Don't forget to vote today. TWC is especially funny this time, because Cheyenne made the incentive. Buzzcomix is, as always, one of Phil's sketches. It looks like we're not doing reruns any more, now that we're playing with other things on TWC. You can bookmark the voting sites and vote every day! Also, it has been my experience that you can vote for as many comics as you like on any given day, which seems odd, but what the heck. I've tried it, and got to look at lots of people's vote incentives on the same day. Interesting.

And now, I will talk about the weather. Which is gorgeous. We're getting a sweet Spring breeze that smells like everything wonderful. The cherry blossoms have been lasting a ridiculously long time this year, but the last few days we had a lot of wind, so now my part of Seattle looks like we had a sweet pink snow. Also, I've been enjoying walking through the anime cliché of swirling pink petals. Mmmm. I love weather.

I've been on the phone with the pin company, trying to figure out how to design stamped pins that are a little more 3D. They were really helpful, so we should be getting those Jäger pins in the next month or so. It's killing me, the amount of designs I want to do, now that Phil has opened the floodgates. (That is, he finally decided that we have enough money to start making all the things I've been wanting to make, as long as I do about one a month.) Woohoo! Mountains of swag, here I come!

Gaaah. I can't sleep. I'm too tired to work, and I hate reading archives. (I like to buy booooooks....) Maybe if I hit myself over the head with a hammer? Yeah, I'll try that. Ow.

Phil is drawing an awesome page. Just sayin'.

I've listed more originals on eBay. No Girl Genius pages this time, I'll start with those again early next week. Well, there is one design sheet for Agatha's Othar-Rescuing Clank (and what a bad idea THAT turned out to be...I know, let's turn Othar loose!)

Speaking of Othar, right now, he's apparently loose in Paris. Searching for the dastardly fiend who has stolen the Louvre.

Holy Cow, the pins are doing well. We packed a whole bunch of them today. Thanks, everybody! So what I'm hearing is that, in addition to these pins, we need great big fancy ones, and little bitty subtle ones. Hmm...

Make sure to vote for us on TWC tomorrow, Cheyenne sent me something WAY funnier than anything I've done to date. Waaaah!

My kids have a friend over, and he brought Mario Kart for the Wii and little Wii remotes shaped like steering wheels. So cute!

The new trilobite pins are in, and I've listed them in the "Company Store" pages. They're a lovely brassy stamped metal, and I'm quite delighted with them.  Of course, we've also got the squeezy wrench stress balls, and the new backpacks, and are very excited about making new stuff very soon. Making new stuff is fun! The stamped metal for the pins was an experiment, and we are very happy with the results. Next up, the Jäger insignia! My new plan for the backpacks, until I can afford to make them all at once, is to wait until we run out of the trilobites, then print up Jäger packs, then Wulfenbach, then back to the trilobite. Unless I come up with another design to add to the cycle...Hmm...

Today I slept far longer than I should have, I suspect that all these nights with less than adequate sleep finally hit me. That, or I'm coming down with the same thing alicebentley has. I'm kind of sore and exhausted, for no reason. I'm drinking a lot of water, and I'll have a go on the treadmill, that sometimes helps, believe it or not! Especially since I'm currently watching The Great Race while I walk, and I'm almost to the awesome pie fight scene...

This has been the month of cool people coming to Seattle, no question. Last night we met Bill Willingham for dinner. He moved away from Seattle about a thousand years ago, and we only get to see him if we're all at the same con, which hardly ever happens. We've been applauding his success from afar, but it's nice to get together and talk in person. (I've been saying that a lot lately. I guess we HAVE been lucky this month!) Anyway, he's been doing Fables, which is very good and extremely well-loved by a heck of a lot of comics readers indeed. Hooray for success!

We've been invited to a Steampunk birthday party / picnic. It's the perfect excuse to dress the kids up. Heh heh heh. If I manage anything good, I'll post pictures.

Also, Payne has built a Flea Circus. It's...amazing.  It's full of all kinds of clever fiddly things that he's come up with, and little finds that he's altered to suit the piece. I believe the cannon started out as a book end. Now, it actually shoots streams of confetti.  Here's a better close-up of the whole thing.

Aaaand, other great stuff from the con:

An autographed copy of Jennie Breeden's The Devil's Panties!  The webcomic with the best name ever!

Because Phil knows I can't resist a gorgeously designed book: Passport : Forgotten Kingdom of Imaginary Friends by Andrew Wilson. Also signed, with a little sketch. Eeeeee!

The head of Cthulhu, stuffed and mounted. (The Kid bought this with his allowance.)

