Over?

Almost two weeks since Rebecca's last treatment and as predicted, she's feeling fine. In face she's been feeling better since middle of last week. There's a slight bit of discomfort still lingering but on the whole, it's all over. Big sighs! There'll be regular check ups, and a scans, but that's it, just recovering now.
It's been a mixed up six months, weirdly not all bad, with a bit of luck, and work, we'll be getting back to normal life.
Thanks to everyone who's expressed support and concern, all great appreciated.

The Man Who Shook

Quick as a flash after the last post, you may now head over to a whole new blog here and read an old short story of mine.
I wrote 'The Man Who Shook' under the influence of M.R. James way back somewhere in the misty regions of 2001. I do like a creepy yarn and it seemed the older stories hada different weight, a creepier one. I decided it would be wizard to set a story in the sort of present but write it in a style that seemed older (I've since discovered Mark Samuels who does something like this and does it brilliantly). I could have carefully researched and spent a great deal of time emulating the prose of James or Algernon Blackwood, but I thought it'd be easier and more fun to just bang it out. Oddly it came remarkably quickly and I had a lot of fun doing it. Having enjoyed the experience I decided to never repeat it and went to work not writing much, and when I did trying to keep it as simple and direct as possible.
Even though I could have taken the opportunity of retyping it to smooth out rough edges, and generally improve the writing I decided to stick to the spirit of the original and just bash it out expanding some bits and cutting others down for no other reason than I felt like it.
Lest you think this is some wonderful minor piece of literature due to the length of this inroduction, let me absolutely assure you that it is utter nonsense. But it really was meant to be:)

Living off the past

A week later and things are still a bit rubbish, but Rebecca's slowly starting to feel a little better and is managing a few hours sleep. We had bad news during the week the Rebecca wouldn't be getting her full sick pay, nor would she be getting statutory sick pay which was a bit of a surprise and left us feeling a bit run down, luckily we've managed to sort something out that should get us through the next couple of months.
Meanwhile I'm revisiting old work in an effort to get my, ahem, 'creative juices flowing.
I'll post a short story soon. I wrote it years and years ago but lost it from my hard drive when my last computer died. I'm not sure that it's any good but I've got a soft spot for it so I decided to type up the hard copy pruning it a little in the process. I've not really changed anything, just added a touch of rouge to a moldy old corpse. Anyway, that'll go up as soon as I find out how to do the whole 'click here to read more' thing, or give up and just put up one big post.
Artwise I've dug out a story I did a few years ago for Solar Wind called 'Punk Princess'. Again, I'm not sure if my artwork's much good but it was a great script so I thought I'd try and improve it a little, especially as the printed version was badly pixelated.
I had hoped to post a Wickerman picture, sadly it didn't turn out too well so that'll have to wait, I do have another idea I'll draw up soon.

Weary

Today was the last day of my wife's radiotherapy treatment. The last week's been awful, and it's not really over as radiotherapy stays with you for maybe 2 weeks. In the last week sleep has been difficult and she's been putting up with what feels like bad stomach cramps every few minutes, not pleasant when she's already got the external pain to deal with. Morphine would have helped, but it would cause other problems making things worse, so it's been a grin and bear it situation.
It feels like we should be marking the last treatment with some sort of celebration, but in the circumstances it's not really practical, or possible to be honest. So I bought flowers, a crap mag and a tub of Bailey's ice cream complete with the promise of doing something nice in week or so.
Better news is Olivia's now on her fifth tooth and is becoming more mobile.
Posts about inconsequential nonsense like horror, comics and dopey pin ups will resume:)

The Terminator

So, I had planned to do a different picture, but I was struggling a bit, so I decided to do something else, I will finish the other one though.
Quite taken with halftoning at the moment, might permanently add it to my personal catalogue of fx. Incase you don't recognise the scene, just picture Pill Paxton's corpse at Arnie's feet.
Er, what else? Hmm, the logo's 'inspired' by Monstermag stuff which I'm very taken with at the mo. It also reminds me of the logo for 'The Invaders'.... a Quinn Martin production!

Edit. A brief comment from Peter Bangs, allows me to ramble about my 'technique' :)
After scanning my line art I turned it red and removed the bg. In a seperate layer I filled in the main shape with a lighter red, then painted the tones in using white or varying degrees of transparency. Selected the 'colour halftone' from the pixelate/filter menu I set the 4 channels to the same degree to give the dots a uniform look. The I laid the original line work over the halftoned layer.
I used another layer to give Arnie a solid white bg and coloured the blood on his hand, this allowed me to make the fist nice and dark but still keep the halftoned shading effect (I also didn't like the way the fist looked when I tried colouring it as part of the halftone) - don't know how well it shows up, maybe better on the larger version.
Originally the bg was going to be a flat blue so as not to jar with the halftone, but it didn't work, so I went for something a bit more textured. The logo was a hand drawn after thought that I really like now, looks like The Cramps version of the Terminator or something.
And that's it, apart from the trial and error I went through to figure all that out:)

Grrrr

Feeling very frazzled, tired and emotional you might say. Can't go into full details really, suffice to say that not everyone has been as supportive as they could've been during Rebecca's illness, and it reached new lows yesterday.
Guess it's a cliche that big things like life threatening illnesses make you view things differently, but it's a true one. 2007's been a weird old year so far, I think I'd like a very different 2008.