Right now a bunch of Silber songs are nominated over on TopChoons. Northern Valentine, MWVM, & Plumerai are all duking it out for a space on the charts. So if you could vote for your favorite & spread the word, I’d appreciate it.
Here’s the issue of Deconstructing Comics that I’m on for a short little interview talking about my comics.
The Silber Comics Kickstarter now passed my monetary goal, but is still a couple short of my goal for number of backers. I also got my first person backing at the level to get a comic inspired by them. It’s interesting to me that the guy who backed at that level is a college professor, as most people who know me well know I feel like in general the current american higher education system is predatory. He sent me a video of one of his lectures as a starting point for my comic & it’s actually pretty interesting to me because he talks about how the job of any educator is to be a good story teller & use stories to transfer knowledge. Here’s a link. Anyway, I’m super excited to get to assemble comics that are actually sold instead of just making a bunch of comics in hope that one day someone will be interested.
So as some of you may know, this weekend I went up with my family 500 miles north to put my grandmother’s ashes in the ground. She died last October. I started living with her & taking care of her with my mother in 2003, in 2007 it got to a point where my mother & I couldn’t handle taking care of her & we put her in a home, in 2008 I quit my day job so that she could come back to the house with the care I wanted her to have. Which meant me handling things from making her meals, to bathing her, to carrying her when she fell, to walking several miles everyday pushing her in a wheelchair. I’d kinda thought that I was “over things” & pretty functional at this point. But this weekend with me getting down on the ground & physically putting her remains in the earth kinda screwed me up pretty bad. I realize that my situation is not unique or special or whatever & I feel like a broken record sometimes (then again I am a fan of loops), but I really get tired of people saying they understand how I feel or that I did a good job. I just gave a loved one what they needed & unless you’ve got Aspergers & have given a family member that degree of care for that long you probably don’t know how I feel other than the vague statement of “not very good.” It all goes back to the book of poetry where Silber got it’s name (Demain de Monsieur Silber) & the bit where Kay Sage writes something like “when you walk a tightrope, at the least thing you fall & break your neck, leave me alone, I will manage by myself.”
In combining ideas from those previous two paragraphs, I’ve been thinking about releasing some of my comic scripts that I’m having trouble finding artists for as narrative poetry. I’m also thinking of doing something where it’s “comics without pictures” in the style of Garfield Minus Garfield just for fun. We’ll see if/when I find the time to pull that off.
The first leg of the tour with The Independents I was supposed to go out on this week ended up getting canceled. Kinda sad because I was looking forward to getting out of the house, but also kinda relieved because it gives me more time to work on assembling all the comics & working on some other things of my own.
Recent Dreams:
I’m at a comic shop in my grandmother’s home town & there’s another comic shop on the same block. I’m talking to the owner about how awesome it is to be in a non-super hero oriented shop & how cool it is that this small town can support to comic shops on the same block while where I live can barely support one shop in a population of half a million people. Then the owner tells me the other shop is going to probably be shut down by the end of the month.
I’m driving my car in Saint Louis at one of those massive highway intersections that looks like a child prodigy designed it for the DOT with a Hot Wheels set as the inspiration. I’m following the directions from my Garmin & take an exit where the downward slope is so steep I have to ride my brakes to go slow enough to not flip the car over. The exit corkscrews down & it ends up that at the bottom the road is flooded & my car glides in & sinks in three feet of water.
I’m collecting old rusted ball bearings from a site that was once a factory, but time has already taken out the buildings & weeds are reclaiming & cracking the cement. The ball bearings aren’t steel or they wouldn’t rust like this. In fact I’m not sure that they are really ball bearings at all. One of them is cracked in half & the inside is crystalline & looks like lead. What are these things?
I go back to high school because I never graduated. I don’t know if I can handle being around teenagers….
GoddakkAttack 
N. 
are you taxed on kickstarter dough?
They require a W2 to be filled out, so I’m sure it’s reported as income at the end of the year. So if you aren’t declared as a business & writing off the expenses, the government would take about another third of it when you file your taxes the next year. Kickstarter/Amazon took about 13% of the money off the top. So that would mean if you aren’t reporting stuff with yourself as self-employed, you probably lose half the money.