In the last year and half, I have been rejected 19 times. This includes submissions to agents and publishers for short stories and novels, animation shows pitched to studios, voice acting auditions, color jobs for animation and comics, and writing gigs for video games. I can't get a job to save my life. Or anyone's life. If you were to dangle a small baby over a lion and say, "Publish me a book or make a cartoon in exchange for revenue," then that would be one satisfied lion.

Before this, I experienced 16 years of constant work, and there wasn't a moment when my arms and brain and voice weren't engaged in some activity that, while they didn't generate fortunes, at least allowed me to make enough money to do more arm waving, screaming, and cerebral activity. Now, I've gone through the wave of emotions, from weeping into my lace handkerchief while re-reading Chapter 11 of A Picture of Dorian Gray, to feeling blame for everything bad that has ever happened in the world since Jesus rode that dinosaur head first into a crown-shaped thorn tree, to writing angry letters to the weather. It's a terrible cycle and I'll have no more of it, let me tell you. And I am telling you. See these words? Good. So! Rather that throw myself onto my replica copy of Sting, sharpened by my terrifying friend, Erk, who thinks every blade, even a toy blade, needs an edge, I've decided to go back to school.

Going back to school at age 39 is, as you may have guessed, a rather spooky decision, but not nearly as spooky as these art school applications. They are haunted, I think. But! What's even spookier right now is the cost of the portfolios I'm putting together.

And that's why I'm bothering you. You were all so nice the last time I had something horrible happen to me, and it was a great deal of fun signing autographs for everyone. So let it be known that once again, if you go here: http://www.tavicat.com/tavicat/donate.html and donate any amount (please note, it costs at least $1.22 for me to mail each autograph, and PayPal takes .50 cents), I will sign an autograph for you of either GIR or Bloaty, mail you the autographed picture, and then convert your donation money directly into an art portfolio for college using SCIENCE.

Thank you, and hopefully this is the last time I ever need to do this.


(image drawn by Bryan Konietzko, colored by Rikki Simons, created by Jhonen Vasquez, © by Nickelodeon)

-Rikki

Comic Con is always a huge drain on resources - and that's besides the Beebos we wear out just riding into town. Just eating for five days is a horrendous Dali schism of distance, crowd maneuvering, scheduling, and most of all, moneys. SO! To help ease that burden, and to ease our Beebos weary ear-wings, we've got 18 signed and illustrated copies of ShutterBox Book One for sale on Etsy.

You can buy them here: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=27796691

We thank you, and our imaginary bird-babies thank you.

-Rikki

Our attorney and friend, Ken Levin has confirmed for Tavisha and I that we own all of the rights to our entire ShutterBox series free and clear, including the copyrights, which we had never shared. As you may be aware, Tokyopop, the series' original publisher, went into "restructuring" last year and canceled publication of ShutterBox (along with many many of Tokyopop's other titles) just as we were about to turn in Book Five for early 2009 publication.



In answer to the numerous inquiries from some of the ShutterBox series' many fans: YES, we are now actively seeking a way to continue the series, both to publish the new volumes, and to republish the now out of print earlier volumes. We are open to and exploring both traditional publishing or through new methods. Interested publishers can e-mail me at rikki@rikkisimons.com and I'll forward any proposals to Ken, or can contact Ken directly at KenFLevin@gmail.com.



ShutterBox, the first American series published by Tokyopop (2003), is a high fantasy romance about a young lady named Megan Amano, who, when she dreams, is transported to an afterlife world where she attends school as the only living exchange student in a school for muses. Five volumes have been completed, with only four published thus far.



-Rikki

Today's @Tavicat comic is called "To Sanctuary:" http://www.tavicat.com.

It occurs to me that I don't feel bad for these characters I write until after I see the expressions that Tavisha draws. That fly probably has a family. I mean, look at him. He's been through some stuff.

I'm a monster.

Well, back to writing doomed insects.

-Rikki

Today's @Tavicat comic is up: http://www.tavicat.com. Prepare for ... The LOL Ones!

Are you prepared? Okay, good.

-Rikki

Our new @Tavicat comic is up: http://www.tavicat.com.

It's called "Belly."

The RSS Feed is now fully functional too.

-Rikki

New @Tavicat comic is up: http://www.tavicat.com. The site is much faster now. The RSS feed is still down, however.

-Rikki

We launched our @Tavicat comic site, and thanks to all of you who helped.

We shall endeavor to be entertaining: http://www.tavicat.com

The RSS doesn't seem to be working. I'll have to poke around with it. Or stare at it and cry.

It's twice a week, so the next strip will be up Thursday morning.

Woo!

