After this month, I’m losing two students that I really loved teaching. Dongwook Kim is moving back to Korea, and Griffin Limerick has landed a newspaper internship in Rome, Georgia, just a stone’s throw from Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens. Both of these guys have huge futures ahead of them.

Dongwook, at age 14, is one of the most diligent students of music theory and technique I’ve ever had. A couple of weeks ago I laughed when another teacher tried to show him the blues scale. Dongwook can already recite the 7 modes of the major scale in every key and knows quite a bit about harmony. At today’s lesson we worked on superimposing the ascending melodic minor scale over chords with different roots, and thinking in terms of its modes.

Griffin is an aesthetic polymath, and is a man after my own heart. We talk as much about literature and philosophy as about guitar. I maintain that the guitar is an artistic medium just like any other, and to truly master it, you must be familiar with all forms of art. It’s great to be able to share much of the wisdom I learned from Steve Giordano, and from my explorations into various cultures of knowledge.

You guys will be greatly missed.

This took a long time but it was super, super fun. I really enjoy pushing my limits as an artist.

Todd Henry, over at Accidental Creative has come up with the 7-word bio as a way for artists to describe themselves. After much twisting of phrase, I’ve come up with the following to describe myself:

Autodidactic polymath, cultural enthusiast, and transdisciplinary artist.

What is your 7-word bio?

Here’s an illustration I’m doing on spec. I hope I actually get some work and money from it, but if not, I still get a drawing from it.

And here’s a detail of the face:

Since Parker was born, I’ve been going mad with ideas for children’s books. Here’s one of them.

I keep thinking to myself, “someone else must have thought of this first…it’s so obvious.”

But Google and Amazon turn up nothing, so I hereby claim Captain Kid as an original (cough..ahem) children’s book character.

This one may be a bit of an acquired taste. I particularly like the blue and brown together, perhaps with the red as an accent color, but perhaps not.

Wacom tablet. Autodesk Sketchbook. Photoshop. 30 minutes, maybe.

Yep. I think this is my favorite picture of him.

I’m doing a lot of work on The Flowers of Evil this week, and there are a lot of words going into my InDesign document. It’s hard to keep track of my design goals when I’m basically writing as I’m brainstorming, so I’m going to publish them here so you can hold me accountable.

If everything works out the way I want them to, the following things will be true:

• The game will be a good introduction to the hobby of story gaming, especially to people who otherwise wouldn’t be attracted to the hobby.
• More experienced gamers will be able to pick up and play the game within 20 minutes of cracking open the book.
• My wife Sarah, who is an intelligent non-gamer with limited rpg experience will not only have fun playing the game, but running it.
• Sales of Absinthe in the US will skyrocket, as will collections of poetry by Verlaine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Lord Byron.
• Major RPG publishers be clamoring to hire me as a game designer, layout artist, and illustrator.

I need to remember the following:

• Just because it’s a cool idea and could theoretically work doesn’t mean it belongs in the game.
• The less rules there are, the easier it will be for people to learn them.
• The rules should reward players for playing their characters in such a way that genuinely emulates the fiction that inspired the game.
• The game doesn’t have to be original. It’s okay to rip stuff off from other games if it works. The game does have to be good. Do whatever it takes to make it good.