Monday, November 23, 2009

shameless self-promotion

So, in news other than writing my friend Toby and I have been working on starting a vegan chocolate business.
Bum's Candies is officially up and open for business!
Please, visit our etsy shop here and our fellow blogspot here, any feedback would be great or if you have any flavor suggestions we would love to hear them!


Also in other news, tomorrow night I will be participating in an open mic event for my friend Amy's literary magazine Two With Water
The story I'm reading came from a writing prompt that Matt and I did earlier this week. So far they have been almost all helpful and we have written some good stuff from them.
Here is a snippet from that story...

I started to stay up most nights, as late as I could take, doing god knows what, just to avoid the nightly cat fights. It was around that time that I started trying to teach them simple English to try and communicate with them. I talked to them as you would a baby, just learning how to make sounds and form them into ideas.

“You. Cat. Andy.”

“Me. Human. Michael.”

I would point at their tails and say, “Tail. Can you say tail?”

Ralph, who was big and gray and whom I loved more than Andy, seemed more receptive to the lessons. He would mew and cock his head, as if asking me to, “Explain that again? Maybe slower this time and possibly in cat tongue?” His big green eyes curious to the sounds I was making and the response I was looking for. Andy, on the other hand, would just scamper off, looking for food or a toy. He was a very cat-like cat and I guess I resented him for it. He thought only of cat concerns and seemed to be telling me he had no use for this higher knowledge I was wasting his time with.


If you're in Chicago, please come to Cafe Ballou on Western between Division and Chicago around 7pm Tuesday to hear the whole story!

Monday, November 16, 2009

it's not funny

Well, as I've been saying, in preparation for the Milwaukee Zine Fest Matt, Ramsey and I compiled our comics together and made a zine with them all in it. I like the way it turned out a lot and we called it "it's not funny" since they're comics but aren't really comedic.
This is what is turned out like:
Photobucket
let me know if you would like one, we've been charging $4 for them. They are 40 pages long!

The zine fest was a lot of fun (although I was sick), and actually quite successful. We as a table sold a lot of zines. This was the first time I really tried to sell any of my things and people bought them which was very very exciting. We are trying to plan a zine fest for Chicago now, since for some reason one doesn't exist here.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

comic-nov 7th

Okay, this is the last comic that will be in our comic zine that we're putting out with Matt, Ramsey and I. It's exciting to have a small project like just practicing drawing turn into something much larger and see everything I've done all together. Yah for having friends that do things!!
comic-nov7th

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

comic-nov3rd

I've been so busy getting ready for the Milwaukee Zine Fest and putting together our new comic zine that I've barely had time to scan in stuff that I've been making. Exciting news is that our friend Neil is coming to table with us as well, he makes really awesome comics! Here is a comic I did last week..
comic-nov3rd

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

prompts, please

So, my friend Mathew (who writes this blog) and I have started every other day writing sessions. But we need prompts. Last time we used a book title by Rita Dove and a quote from Brideshead Revisited. If you would be so inclined, you should help us out by sending us a prompt or two for us to use in our writing. Thanks! We're hoping to eventually compile a bunch of stuff and put it in a zine possibly.

Monday, November 2, 2009

comic oct. 30th

Exciting news is that Ramsey and I are getting close to having all the preliminary stuff done for the graphic novel and almost to the point that we can storyboard the whole story out.
We are also working on a comic zine with the things you have seen right here on this blog and at Ramsey's blog everydaypants.com/blog with her and Mathew's comics. We're getting this together for the Milwaukee zine fest which is next weekend, Nov. 14th. I'm very excited to table at a zine fest and see all the other people's zines. This and next week are going to be very busy with getting things made for it.
Here's a drawing (the third panel says "fully stocked kitchen" I first spelled it "fully stoked" which would be funny--but confusing. Hopefully I'll stumble across some white out soon to fix it.)
comic-oct30