So, as I believe I mentioned earlier, I’ve been working on putting together a print edition of one of my plays, Parens. Well, I did it! I don’t have the full order in hand yet, but I received my first copy, and I think it looks pretty darn spiffy, in its understated way.

I plan to sell copies at The Maine Comics Festival in Portland in a couple of weeks, and I’ll be selling them direct from my website, of course, once I have the copies in hand. In the meantime, if you just can’t wait, you can order directly from Lulu.com. (Print copy is $10.00, or you can just buy the download for $6.00. I make the same profit either way.)

And hey, if any theatre people out there read it, and like it, and maybe want to produce it–I’m all ears!

Here’s a synopsis:

Parens. is the story of Brook and William, a wife and husband, the impressionable student and the lover of language, who now speak only through voice recorders, their lives encoded in battles over grammatical minutia.

It is also the story of Eloquence and Bill, the two children who ferry these messages back and forth, always bouncing from one parent to the other, struggling to find their place in a fractured family.

Weaving forward and back through three pivotal days, Parens. reveals a chain of events that will force Brook and William to finally confront the state of their family and to make the most important decisions of their lives.

I’ve started adding the old Amy stories from Picture Story Theatre to my main comics archive, under the series title of Amy’s Picture Stories. “Amy Plays a Game of Chance” went up today. This was one of my first illustrated comics, and the very first one which I collaborated with Bill Duncan. I think it’s fair to say that Bill and I have both come a long way since that first story, but I still have a deep affection for it. This one story lead directly to my regularly creating comics, not to mention that it resulted in a lasting friendship with Bill and his family.

I’m going to try to add another Amy story each day until they’re all up.

I noticed that my first collaboration with Grug, Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, has been getting a noticeable spike in traffic over the past few weeks, but couldn’t figure out why. It didn’t seem to be getting any prominent links or anything like that. Then I saw a news posting, that pointed out what I should have realized in the first place–the actual Bring Your Daughter to Work Day (now called “Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day”) just passed! Duh!

So…Happy Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day everyone!

Busy as I am these days, I don’t often have time to go hunting for new comics. But I do always check the linked sites for people looking to buy adspace on my site, to make sure they’re not linking to anything I find terribly offensive or objectionable. And every now and then, I find a great new comic as a result.

The first one I found this way, probably a couple of years ago now, was Buttersafe,by Alex Culang and Raynato Castro, a strange comic with a darkly random sense of humor somewhat in the vein of The Perry Bible Fellowship. I don’t read many straight-up humor strips, but this one often delights me.

Today I found another strip that seems promising–Amelia Altavena’s Sketchfervor, a journal comic that occasionally reminds me of Erika Moen’s Dar, interspersed with some lovely flights of fancy, such as today’s strip, wherein Amelia vomits up a Miyazaki-esque canine companion.

At some point in the next couple of days (or maybe even today, if I get ambitious enough), I plan to make another major change to this site. Right now, the primary content appearing on TwentySevenLetters.com is my blog, which isn’t really the most important content I publish online. So, may plan is to reorganize to put the comics front and center. The end result will probably look a lot like the front page of my WebcomicsNation site–a portal to my various projects. The blog will continue to appear at the bottom of every page, and will retain the same RSS feed location. But new visitors to this site will be presented with a better set of options for introducing themselves to my work. And I suspect most people are reading the blog through RSS rather than direct off the website these days anyway.

So, don’t be surprised if next time you stop by, things look considerably different.

No details yet, but Frank Frishna posted an update regarding his missing niece earlier today:

WE FOUND HER!!!!! SHE IS OK!!! I JUST BROUGHT HER HOME!!!! WILL POST DETAILS SOON ON LIFESABLUFF.COM – thank you everyone!!!!

Cartoonist Frank Frishna (Life’s a Bluff) posted on his blog today that his 14 year-old niece went missing this past Saturday. There are no indications that she ran away. Frishna lives in Colorado, so if you are anywhere in that part of the country, please take a look at the photos on Frishna’s blog and keep an eye out for her. Frishna is offering a reward for information leading to her safe return–not that any reward should be necessary.

The Patriotic Adventures of Star-Spangled Danner.

BIll Duncan opened up an Etsy shop this week, where he’s selling kitschy figurines that he has repainted in his own adorably monstrous style. Go see!

• I’ve decided to put together a print edition of my play, Parens., which I hope to have available at the new comics convention starting up in Portland, Maine next month. I’m making good progress, but laying out a book is a lot of work! Especially when you’re dealing with script formatting. I’ll likely be getting it printed through Lulu.com.
• I still need to finish the revisions to Trouble Is. I had hoped to be further along on this than I am now, but I keep getting distracted by other things, such as fixing my website and laying out a book for print. Still, this is okay–it’s always good to step away for a few weeks before diving back into revisions. And I’m confident the process will move very quickly once I get started again.
• Of course, the biggest holdup is that I’m still in session at school, and I’m way behind on grading papers. Not as far behind as I was, and I’m making progress, but until I get out from under this backlog of grading, I’m not really going to be able to put my full attention on anything else. Fortunately, the end of the semester is just two weeks off. Unfortunately, the final day of class will bring a whole new stack of papers to grade.
• Bill Duncan, Leah Fitzgerald, & family are visiting this weekend! I haven’t seen them in much too long.