-Rikki

Thank you to everyone who donated to get my computer back up to speed. Well, back up from death, really. Resuscitation is a form of inertia, I am told. My cats told me.

Some of you are asking that I wait for your PayPal accounts to fatten (??) before I cut off signing, so I'll keep accepting donations-for-prints until noon Tuesday, (California time) the 9th. If I go any longer than that, it'll look like a business instead of a rescue.

Your response has been ... robust! It'll will take me a day or two to sign all these prints. I'll try to get the birthday gifts off ASAP. It'll probably take a week to deliver your prints, probably two weeks for international.

No matter what state it's in, I'll have our @Tavicat web comic launched Tuesday evening THANKS TO YOU.

-Rikki

Friends, and by golly even horrible enemies, know that I hate asking for help, but I'm on Tavisha's computer right now because mine just went kaplowie. Actually, just the hard drive went kaplowie. The information is safe, but it's on a Time Machine drive, and I can't recover it without it erasing whatever drive it loads to. My iMac is, of course, now 3 months past its warranty, but I just need to buy and install a new internal drive into this mac and then I can have the Time Machine poop its amazingness into it.

Tomorrow, Tuesday the 9th of June is supposed to be the launch of our new web comic series called @Tavicat, the story of two adorable house cats and the dark gods they worship. These dark gods also seem bent on preventing the launch of this comic without sacrifice. And so I must humiliate myself for them. Dark gods jerks. They know I am a prideful hobo.

So! This is a limited time offer. Very limited. If you go to http://www.tavicat.com/donate.html and hit the "Donate" button, donate any amount, and include your address, two things will happen: 1) my hobo heart will fill with shame; 2) and I will sign this small print of GIR to whomever you like and mail it to you:


(image drawn by Bryan Konietzko, colored by Rikki Simons, created by Jhonen Vasquez, © by Nickelodeon)

-Rikki

I calculated Warp 5 all wrong and I have brought shame to the Vulcan order. Vulcan children may now bully me until I run weeping from the education pit.

In my insomnia I calculated 1 Astronomical Unit as 149.598 kilometers instead of 149,598,000 kilometers. Which means the Earth would be inside the Sun's corona had I been God. I KNOW, RIGHT?!?

SO!

Light speed is 1,079,252.8 kilometers an hour.

Warp 5 (1,000 times c) = 1,079,252,800 kilometers an hour.

After 6 hours, the Enterprise was 6,475,516,800 kilometers away.

Which is 43.29 Astronomical Units.

So the Enterprise was not 21.59 LY away when Scotty and Kirk beamed aboard, it was only a little farther than the distance between the Sun and Pluto.

I hope you will see fit to forgive me.

-Rikki

I very much enjoyed the recent laser-spaceship movie.

I don't know if this is a Star Trek spoiler, but don't read if you haven't seen the movie and are feeling cautious. Or tribbley. Or just rather salty ... .


Okay, so I used this scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Warptable.gif to make a quick calculation.

If the Enterprise was traveling at Warp 5, which is 1000 times the speed of light, for say, six hours (the time Kirk needed to wake up on the ice planet, get chased my monsters, find Old Spock, find Scotty, and start up the transporter), then Kirk and Scotty beamed at least 21.59 Light Years 43.29 Astronomical Units to the Enterprise. That's a little farther than orbit.

I'm going to go have sex with my calculator now and cry myself to sleep.

-Rikki

P.S. Star Trek Online game has more information on what Elder Spock tried to explain during his CSI flashback: http://www.startrekonline.com/node/235

P.P.S.: Was Romulus a binary system?

P.P.P.S.: Spock stood on the surface of Delta 5 and watched a black hole form (and then collapse?) less than an AU away. Did Spock's Genesis Device reincarnation in Star Trek III make him radiation proof? Aaron A. reminds me that Spock also has no salt in his body, according to the Salt Vampire episode of the original series.

P.P.P.P.S.: Is the new Enterprise different in design from the original series Enterprise because all of the engineers who would have designed the original series Enterprise were killed on the U.S.S. Kelvin?

P.P.P.P.P.S.: Can't ... turn ... off ... BRAIN! iiieeeee!!

