SR 1 PAGE NINE

SIDEWAYS PAGES! You’ll have to zoom, unfortunately. Sorry! I assure you this all worked very well in floppy print magazine form.

And DANG those are some huge shoes on Sera. Big, bulky boots were such a thing in the goth/industrial scene of the early 2000’s. Everyone was rockin’ their New Rocks, the bigger the gothier, the more straps and buckles the more formidable the scenester cred. I heard about one guy who LIVED in his New Rocks. He had a full kitchenette and half-bath built in there, with a plumbing system that let his effluence out through the heel. No shower in there, sadly, but if you’re living in shoes a certain amount of funk is unavoidable anyway. Beats paying rent in L.A., AM I CORRECT ABOUT THIS FOLKS??

(Just checked and it looks like you can still buy New Rocks, and they’re just as bulky and complicated as they were in 2001. I find this weirdly comforting.)

Not much else to say about this page, except that it’s making me think of the teacher in college who pointed out that pines don’t really come to neat little points like that. Which is true! How do those top branches even work, MAN? Are they all bent down at 20 degree angles from the tippy-top of the trunk, DUDE? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING, BRO??

THIS IS IMPORTANT.

SR 1 PAGE TEN

Crestfallen! So where did the idea for Crestfallen come from? Basically my daydream of the coolest conceivable place to live. A big ol’ hunk of Old Europe nestled in the Pacific Northwest and bursting with freaky legends, weirdo secrets, and literal monsters. Paradise. But even in my daydreams I know what regular humans would do with such a cool place. It would become a suffocating tourist trap within seconds of discovery.

Which is funny! And creepy. The attempt to Disnify something so inherently sinister creates a lot of nice, sizzly dramatic tension. (When I’m doing it right, at least.) 

When I was a kid, every summer my family would drive up from Chicago to spend a couple weeks in Door County, WI, the spiky peninsula jabbing into Lake Michigan. Now, Door County (“Cape Cod of the Midwest!”) isn’t exactly “The Spookiest Lil’ Town in the U.S.A”, but it was still an inspiration for Crestfallen. Door County was (and is) a place almost entirely cut off from the big corporate chains that rule the rest of the country. No McDonald’s, no Wal-Mart, no Holiday Inn Express, nothing. Not even Sbarro. There’s one lonely Piggly Wiggly, and I remember an electronic shop had a “RADIO SHACK” sign in the window for a while, but otherwise, every business is unique to Door County, by design. There’s something beautiful about that kind of separateness: This place is only this place. That idea had a big impact on me as a kid.

You just know in the world of Serenity Rose, Chick Fil-A would LOVE to cram a franchise into the bottom floor of Crow Clock. Somebody’s preventing that from happening, but I’d sort of love to see them try?

The only other thing that pops into my head re-reading this page is that “confusing” is my least favorite note to get and also by far the most common note throughout my artistic career.

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

Turned in the final(?) cover for SHOCK CITY this week! Fingers crossed my editor and the design team like it. A good cover can be the difference between selling 8.5 million copies and living in a wet paper bag in a dumpster behind Carl’s Jr.

Speaking of breathtakingly beautiful covers, I came across this A.I.-generated treat on Bluesky the other day (a real book really listed on real Amazon dot com):

The future is so bright we gotta wear shades, gang.

NEXT WEEK: IT’S NOT BALONEY.