle this time of year, the obligatory fight with the ladies from QANTAS (No I won't wear your hideous pyjamas! I'd sooner sit in economy and you man things better bring me my china plates and fancy cutlery anyway!) 

And this year the schedule is particularly packed, it's not just San Diego we've got exhibitions coming up in both Hong Kong and Paris towards the end of the year (Paris France - not Paris Texas! - don't email and ask - no you can't drive it from North America you'll all drown).

Work wise we have to hustle to make up for time lost, easier said than done. We just birthed WWR2 which was a mammoth load of work. So if you're rocking up with one piece of art to show as a portfolio and it's the same piece of art you showed us last year and Woody looks less than impressed with you, think about the forty or so paintings the man just produced... hmm. 

And finally RIP Harry the cat, you will be missed. Ash was a bit of a meanie to me, he said that the vet told him that he'd found Harry had a broken skull, (a couple of years ago I accidentally slammed his head in the fly wire door.) The truth is that Harry didn't have a broken bonce but his kidneys did fail. Harry was 16. Popbot's Kitty is now 15 and alas is showing similar symptoms. 

Thanks everyone for all the birthday wishes, until next time... Look out for WWR2 real soon and we've got another ZVR coming too:)

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday, Happy, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday. I think that's how the lyrics go... don't quote me!!!

Happy birthday Ash:)

Progression and the Flu

This week I caught the flu, Ash is a tank, (our oldest two likewise), and so me and baby got it and everyone else is pretty much hunky dory. It hasn't stopped me writing but it has slowed me down some so I got to sorting a whole bunch of stuff out and it's amazing what falls out between the pages of long forgotten about books and other extraneous items that turn up.

Here are some examples: A yellow envelope, sealed, postmarked San Luis Obispo circa 1998. I had a good laugh at this, somewhere along the line we were convinced that we should seal copies of some of our creative ideas in an envelope and copyright ourselves by mailing it to ourselves. Okay, this was a trend that was going around at the time, like the flu, it pops up every now and again. Would it hold up in a court of law? Hopefully we'll never have to test it but hey, it's in the envelope and it's sealed in... a kind of time capsule for future generations who knows?

A polaroid of me and Ash, kinda rare cause I don't like being photographed that much. Cool though all the same.

A chewed black notebook circa 1999. We purchased it at an airport kiosk in LAX, it was late at night and we were bored so we bought this notebook and came up with an idea for a whole world, that will hopefully be encapsulated in a children's book in the future. Those who know us will tell you that we've been threatening it for years. 

And tons more stuff, everything showing a steady, if sometimes dogged progression.

This week has been a monster week for us in more ways than one and to close I want to say thank you to all of those wonderful people who have stuck by us like glue through the years, you know who you are, Ted and many others, we love you dearly and thank you from the bottom of our hearts. True friendship and belief, like gold.

Hard Men and Logistics

I've been working on Loreless this week and I'm glad to say we're getting there! Here are some random thoughts.

I once knew a girl who had a poster on her wall featuring a well oiled muscle man complete with the caption "A hard man is good to find." Okay so this gym bunny got paid fifty bucks for diving into a vat of baby oil and striking a pose but is he really a hard man with his muscles all a rippling or would he in fact be one of the first to be well and truly fucked in the event of war or famine? Your Big Red Car isn't gonna get you far on 1% body fat and nothing to eat.

In the ancient world people left offerings for their favourite Gods and Deities to keep such events as war and famine at bay. The idea no doubt sprung from strong superstitious practices and blissful ignorance to how the world and nature really worked... but what if they were in part right? What if these Gods and Deities did once exist, came back into being and controlled entire populations, how would they do it? War? Famine? Or something else?

I recall visiting a temple with a huge Buddah in Singapore where the locals left offerings for the monks there, everything from fruit and vegetable platters through to slabs of beer. How long would it be before everyone was running off down to their local to buy slabs of beer if a Lore type  scenario were to occur in real life? What would we offer for our safety and protection and would the 1%'s among us be the first to break? 

Okay so that's one kind of hard man but what about the other kind? I've been thinking about the hard man but from another perspective. The gangster, the player, the navy seal, the hard man in the real sense of the term. Not all shepherds would be like Jonathan Bradley, given all that the shepherds do and are involved in, it stands to reason that some of them would be true hard men. One of the most recent examples I can think of is Vinnie Jones in the movie Snatch, an east end hard man, but he's by far and away not my favourite example. I'll admit it here and now that one of my favourite hard men of all time would have to be Nosher Powell (if you are not familiar with him Google him). Would a real hard man put up with Gods and Deities telling him what to do? I don't think so and so writing Loreless is proving to be a lot of fun.