This last weekend brought us the Emerald City Comicon, which I was unable to attend. But Phil was there, and he took the Large-size Kid with him for one day. (The Fun-size Kid stayed home with me. She is unruly and not yet fit for human company.) Aaron and Cristi Williams came to Seattle for the con and stayed with us for the weekend, which was lovely. It's always fun to see your friends at a con, but it's also nice to have some time to talk in a more relaxed setting. As Aaron put it while we were sitting around the living room: "I keep thinking someone is going to interrupt us to ask how much something costs." Look at Aaron's comics here!

Cool stuff that came home from the con:

There's a new collection of Dave Kellet's  Sheldon out: A Blizzard of Lizards. Remember: Sheldon comics heal the sick! (Well, they certainly helped ME feel better.)

The Kid came home with a great Smash Bros. BRAWL poster by Bleedman. I recognized the art right away, because I really REALLY like his Grim Tales comic, and if the official PowerPuff Girls cartoons were anything like his PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi, I'd actually watch them. Yes, it's copyright violation city, and I'm well aware that if somebody did this with our stuff, it would be a huge headache, and yet... I'd love to have this stuff in a book. I am a conflicted monkey, and make no excuses. Heh.

There were lots of other nifty con things, but I'll have to write about them later. I have to go out tonight so I should wrap this up.

But of course, you're all dying to know what I got for Mother's Day, right? (What? You're not? I will tell you anyway!) I got a soft, cuddly Necronomicon. My kid is a Good Boy Who Is Kind To His Mother.

What we actually bought were two "Ben Ten" action figures. The receipt makes things sound so much more... interesting:




And a detail:

Squeezy Wrenches, they are here! Tra-la-la-la! (That's WRENCHES, you naughty people.) These cute little "stress balls" from Transylvania Polygnostic are a huge hit with my kids--they're great for bonking each other over the head.

The trilobite pins shipped today, so we expect to have them here and for sale by the end of the week.

I plan to spend the rest of the day re-designing the heart-shaped gear and Jager symbol so we can do patches and pins. There are 10,000 other things I should be doing, but... I'm tired. I didn't get much sleep this weekend, we had some friends staying with us, and we don't get to see them very often, so we ended up staying up late talking a lot.

To Work, and Beyond!

I guess if I go around calling Girl Genius "Gaslamp Fantasy," then I don't get to sulk when the NY Times prints an article like this and doesn't mention us at all, right? (If I used cute little smiley emoticons, there would be one here. But I'm too old for that stuff.) Anyway, you should read it, it's pretty good.

Had dinner with Steve Jackson last night, which was very nice. We don't get to see him enough. More on that front later.

I've scheduled more original art on eBay, it will start going live at 6:30 this evening, and continue listing until 7:10. I hope you'll have a look, and thank you, everyone who has been bidding this week!

Finally, at the risk of losing out when that one perfect piece I want comes along... look at the work this etsy seller is doing. Lovely stuff. (And, of course, we like the seller name...)

I've been getting the last of the stuff together for this show at the Helix Gallery, and I see from their site that I am the Most Horrible Mistress of the Last Minute. Gak!

One of my unfortunate addictions of late is ordering things from Etsy.com. Recently arrived is: The Irrelevant Redemption: A Steampunk Fairytale, a lovely, poetic book with some great art. There are also some wonderful shirt designs in the authors' store:  binarywinter.

I am also fond of the jewelery by Rivkasmom. I have a few of her smaller pieces. Pretty stuff!

Ack, I was going to write more, but it's time to sleep. More later.

Aack. Long, boring day of trying to get work done, and everything moving sloooowly... I want to go to bed, and am waiting for Phil to finish sending the latest page to Cheyenne. I'm sitting here hitting "refresh" on my "friends" page, and grumbling: "Where IS everybody..."  It's really sad.

I guess I could work, but I'm way too tired. Even a turn on the treadmill didn't wake me up.

The signing at Comics Dungeon was fun, thank you to those of you who came to see us. At least our local comic store doesn't think we're TOTAL losers, now. Hee. We hope to see more of you at the Emerald City Comicon, as well. Maybe we won't be so zombified then.

I'm doing vote incentives every day, not just days that the comic goes up. Some of them are, of course, better than others...

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that while I was sick last month, I completely failed to get any vote incentives taken care of. Er... sorry about that, and thank you very much to those of you who support us anyway. Anyway, I got a few silly things done and we're uploading stuff again.

You can vote for us at Top Web Comics and Buzzcomix to see different amusing (we hope)  pictures and sketches.

Thanks!

We will be at Comics Dungeon in Seattle tomorrow, for Free Comic Book Day. Please come by and see us, if you can. Try not to point and laugh. Much. Okay, you can, as long as you come to talk to us.

