State of the CW

No Host today. I'm trying to get all my ducks in a row. Incidentally, I have discovered that JUST LIKE WHEN I PUBLISHED TFT, I've managed to schedule a release for the BUSIEST FUCKING NIGHT OF THE MONTH.

Valentine's day is the 14th. Release date for Gray Fox is the fifteenth. I SUCK at schedules.

That said...so far, everything is on track.

Also, I'm releasing a new short into the wild tomorrow. It's a nasty-good little horror piece in the same universe and vein as Taker. And by "tomorrow" I mean I've uploaded it already and it should be live sometime before midnight. Tomorrow, however (IF everything goes right) will be the day it is free for all uh...well, I was going to say "takers" but given the context of the story that'd be kind of creepy.

The cover art is a slightly modified version of a very old picture I did. If you've been with me since 07 you might recognize the piece.

In other, more selfish news: I GOT GIMP TO WORK RIGHT!!!

Okay, so about two years ago my old computer, the one with Photoshop on it, died a horrible fucking death. I was able to get all of my old stuff off of it, including music and old pictures, but my version of Photoshop went down with the ship.

Photoshop=oxygen. And I have been coasting ever since, first on temporary trial copies of Photoshop, and then on a very mangled partnership between Gimp and Photoshop Elements.

Surprisingly this partnership has worked very well. Gimp does a few things differently than PS, and I actually prefer most of its versions of the actions over Photoshop's. The two things it couldn't do well (dodge/burn and the Liquify filter, AKA the I-fucked-up-this-face-how-do-I-fix-it filter) Elements does perfectly. But I hated every minute of this because I could not make GIMP custom brushes paint in any color other than black, and Photoshop elements didn't SEEM to have all the fun brush settings that the real thing has. I was stuck. Trapped.

Until three days ago. When I figured out how to do that.

Apparently you have to flatten the brush image in GIMP using the very fucking specific control hidden under two different menus, otherwise your brush is just plain fucked. As for Photoshop, the angle/roundness settings, the opacity settings, and everything else I was just dying for, those were all hidden under another set of menus, and in the case of the angle/roundness setting, which I REALLY wanted, there was no indication that the little brush icon was hiding a drop down menu. None whatsoever.

BUT! THE GOOD NEWS! KIDS! IT WORKS! IT WORKS! AND NOW I DO NOT HAVE TO SPEND SIX HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS to get the real program again! It is a small stupid thing but I am PROUD of myself, loyal blog-readers. I am so. fucking. proud. I can paint leaves again! Using methods that work! And I can do screwball things with abstract brushes that are oh, so very much fun.

Other than that...well, you should probably know my personal challenge goal was to sell 50 copies of anything this month and thus break 200 books sold. Yes, I broke 150 last month--I believe we ended January with 155 copies of everything sold (Starbleached, naturally, sat in the seventies) Right now we are sitting at 160. That's 40 copies to go.

So if there is a book of mine? And you think you maybe sort of kind of might maybe want to read it? Please go buy a copy. (Unless you are waiting on an e-pub. Everything currently on Amazon, and I do mean everything, is going on Barnes and Noble in March. Except for Blue Ghosts because it is already there) Breaking the 200 mark in this short and dysmal month would be like, the best birthday present ever.

(...my b-day is the 27th. Which is also how old I'll be. I'm almost a dino, folks.)

Now I have to go bite the bullet and go to work on a friday. I hate weekends. There's no me time anymore.