As I rebuild our main Tavicat site for the coming @Tavicat web comic, I'm also trying to make room over at my Rhumbaghost site for a little extra thing — a little thing in the spirit of The Spirit of Failure. Over at Rhumbaghost I'll be posting short stories that find no publisher. Once a story makes the full circle of publishers and is rejected multiple times, or many multiples of multiple times, I'll place it online, complete with illustration. Here is the first and it is 6,000 words:

EDIT: An PDF is also available here: http://www.rhumbaghost.com/short_stories/Kipling_Mistletine_Poppish_web.pdf




Kipling Mistletine Poppish
by Rikki Simons


Kipling Mistletine Poppish could hold up to eighteen conversations simultaneously: fifteen conversations more than a simple Poeta, five above the average Phothesic Engine Priest, thirteen above the most standard Human, and of course, seventeen more than the average Ghoul. A discussion in holo here, a debate in Tacit Outhernet there, gossip in analog tongue, and poetry in subvocal harmonies: so much chatter to sort and yet he’d still have to hold open a line for the Keysers, who communicated via hallucinations. Kipling was a talented, if rather lonely android.


***


Kipling stood lank and tall in the streaming rain, like a pumpkin-headed scarecrow adrift in a waterfall, slightly bent in his gray-green campsuit. The safari armor left him comfortable, dry and warm, and though the dome helmet was open, the waters of Keyser’s World bounced from its illuminated deflector fields. He could have closed the helmet and sent a short burst message to his surrounding crew, but the Keysers, the theocratic rulers of this world, might be listening. To communicate with his crew working the mineral pools five meters away, Kipling simply shouted his synthetic lungs out — and what he shouted, as always, sounded unintentionally camp.

“Right-o! Our lady whale will surface in ten minutes at this rate! Rather!” Kipling hollered in his Flash-Wooster modded Ing‘Lesh, the national patois of the Windsor Temporality. As a Brummagem android Kipling could make himself heard clearly over the aqueous roar, cartoon vernacular and all.

( Click here and read the rest of this story under the LiveJournal cut. )

I will be on the Internet radio show ARMY OF DRUNKS tonight along with Eric Trueheart and his beautiful goons. You can listen here http://www.theoryradio.org at 8:00 PM Pacific time (as in Los Angeles) if your ears are over 18. That's 18 years not 18 inches. We don't cater to no childrens or Night Elves. Go there and press "Tune in Now" at the appropriate time. It is a vulgar show and the last time it aired near someone of virtue, Jesus rode all the dinosaurs into a volcano. IS TRUE!

There's not much going on besides this. I've been out of work for so long now my life has become a sort of hobo version of Homer's Odyssey. The homeless now sing to me a sweet urine-scented Siren call, steering my cardboard box closer to the rocks. Odysseus was just Boxcar Willie with a Cyclops you know. The Sirens sound like Tom Waits riding the pony, but I no longer play his albums, I burn them for warmth.

Tavisha's family continues to fall apart and we are the only ones with the glue, and even then our glue is more of an acidic fly vomit than a proper adhesive. As Tavisha's mother's condition worsens Tavisha's grandmother seems to descend as well. I have never been inside a psych ward before in my life, and in the past month I have visited two. Not for me of course, but if I have to keep going in there I'll soon make the transition from visitor to resident. Our hospital system is so screwed up that this is where they put old ladies with dementia and neurological conditions when their symptoms worsen. We used to have to make our way through the elderly moaning through dark hallways in wheelchairs when we visited Dee, now we have to walk through electronically secure doors and navigate a path through howling men tied to chairs and fractured tour guides who try to sell us a vacation package to China, but all they're really doing is pointing at a game of Battleship. An interesting note, one of the doctors has suggested that her mother may not have suffered a stroke after all, but may have been the victim of a brain virus. If that's true then hide your brains, people. Breathe nothing. They eat your personality and leave you a walking catatonic unable to even discern the nature of food.

We are still working on our website, rebuilding it for its @Tavicat comics debut. Considering everything that's happening, the April release will most likely get pushed to the end of the month. Everything involving old ladies leaves us pooped.

ShutterBox is still tied up. No progress there yet.

On a happier note, I painted this picture, called happy Eddy:



You can buy him here for $55: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=23301606

He comes with the following poem:

Happy Eddy strolls under daylight moon,
Tiny stick feet sift through rocks and gloom,
When the stars come out it's near half past noon,
Happy Eddy smiles under daylight moon.

Meanwhile, Tavisha has out-cuted me with the following picture of what she calls a Seawee:



You can buy her here for $45: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=23303579

SEAWEEEEEEEE!!!

-Rikki

P.S. On that final episode of Battlestar Galactica: I don't care what the horny space angels want, I wouldn't give up my spaceship, life saving surgery, and toilet paper for Apollo's cwaaaazy ideas.

I just ordered 50 more years of quality life with Tavisha from God. He better deliver, or else I won't let him borrow any more of my Richard Dawkins books.

Oh, good. the pills just kicked in. 'Night!