Heh. Part of me wants to post this to some of the Steampunk LJ groups, and part of me is afraid they'd ban me for spamming the lists. Well, maybe I'll be brave and do steamy_stitches.

Phil's birthday was yesterday, hooray! Instead of a cake, I made him my best imitation of a Chicago-style deep dish pizza. He was very happy indeed. It was a nice birthday.

The new shipment of the  Girl Genius Safari Backpacks came in yesterday, all 50 in one box. It weighed a ton and took two of us to move it around. Comedy! We also still have a few of the blue Girl Genius backpacks, which are also very nice. Although, frankly, not a patch on the Safari ones. It's not their fault, though. The Safari ones are awesome. We still await the squeezy wrenches, but expect them in the next week or so.

Heya! I have gotten off my * again, and listed some art on eBay! Yay, me!

Aaand I would have made this part of the previous post, but I don' t quite know how to make flickr blog two pictures at once. (It's probably very simple, I know. Ah, I have now been told how. Thank you! ) Here is a close-up of the hat.

Hee! Hat Macros! LOLhats!

Here is my Great Great Aunt Ruby, and my Great Grandmother Kaja. I love this photo, because they both have fabulous hats. Especially Aunt Ruby, who seems to have acquired the head of Mothra. I also like the button-down coat.

Today I've been trying to hack through my e-mail. It is slow going, because a lot of the questions I have to answer require figuring out what the heck the answer should be. Waah! If I didn't have help with the main inbox, I would be down in the basement hiding behind the freezer. Yes I would. Growling and brandishing a fearsome frozen goose at anyone who tried to winkle me out. Oh, yes.

And I should check the e-mail more often, because there is some really good (really old) stuff in there.

Check out the Girl Genius costumes from this game!

Wow, and wow again. And again.

Ta dah! Othar's Twitter is now archived on the Girl Genius site. Now you can read it top to bottom, if you want to.

Okay. I have been away from the thing that is LJ for a while, and have many comments. Some I'll answer the usual way, and some I'll answer here, as a sort of FAQ.

...

Great googly-moogly. There are a lot of them.

Did I say I'd look through the comments yesterday? Ah, I'm a great big liar. If you haven't noticed by now, I'll tell you that I'm one of those people who has lots of ideas, and can't quite manage to deal with any of them. Well, at least I get the comic posted on time...

Pod people have replaced my son. He hates writing, (not making up stories, just the physical act of writing things down) which gets him in trouble with his schoolwork at times. This morning, he got up, mooned about at the beautiful Spring morning for a while, and then came down to breakfast and wrote a poem about it. Neatly. On paper. And no one was making him do it.

Pod people.

I could have spent the entire morning reading the copy of Narbonic that the kid left out on the table, but I tore myself away. Every time I read Narbonic, I'm blown away by how brilliant it is. Shaenon Garrity's new strip is also brilliant, check out Skin Horse. She's always amazing, but I find that I love Shaenon's work best when she's drawing it herself, and this one is great. My kid really loves Narbonic, which means that I am going to have some explaining to do fairly soon... "Hey, Mom, what's 'goinking?'" Well, it's about time, anyway.

Edit: as an intrepid, and often apparently unmentionable co-writer myself, I am ashamed to have failed to mention The Brilliant Shaenon's Garrity's equally brilliant co-writer Jeffrey Wells. Thanks for the great strip, both of you!

If you're going to be at Costume Con, keep an eye out for Payne and Marie. (Look at my fabulous friends! In Venice!) Not only do they have amazing GG-inspired outfits that are well worth looking at, they also have a box full of special advertising postcards that I had made as a Costume Con giveaway. (But do keep in mind that they might not always have the postcards with them at all times, and they're doing me a favor by handing them out, and they're dear friends of ours, so please don't make them regret their kindness!) I'm hoping to have my act together enough to start doing a special collectible postcard for each con we go to, but that might be another great idea that I drop the ball on... I'll do the one for Emerald City Comicon today, that will keep me going for a while.

While googling for a picture of Cheyenne's lovely wife, we discovered the Girl Genius Wiki. Yeep! Holy Cow! It's awesome! We feel loved! (Somebody probably wrote us about this ages ago, but --surprise!--we're idiots. Please bear with us.)

I love my treadmill. Especially since I hooked up a DVD player to it. Yesterday I was watching the first part of Bride of Frankenstein, and jumping around like a fool (still on the treadmill) whenever Doctor Pretorius did anything especially awesome. Squee. Still a movie I love. Although... "HENRY?!" Seriously? Henry Frankenstein? What was wrong with "Victor?" Victor is a great name. Oh, well. They didn't ask me.

Now, on to the comments. I'll do that in another post, because this one is getting long.