Old Devils #1 is live on Kickstarter! Back it now!

HELLO ALL!

It’s been some time, but I’m back and making comics again. This time, with a new horror story with haunting art by Jeremiah Schiek called OLD DEVILS! Influenced by my love of 90s horror comics like Nightstalkers and horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Thing, OLD DEVILS is a six-part modern nightmare with hints of pop culture and Lovecraftian lore mixed in.

It’s the perfect time of year for you to help make horror happen, so join the Devils today.

Synopsis

20 years ago, Jade was in the pilot for an occult-themed reality show. Her husband was killed, her mentor was maimed, and her dreams of fame were destroyed. The show never aired.

Now, after decades of trying to put the horror behind her and distance herself from the chaos of her youth, her mentally shattered and permanently paralyzed former mentor has some news. He found one of the Old Gods they'd been searching for, and it is reproducing.

Read the first five pages now!

There Will Be Blood(y Good Deals)

Make sure to hop on over to our Kickstarter page as quickly as possible, as we’ve got some special priced tiers for newsletter subscribers that are only up for 36 hours!

And if you miss’m, don’t sweat it! I do everything I can to keep my lowest tiers cheap, so anyone can get into this show for $5.

We’ve also got some really cool higher tiers, including half page ads in the book (sold out on Free Hands #2) and an opportunity to be on the back cover!

OTHER THOUGHTS!

My Writing Heroes Ruined My Writing (Sort of)

A few years ago, Neil Gaiman took some heat on social media for something he said in his Masterclass. Near the end of the online course, which I found nice to listen to and at times insightful, he recommended that writers get themselves a nice fountain pen.

This wasn’t the first time Gaiman had suggested this. He spoke in some detail about using fountain pens and nice, old, bound books in various essays collected as The View from the Cheap Seats, explaining at various points that he’d begun using fountain pens while writing Stardust, a book that he sought to have a Victorian tone and feel and so, his logic went, he should actually write it like a Victorian. Elsewhere, he mentioned that writers using pens, in his experience, used fewer words to convey the same quality of story than those using word processors and computers. The stories he was reading were doubling and trebling in length, but were not increasing in quality by half. 

As I said, the internet was, as it often is, unkind toward this somewhat bougie writing advice. But I am not the internet, and so I gave fountain pens a try. 

And I’ll tell you, dear reader; writing with a fountain pen is indeed a lovely experience. I wrote first in journals, which I enjoyed a great deal. Then I tried my hand at writing a manuscript for a novel, just as Gaiman had. I worked on the book for months, often going into work after a dawn of scribbling, a triumphant feeling of joining some kind of brotherhood of “real writers,” with notebooks in my briefcase and ink on my fingertips. It gave me a feeling of romance that I hadn’t experienced in the previous two years of clickety-clacking on the keys. I very much enjoyed it. 

Likewise with an offhand recommendation by J. Michael Strazynski in his new book, Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer, which has some really great insights on writing discipline and approach. All that stuff is great, but I’m a sucker for “this is how I do it,” and Strazynski does it, he explained, on Levenger freeleaf pads with a box running the whole left side of the page for annotations. 

I ordered some of the Levenger pads, and they felt great. They were easy to add notes in the margins of, and man alive, did they take the ink from the nibbed pens well. They looked cool. They made me feel like a writer. 

The truth for me, though, is that using these tools, I didn’t actually finish much work. I only have about an hour to write most days, and writing with a pen, I have trouble getting into the flow of vomiting out a draft. This should have been an expected problem. After all, Gaiman said pretty clearly that the reason he used his pens was in large part to slow down. I genuinely couldn’t make more time to write alongside my job and family commitments--an hour a day is a serious time sink for most adults, and so not maximizing that time actually made it virtually impossible for me to do the work I was romanticizing, and the stuff I was getting out wasn’t that good because I was so rarely locked in. 

I want to tell you that I got there--that I figured it out and found a way to use those tools to do my best work, but that isn’t what happened. I became increasingly depressed and struggled to write more and more. I abandoned the regular practice and went weeks, or even months without writing. Finally, I cast the glamorous tools off. I opened a Google Doc and started clacking again. It came back immediately. I could write again. It wasn’t all good, but it was fast. I was completing drafts, and it allowed me to write more drafts, and now here we are.