-Rikki

I have opened an Etsy site. Above is a link to an original painting I painted with PAINT and oil pastel and colored pencil back in 1992. I don't know what i was thinking when I painted it, but the Cocteau Twins were probably playing in the background, and I include the following description at Etsy:

Izabella the Spotted Icabicarus rests in the core of a red giant star, held captive in a private zoo in a sealed chamber all to herself. She was once human. Once she would hang around clubs after hours, a New Wave girl in old London town. She met a fashion designer who never took off his shades, even when they were intimate. He was very strange and she could never place his accent. One day he said to Izabella, "You know you'd look great in spots. How 'bout it, babe?" What could she say? Of course, she'd love to be in spots.
She remembers the bright lights in the park after Flock of Seagulls played one night. She remembers him standing at the ramp, a bright light behind him, beckoning for her to follow. She doesn't recall the ship landing, the isolation chamber, or her transformation. She just remembers waking up one day, all alone in a strange habitat, the feeling of many eyes pressing down on her from behind some artificial sky, a New Wave girl in a new kind of world.

$400 is a bit steep, I know, but I'm trying to reinstate my Screen Actors Guild membership to paid-up status, and that costs the moneys.

Prints are available at the full Etsy Shop, here: unGrande Artmentations.

And Tavisha too has an Etsy, located here'bouts: The Sleepy Muse.

More prints will go up as the days go buy. I will also sporadically spore out some new painting originals from time-to-time, probably around the $90 range too. I will keep you posted with posts.

-Rikki

The above amazing render of my actual face is by Shadra. This sparked a battle of little post-it pics between she and I and Dizzy at Ohayocon, which resulted in an image of Galactus in bed with a Mecha Lincoln. It was a fierce battle, but love won out. As it always does.

I have neglected you, oh Sad Circus readers, and for that I should be punished. Nothing too harsh mind you. None of your William Wallace intestines on a spool shenanigans. Though I would argue the court that the ice cream man who keeps playing Turkey in the Straw ALL DAY LONG outside my window is punishment enough.

Several things have held my attention. I shall mark them off in order:

( A CHUNK of pictures and words under the cut. )

Now if you excuse me, I have to go help Tavi kill a bear in Warcraft. BEARS! IT'S ALL ABOUT BEARS!

-Rikki

It seems like all I use this journal for is to find lost relatives and pets. Well, this is about my mother's dog, Misty. Every thing's in the poster there, as far as description. She was last seen on Huntington Blvd. near Main in Los Angeles, just South of Pasadena, possibly running towards Alhambra. She's been missing since last Sunday and so far nothing has turned up at any of the emergency clinics or shelters we've checked (the Pasadena Humane Society on Raymond is very nice, by the way — if you're looking to adopt in LA, that's a good place to start).

The e-mail address is my mother's and please only use it if you think you have helpful information. She's crying about Misty every day as is, please don't make her cry to me about one of you e-mailing her about singing the "Doom Song." I am shaking my finger at you all dad-like.

I have to run out the door in the next several hours and get on a plane to Columbus Ohio, where Tavisha and I will be attending Ohayocon as guests, so my search for misty ends here for now. I hope she'll be found before we get back. I love animals, but I've never been much of a "dog person" I suppose. But Misty has always been been a cut above the average dog. She loves to shake hands, never diddles on anyone's lawn when you take her for a walk, and she's safe around children and indoor cats — but bring her outside and leave her alone and her little doggy brain goes ZING and she starts running. This time she didn't find her way back.

So if you're in LA, South of South Pasadana, Alhambra, San Gabriel please watch for Misty. Thanks!

-Rikki

The first shot: http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/8cXgLB57TCArTUbZgYjP

And to warm your heart: http://coilhouse.net/2008/12/24/the-magic-of-christmas-delivered/#more-5022

-Rikki

I have been preoccupied.

I did not mean to neglect you but I have been flittering about like a giant fairy man, engaged in the days events with a Dali-like, mustachioed wide-eyed panic. However!

I have this for you: you can now purchase Super Information Hijinks: Reality Check! from iTunes for your iPhone or iPod Touch. The individual chapters are being zipped out slowly over the coming weeks and the first two APPs available cover two and a half chapters. Here are the links:

This 1st issue covers chapter 1 of Volume 1.
.99 cents.

This 2nd issue covers chapter 2 and half of chapter 3 of Volume 1. I don't know why they divided it up like that. But there are many things in life that make my HAL 9000 brian sing Daisy, so I best not think about it. Also .99 cents.

You may ask, "But wasn't Reality Check loaded up to Tavicat.com as an archived comic strip forever?" Why yes, but even forever ends and this is a horrible universe.

Hope you like. Oh, and can you do me a favor and push the purchase button a million times? Thanks!

-Rikki