May 26, 2010

Greetings & Felicitations!

Here’s Nick, staggering in a little late with the holiday letter again. I hope this finds everyone doing well.

Keep fingers firmly crossed – so far this is the first holiday letter in many years to NOT announce the passing of someone near & dear to me. Good! Let’s go with that feeling, people. I was beginning to dread writing these! Think about it – who goes to a stationery store and requests some festive holiday letter paper… with a Victorian-style black border?

Probably the biggest upheaval in my life this past year (2009) was another abrupt relocation. As I’d mentioned last year, after Lily’s mother passed away, Lily inherited her parents’ house – and the rent on my apartment was raised to the point where I couldn’t afford to stay. (Neither could most of the tenants; while I was moving out I saw that the complex, which used to have a waiting-list for vacancies, was now nearly deserted.) We arranged for me to move into Lily’s house, where I intended to help clean it up. However, since the items in the house were other people’s things, my tidying-up was limited to times when I was at home and Lily’s sister Conni was visiting. This took some time. Then, as the 2008-2009 school year drew to a close, Conni announced that she was moving out of Salem and into Lily’s house, with her two teenaged children. For legal and practical reasons, I’d have to move out. After a rather frantic couple of months of searching, I found a room for rent in Sicklerville. My new landlord is a fellow named Antonio, who is a professional masseur. If you’re in the South Jersey area and would like a massage, you may wish to look him up. Here’s his profile page on MassageAnywhere.com: http://www.massageanywhere.com/profile/AntonioSantana

Since Conni & her kids moved in, Lily’s house has undergone quite a transformation! Conni’s friends & in-laws who work in construction and have time to assist spent much of last summer fixing the living-room ceiling, installing new light fixtures and completely rebuilding the bathroom and kitchen. It looks quite nice now.

I also shaved my head. My hair had been falling out for many years, and after reading someone’s observation that “having a bald spot is all of the maintenance and none of the benefits of having hair,” I decided to give total baldness a try. It’s quite a different look for me, but it’s not bad! So, Star Trek fans, do I look the way Captain Picard would in the Parallel Universe?

Spock… “Mirror, Mirror” Spock… Picard… ???

It looks like the store in Greenwich Village is officially called “The Lost World” now. Yes, it underwent many name changes! Here’s the list of names (for those who are keeping score), and what the problems were:

“Nick and Preston’s Imaginarium and Gift Shop” – Very long name, most of the gift items were hard to sell, it was too difficult for casual passers-by to figure out what to expect to find within no matter what signage we used, and too many (usually drunk) people more interested in asking “What’s an ‘imaginarium’?” or complaining “This ain’t imaginative” than in actually buying anything.
“Thompson Street Comics” – This seemed to do well at first. One knew what to expect from the name and the window display. Many locals were excited because they missed the comic shop that had existed a block away. Unfortunately, most of the customers were locals, and they simply didn’t buy enough for us to maintain a healthy stock. It became too difficult to keep titles in stock, and customers drifted off. The T-shirts we had seemed to be selling, though, even to the occasional tourists who came in…
“The Lost World” – Like “Imaginarium,” it’s a name that conveys something offbeat; but it doesn’t require a dictionary definition. It doesn’t limit us to a single niche as much as “Comics” did. We now seem to be specializing in T-shirts and DVDs, while unloading our unsold comics. Our books are there, too, as are some figures I make out of a polymer resin clay called Super Sculpey.™

The Alien from the Alien movies.

Counter-clockwise from left: The asteroid chase from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back; the mighty Kong fights off those pesky biplanes; Harley Quinn from the Batman comics.

Business picked up considerably last June, when the barrier at the Washington Square Park end of Thompson Street was finally removed. It improved a little more when we changed the focus to T-shirts and videos. However, it may be quite some time before we’re out of financial trouble. That barrier went up immediately after we’d opened in November 2007, wrecking our sales for the first year and seven months! That’s a LOT of damage.

With all the turmoil of moving and the rush to make Sculpey™ figures on request, I’ve been incredibly busy. Before the move, I had hoped that, if I couldn’t land a day job for the summer, I could at least get a lot of work done on Honshirabe, Preston’s graphic novel on which I’ve been working for several years. Well, the summer was a bummer, of course; the relocation occupied most of my time. Thank goodness I now had the evening/weekend job at By Design Furniture as a technician! All the same, I made no progress on Honshirabe until after the school year started. A month ago, during a break period, I pulled out Honshirabe to continue working on it – and realized to my amusement that I was in the exact same classroom I’d been in when I’d left off!