I relay this story not to beat up on Strazynski or Gaiman. They have both offered me and other writers lots of advice--much of it useful. Instead, what I’m saying is that some people, of which I am one, are desperate to find out “how to do” something, and get caught in the trap of believing that the ways our heroes do things are the ways things are done. It is good to take a moment sometimes and remember, particularly when dealing with things that you yourself have done successfully in the past, that the only way that matters is the way that allows you to do what you are trying to do. I wish that writing was more glamorous. I wish I could do it in beautiful notebooks and with fancy pens. I wish I could do it with a pencil and loose leaf paper while nursing a cafe au lait at a small cafe table in the city while occasionally running into other creatives I knew, as Hemingway describes doing in The Sun Also Rises. There is a lot of romantic beauty in the myth of the writer. My reality, though, is that I do not write that way. I write best on a laptop or tablet on my kitchen table very early in the morning or somewhat late at night, when I can hear crickets and I’m drinking a cup of store brand peppermint tea. 

New To My Work?

I’ve been making comics under the name SEQUENTIAL DECAY for about four years now.

You can get everything I’ve published so far on our current Kickstarter via the Digital or Physical “SeqDec Value Pack” tiers. This includes Nightmare Man, Free Hands #1 & #2, Small Bites #1, and the upcoming Old Devils #1.

Join the Decay now!

News from Friends Both New & Old

The nice thing about making stuff, is that you get to meet other people who make stuff. Here’s some stuff being made by folks I’ve known over the (in some cases many) years that I think are pretty cool.

Music

Pretty Out: All Good, No Worries

Featuring two guys I bowl with, Pretty Out delivers poppy, catchy riffs that give me nostalgia for driving in a carload of scenesters to Western Massachusetts and Central Connecticut church basements and VFW halls to see bands we downloaded songs of on Napster, while still feeling pretty current.

TEARDROPS: Something to Cry About

Jebb Riley has been a part of some of my all time favorite metal and stoner bands of all time: There Were Wires, Doomriders, and Disappearer. This time, he delivers a moderately more garage-rock records with a new cast of musicians. I’m listening to this thing all the time, and I recommend you give it a shot, too. Incidentally, he’s also a really good tattoo artist, as illustrated by most of my wife’s arm.

The Michelle Tucker Quintet: Leapin’

I met Tuck when she was in basement show bands in Allston 20+ years ago, and was incredibly gratified to see she had started a jazz quintet. Her arrangements are a fun, boppy jazz that evokes all the light fun of high-end mid-century club life without the baggage of the mob or the misogyny. Give it a listen and challenge yourself not to start dancing around your kitchen.

Books

It Came from the Trees by Ally Russell

Ally Russell is a walking spook factory. She doesn’t wait for “Halloween season,” she just basks in it 365 days a year. After years of laboring on it, her debut novel, It Came from the Trees has hit YA horror like a fallen oak on a roof. If you or your kids have ever been scouts or nature lovers, and have a hankering for some cryptids, snatch this book up immediately.

Historic Storms of America by Don Wilding

I often say that my dad had the best midlife crisis in history. While all the other divorced dads were buying sports cars and hitting on twenty year olds, my dad read Henry Beston’s The Outermost House and reinvented himself from a sports writer into a Cape Cod historian. He’s been cranking out books ever since. This one is, as you can see, about famous Cape Cod storms, and is a fantastic follow-up to his other works on shipwrecks and the Portland Gale.

Comics & Art

Graveyard Shift by J. Michael Donohue

The author of Morsels is back with a new horror story, and he’s brought artist Colleen Palmer on board for the ride. Graveyard Shift is the story of two mob enforcers, John and Hiroto, who use the small town of Addison Grove as a dumping place for the people their bosses want to disappear.

Cola Pop Creemees series by Desmond Reed

Desmond Reed has become and indie comics darling in Boston, and his super charming Cola Pop Creemees are a large part of why. I fun and kind of absurd day-by-day existence of sometimes roommates and sometimes bandmates, the Creemees have a real underground comix vibe while still feeling incredibly fresh, modern, and joyful in their exploration of depression, art, and being alive in the world right now.

Baseline Review by JP Boneyard and friends

JP Boneyard, of Fifty-Nine Parks and National Poster Retrospecticus fame, is curating a completely insane basketball legends series. Fresh art by America’s top poster designers and fawning write-ups about why all of them should be included in talks about who gets to be among “the greatest” (including some writing by me), this series is sure to produce hot and gorgeous art for collectors all over.

FREE HANDS #3 is coming soon!

I may be launching another story right now, but that doesn’t mean that FREE HANDS is over. Script for #3 is done and artist Matt Rowe is plugging away on pages, and we look forward to a campaign to get FREE HANDS to the middle mark in early 2025.

As always, the launch will be announced right here, so thanks for subscribing.