This cartoon is from the currently suspended (for several years) strip ‘User Friendly’. It was about the workers in a Canadian Internet provider. It ran from 1997 to 2010, the last year and a half of that run was intermittent. Due to the age, some of the jokes are quite dated. However! This strip gives ample evidence of what happens when you don’t form a full sentence.

Again, I don’t know Illiad (J.D.Frazier) or are associated with him or the strip. I just thought it funny. They are still recycling the old comics so you can view them here:

http://www.userfriendly.org/

So I can’t let this go without some comment on the work in progress, Raven: Necris.

Currently the book is over 43,000 words and I’ve set a daily word count for myself. to put this in perspective, this was the same situation I started counting words as with Raven: The Triballi Incident and that topped out at over 200,000 words. There isn’t that many stories to tell in this one, so far, but who knows?

I put a new profile picture up on Facebook. However, it is very pixely. If that’s the way an iPhone takes a picture, then I don’t want one. ;-). The photo was sent to me via messenger, so that might have goofed up the resolution. I’ll have to talk to the photographer.

I really didn’t like the background of the previous Raven portrait on Facebook Raven of Iskandar Page, so I changed it to an action shot. I did play with the portrait in Affinity Photo and here’s Raven with a blue background. I did fool with the aspect ratio a bit as Raven doesn’t have a flat head. (You tell her that!)

What do you think? I can’t make the background white or black, or a light shade of purple. Maybe a light gray?

Sometimes when you make the expedient choice, it turns out pretty good. For example, in Doctor Who, the psychic paper was created because they wanted to advance the action quicker. In the old series, the Doctor was particularly persuasive but this resulted in a long section of dialogue that was frequently boring.

My example: In Raven: Mirabelle, the team visits a local museum where Chaoschick gets incensed that the spaceship that delivered the original colonists is not on display. In the scene, the brunette-with-big-mouth starts yelling at the director in Galact and suddenly Bellan begins to come out of her mouth without her even noticing. This added a bit of strangeness to the scene and added to the mystery of Chaoschick’s origins.

However, it hadn’t been planned that way. When writing the dialogue, I ran out of ideas of what she could say in her rant. So I had her revert to her childhood language.

If you look back in older posts, you’ll find the whole chapter posted.

Teasers!

The writing for Raven: Necris is proceeding and here are a few hints as to what will happen.

1. You find out Grabby’s real name.
2. You find out the origin of Grabby’s handle.
3. Raven takes a surprise guest home with her to Necris.
4. The plot thread of Vysse at Bestmartin begins.
5. The series arc is revealed.

I was on the road for my day job this past week and spent four days on the Florida panhandle in the area, which I just found out, is called the Emerald Coast. We went down by the beach one evening and got a good view of why it was called that. The water at the end of very white sand, is an emerald green until it gets deep at which point it faded into a dark blue. My phone’s battery decided to give out after the long day, so I couldn’t get a picture!

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You can get a little of the idea from this picture of me that one of my travel companions took, but the green in the background does not give justice to the actual emerald green.

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As you notice, we got there about sunset. It had to be the whitest and finest beach sand I’d ever seen.

This does go along with the writing for book 4 of Raven of Iskandar. A minor spoiler but Necris will be getting emerald green seas.

I think writers are more adept about taking various things and combining them into a new and strange configuration. Of course, writer’s experiences generally come out all over the place in their writing.

I was thinking about this because I remembered an incident from the first Raven of Iskandar book: Raven: The Call from Central. Not really a spoiler, but at one point, Raven describes the harpsichord that Grabby buys. In it, she describes how the two lowest keys are split horizontally, so that you can play two different notes in the same location. This description is what I actually saw way back in college (at the dawn of the Cretaceous) when my music teacher brought in her personal harpsichord to show the class.

The rest of the description of the harpsichord was due to research. Even when creating a society from scratch, you still have to do some research.