Well, it's 1 October so you are officially allowed to break out your decorative gourds.

It is also release day, and my hard-boiled noir featuring witches, vampires, monsters, and a jack-o-lantern detective is out.

I do not expect great things of it, which will be painful, just as when "The Fisher Case" didn't do well it was painful. There's something about the Venn diagram here. I know I've got people who would appreciate a story in this genre, but they seem to want that genre in text; and the people who like the comics format seem to not have the engagement for this genre. Perhaps it's because these stories tend to have lots of plot and narration and they're allergic to words. I don't know.

I won't stop, though. The genre is beloved to me; about half the Quitclaim stories are basically this kind of thing in disguise, and I have a major standalone story I plan to do as soon as I can muster the energy to do it properly. If they're weird, so much the better. The best hard-boiled detective film ever made, The Long Goodbye, is deeply weird and -- like all the best stories in the genre -- the plot is almost beside the point.

The Big Sleep, for example, makes no sense. Everyone knows it makes no sense. Raymond Chandler knew it made no sense and didn't care. Critics at the time pointed out it made no sense; and whether they liked the movie or not depends entirely on whether they considered that irrelevant. If you read a bare plot synopsis of either the book or the film, it will leave you scratching your head; and to do either misses the point entirely, because the plot is not actually what either is about. I can't achieve that; I'm too attached to plot and too negligent about character ... but I aspire to it.

Anyway, it's out, go read it.

I have told myself I will devote one more night to playing CONTROL, and then I absolutely have to stop at least long enough to figure out the plot of Sleeper Squad 61. Then we'll see if I can tend to CONTROL while simultaneously working on renders. I suspect not, in which case the renders will have to be given priority. It's going to be another of those stories which I'll need almost a whole month to do. I need to back away from those.