Two pages of Honshirabe I “completed” in 2009. They should look really awesome when the half-tones are put in, and the backgrounds finished in the page on the right.

I’ve been slowly learning to use a drafting program and CorelDraw, both of which should make it easier for me to complete Honshirabe and make it look great. Since the story takes place in a city, there are many buildings in the background, which take a very long time to draw. Hopefully the drafting program will allow me to create a few blocks of “virtual city” that can be inserted into backgrounds. CorelDraw hopefully will open up a few career doors for me, as “vector graphics” seems to be the industry standard now. It appears that CorelDraw has an OCR subroutine that might allow me to turn my free-hand drawings into vectors with ease – something I feel would be preferable to trying to draw entirely on a computer!

I met with a career counselor at Rowan University. He looked over my résumé and recommended a number of changes, which he then approved. I may be suited for something along the lines of a medical technician job – analyzing X-rays and MRIs. However, I’d require training, and in the current economy hospitals simply aren’t training. He said that they used to, and that they might resume training when things improve. Meanwhile, though, I used my new & improved résumé to help land a tutoring job with Gloucester County Special Services School District (GCSSSD – even their initials are long!) Many thanks to Lily, who has been a tutor with them for many years, for letting me know that GCSSSD was about to expand into Camden County (where I am now) and would require more tutors! At this point I’m still taking care of technical details; I have an appointment for fingerprinting and a Mantoux test coming up. But hopefully I’ll have a tutoring schedule soon. It may interfere with my furniture store hours a bit, but I’ll try and limit the tutoring to Mondays & Tuesdays, and come in to By Design a little early the rest of the week.

I also owe Lily thanks for informing me of another income-generating sideline: the Cancer Education/Early Detection Program at Underwood Memorial Hospital (CEED). I now occasionally distribute cancer-prevention literature at events, informing people of free services that exist for uninsured or under-insured people. It’s possible that President Obama’s health-care reform might render CEED a moot point, but until the bill is passed, these services do exist. If you know anyone who could benefit from a free screening for breast, prostate, colorectal or cervical cancer, here’s a toll-free number to call: 1 (800) 328-3838.

For Christmas, Mom gave me a book by Dr. Oliver Sacks called Seeing Voices, which is about sign language and its role in the Deaf community. It’s very insightful, and now I’m slowly teaching myself ASL (American Sign Language). Although I’m sure my signing is the visual equivalent of stuttering, I picked up a few basic signs very quickly and still remember them now, a few days later, despite not having practiced. For me, this might be easier than learning another spoken language. Because different parts of the brain are involved in signing than in speaking, I’m curious to know if signing can be used to facilitate learning a spoken language. Basically, can one gain fluency in Sign, then practice a spoken language while signing, thus reinforcing the new vocabulary? That’s an experiment I’d like to try.

It looks like “electronic books” are beginning to supplant the printed page, so I’m currently preparing a Kindle-downloadable version of Jenna of Erdovon. This would have been rather quick work if I’d had a MS Word version of it, with the illustrations. As it turns out, I’d inserted the pictures into the Quark file – the industry standard for paper versions – but not the Word file. I also noticed a change I’d made in the text after I’d made the Quark file! Not knowing just how many last-minute changes I’d made, I had to copy the text from Quark, re-format, etc….

This letter is now half a year late! Teaching work picked up abruptly in March, and with all the other jobs on my plate, I simply lacked the time to work on this… until I got a nice little “netbook” computer. For those who aren’t sure what that is, it’s like a “laptop” computer but lacks a disc drive for external data storage. In fact, it probably doesn’t even use a disc for a hard drive, but rather a flash-drive-like module. The result is something smaller, lighter and less expensive than a laptop. Anyway, I used a flash-drive to copy and install the Finale, Photoshop and CorelDraw applications, so now I’ll be able to work on Jenna, Honshirabe, improve my CorelDraw skills, and get that second symphony written, all during prep periods and the layover between teaching and the evening job! At this moment I’m still having trouble getting some applications to load properly, but at least MS Word works so I can wrap up Jenna as well as this letter.

The nieces, Meghan and Tanith Queen, are growing up so nicely and keeping everyone entertained with their lively imaginations. Both are taking dance classes and learning to read & write.

T.Q. is a mischievous wood-sprite; M.J. is a ballerina preparing for her dance “recycle.”

Well, I’d better post this so it’s not any more embarrassingly late, and so that there’s still some news left for the 2010 letter.