December 2004

Happy Holidays! Greetings & Felicitations!

Another year has come & gone in NickLand. Here are some of the highlights!

…But first, a bit of sad news. Angelo the Toad, mentioned in the last holiday letter, croaked (pun intended) very shortly afterward. We buried the defunct amphibian in a quick funeral on a freezing cold night in early January. The moral of this story? Frogs and toads are pretty neat, but they generally don’t make good pets; they get stressed-out too easily in captivity.

And now, more pleasant news! 2003 saw the marriage of Joelle to Don Gray; 2004 saw the marriage of Stefan to Heather Pearson! Here are some pictures from that momentous day.

Me, in my cool outfit. That’s an abaya (an Arabic caftan) with a gold sash. Unfortunately, I was suffering from a terrible cold, and spent most of the time coughing, sneezing, being bloated and generally ailing around. On the right is the wedding cake: 200 Krispy Kreme doughnuts, surmounted by Ralph Wiggums and Lisa Simpson of the TV cartoon The Simpsons. Mmm… doughnuts…

The Happy Couple, exchanging vows and smiling for the camera. We get a nice view of Heather’s boss skin illustrations here! That’s a Pre-Raphaelite Virgin Mary on her arm, and a Buddha-style lotus flower on her back.

Let us all make merry! (Left to right) Best man Seth, me, Jordan, Stefan, Mom & Dad.

The wedding party. Heather’s parents are on the far right; her bridesmaids are clustered near Dad (must be his cologne!), and Charlotte the officiant is in the back.

The wedding was delightfully un-conventional. There was a great sense of village-like community there. The ceremony took place in the theater room of the Metro Arts Center in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. Stefan’s musical friends and associates provided lots of music for the ceremony and reception. Stefan even joined in during the reception, giving a mini-concert on various instruments.

And now, Stefan & Heather are expecting a baby (or “geebee,” as we Dollaks like to say)! This new addition, due around January 10, appears to be a girl.

There’s the cute little jellybean, circa July 22.

This summer, I made my first CD! It’s a recording of some music I composed, all “performed” by “The Electronic Philharmonic” – a collection of computer programs, a Yamaha DGX-300 keyboard and a digital 4-track recorder. It’s kind of neat to finally hear all this music I’ve written. The pieces are: a trio for piano and two violins, a string quartet, a fantasia on “All in a Garden Green” for piano, flute and recorder, and an orchestral arrangement of a Polish folk dance. The trio and quartet are from my high school days. “Garden” is a piece I wrote a few years ago for Lily. The Polish dance was commissioned by my “pen pal” Ewa Barycka, who is a bit of a Renaissance woman. One of her many talents is folk dancing, and she wanted a recording of this tune so her dance troupe could perform to it. I spent a good deal of the summer composing this arrangement, and spent almost as much time trying to record it! Fortunately, thanks to a lot of help from Jordan, I finally got everything to work properly, and made my first large-ensemble multi-track recording. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it!

Currently, I’m busy with several other things. But I look forward to continuing with the music. There are two more early works I wish to record, if only as practice runs for new pieces. I also need to finish Lily’s piano concerto. Then there’s a very ambitious symphony I’ve been pondering on for many years… It began as a symphony about the Red Baron; but now it looks like it will be a symphony about flight, with the Red Baron as the fourth of its six movements.

Lily and I are beginning to look into the possibilities of getting a house. Right now, our best bet seems to be houses that have been foreclosed. Hopefully, we’ll locate something soon, so I can move out of my apartment before my lease starts up again in April. The new house will probably not be very far from Glassboro, and should be near the local bus route so that Lily can live there and still get to work. Wish us luck!

In the meantime, I’ve finished illustrating my novel Jenna of Erdovon, and Malibu Books should be publishing it in September. It turned out to be quite a bit more work than I had anticipated, requiring the addition of a new chapter and several re-writes of the next-to-the-last chapter; but the end result is quite satisfying.

Four pictures from Jenna of Erdovon.

Malibu’s next project after Jenna is Honshirabe, a manga (graphic novel) based on a science-fiction script by Preston McClear. He’s still fine-tuning his script, but I expect to be drawing Honshirabe within a few months. I’ve drawn a few comics before, but nothing as ambitious and lengthy as a manga. The reduction size is a bit smaller than that of a newsstand comic book, too, so I’m practicing with the new format so that the text and pictures don’t become too small on the page.

In the brief interim between Jenna and Honshirabe, I’ve been illustrating my Arabian Nights book, Four Tales of Wonder. I’m using a “new” technique in which I use colored pencils, then watercolors and gouache. It produces brighter colors, sharper contrasts, and saves time. For a few decorative touches, I use paint pens. These little marker-like pens produce small dots or lines of opaque paint – great for making strings of beads and pearls, or geometric patterns, in a fraction of the time it would take to paint them.

Two pictures from the first story, “The Flying Ebony Horse.” I modeled the sleeping Princess after Lily, and the Prince after myself.

An island inhabited entirely by reptiles from “Prince Bulukiya’s Foot-Journey Across the Seven Seas,” and Ahmad-the-Moth & his archers returning in disgrace from “The Pranks of Delilah-the-Wily.” Mine is probably the only Arabian Nights book with dinosaurs in it! I had some fun with creative anachronism in the “Delilah-the-Wily” story, too.

Well, that’s the year in a 7-page nutshell. I hope that 2005 turns out to be a fantastic year for everyone!