Boys will be boys. The Peach is just never going to get why these lads find all this so entertaining.

The layout here might be seen as pure Manga, except there wasn’t a lot of Manga around me back then. Again, women artists always seem to re-invent a form, often re-creating an entire movement without being aware of it. It’s partly because when a female does break out of the Girls Don’t Do that mold, they pretty much break all the other molds around them, too.

Watching the video series “The High Middle Ages,” with Professor Philip Daileader of the College of William and Mary, from “The Great Courses Teaching Company.” He’s quite entertaining in these 24 lectures. The Clallam Bay library had this course sitting on their shelves. A Harvard-level college course — for a pittance of tax money!

(Professor Daileader has ver bad sinuses and post-nasal drip — and tooth-sucking — but he somehow manages to speak without any of this being at all annoying.  We’re enjoying the lectures. A lot.)

Girls always do the circular-panel layout, working in a more art-deco style, almost instinctively. Their work tends to be more ornate, complex, flowing and free than the work of young guys. If left alone, less clone-work, too. Although Manga is turning into the Superhero Downfall for young female artists. As I predicted in one of my early Submission Engine columns.

Post-combat let-down. Post-coital exhaustion?

Again, I had a lot of fun drawing the airplane. I had a model I zoomed around over my head and held up or hung from a string and then drew.

Never underestimate the value of toy models for getting the perspective right. And huge thanks to those readers who have sent me little toy tanks n’ stuff over the years. Not to mention My Little SS Pony….

Sometimes it’s fun just to draw something. These feathery explosive flames had me locked into them, with no thought of anything else while I was laying down ink.

Of course, war always looks attractive from Rosen’s viewpoint; he’s a pilot. As any infantryman can tell you, and has been able to since the original dogfights over the trenches, those flyboys don’t get their boots dirty. Or have to sleep in wet mud, either.

I keep scratching my head over what to say in a blog about writing, because this is supposed to be a writing blog, right?  I follow the best of the old standbys: Write What You Know. Nothing I write is really ficitonal.  It’s based on people I’ve known or that people have talked to me about.

In case you ever feel bad about writing what someone else has told you, remember that you may be the only chance for them to tell their story to more than just their relatives or their war buddies. A lot of people don’t write. And it’s fun, being a jake-leg historian; sometimes you can fill in details about things nobody told the people who were there about at the time. An old Desert Rat — a British soldier from the Africa campaign — asked about a local liquor the natives sold him and his comrades; probably palm-sap booze.

What can I say? I had so much fun doing the layout on this thing. This was back in the old isn’t-this-fun days.

Back before I was trying to help Barnes and Noble update their system so I could use the systems I’m already using.

Booksurge is CreateSpace now, and the automatic transfer was really smooth. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. Watch the airplanes. It’s no fun, really, when the little man behind the curtain starts pulling the greasy levers.

This isn’t anything new when it comes to flying. Some idiot always tries to go between buildings, so why not cliffs?

One of the only things my father left me — along with a crewel-worked owl, and the idea I could actually try to be an artist — was a copy of War Birds; Diary of an Unknown Aviator.

One of the pilots took up Billy Bishop’s fine silver biplane and ended up shearing off both wings landing it between two buildings. I guess he just got he wing-line angle off.

Rosen is just a major shit-head. He’s smart, and cute, and a major manipulator. He could be a vampire sidekick if somebody would just bite him.

The Germans just get on the British nerve, anyway. There’s nobody like a German for teasing the hell out of people, especially if they find out something bothers a person.

Right now I’m plugging away at a novelette for one of my best customers. I doubt it will be published; it’s just one he likes and he hangs onto the files. It’s genre work, so it doesn’t take a lot of thought, just letting the characters and situations just fall into place.

Been pissing people off this week, or should I say, pissing off a few people. Every once in a while this happens, and the mean or limited people go away and leave me alone.

Officially, the causes for this weeks peel-offs have been my saying that copies of originals are aways bad, and hinting to a reviewer that authors and artists are brides, and editors, publishers, and reviewers are yentas. I’ve been a yenta plenty of times — I write reviews, too — but I don’t mistake myself for the girl on her wedding day when all I was, was the wrinkled old matchmaker.

I sent a bookstore owner ballistic when I said that, while I loved old-style bookstores, the author came first, and if he or she could find all kinds of ways to sell what they did, the bookstores that cooperated would be the ones to survive. He lost his mind.

It may be part of the old stable-master syndrome, when a publisher or even an APA editor thought they were in charge of the little tame artist.

Damn. And all we wanna do is draw and write our stuff.

More combat. Fun to draw, a lot of talking, or rather, yelling. Not the screechy, gaspy kind you see in the movies, which is more like what you see in reality in cops.

The cops have been taught to think of the citizenry as the enemy in a war. The problem with that is: you want a war, you’ll get a war. And you don’t want that if you’re outnumbered.

Our own cops up here leave the drug-house alone. We can see it from here. Now, rather than being pissed off about that, 15 years of blockwatch leader taught me better to have ‘em in one place, where you can watch ‘em. They tend not to steal in their own neighborhoods — at last the ones with any brains — because that breaks the understanding with the cops. They’ve got their customers trained to show up clean and driving slow on distribution days — and no kids within five blocks of the place. They’re the only ones drive in a bad snow, so if you’re stuck in a storm, wave down a meth- or pot-head.

If you want to see the tv version, watch the Hamsterdam sequences in The Wire.