Allegory of the Miniatures (part 4)

The time of the death of my boss, the owner of the used book store I worked at, was a time of change in my life. Not because of his death, but there were some ways in which it was related. To make a long story short, though, I ended up hooking up with a gaming group in Shreveport. I should reiterate, at this point, that I had never been a "gamer" as the term was understood at that time (which has nothing to do with how it's understood now, which all has to do with video games and MMOs). I'd played some Battletech, but that's about it, and I'd done that mostly with people who also were not gamers.

I had, however, been on the fringe of the... let's call it the gaming community... for years. It's hard not to have some acquaintance with gamers when you work in a store that sells comic books. For one thing, I ended up being the one that would order all of their gaming equipment. And, as you have heard, I'd been painting miniatures for gaming purposes for more than half a dozen years by that point. So I ended up involved in this group of gamers in Shreveport, one of which happened to be my cousin, whom I'd also gone to high school with and played Battletech with and spent one (disastrous) semester at college with, and several others of whom I'd also gone to high school with, although I hadn't known some of them at the time. One of them had known me because of my painting, but, evidently, he'd never stuck in my head, probably because he was a junior or senior while I was a freshman.

This all started out with some RPGs. Actually, it started out with the Warhammer RPG, and ended up with RPG once a week at this guy's house, which ended up in Warhammer Fantasy Battle. He had this huge army of goblins and orcs, and, as it turned out, tabletop gaming was what he and a couple of the other guys were really into. As it also turned out, all of these guys are guys that I had been in high school with. Have I mentioned before that I went to a smart kid, geek high school? Well, if you happened to gloss over that fact, this ought to be all the proof that you need. Evidently, the whole strategy tabletop game thing lends itself very well to a higher IQ level, so we had had a pretty high concentration of tabletop gamers at my high school.

All of this, again, caused a change in my painting career.

As I've stated, I had been painting exclusively with oils up to this point. The question of me painting came up, because some of the guys knew I'd painted miniatures for people back in high school, so I showed them the few things I had, which included the green dragon.

(Remember, this is not how he looked at the time. Back then, he had metallic green plates, for one thing.) One of the guys very soon began asking me to paint some figures for him, but he wanted them done in acrylics.

I didn't own any water based paints. At all. I was working on my mechs,

and I was using oils on those. I told him I'd paint for him but that it would need to be in oils as I wasn't reinvesting in acrylics.

He continued to bug me about it. And bug me about it. Until I said something along the lines of "if you want to buy me some acrylic paints, I'll be glad to paint whatever it is you want me to paint in acrylics." I was, of course, joking, because it never even entered my mind that someone would want me to paint for them so badly that they would go out and buy me paints to do it with. About a week later, he showed up with this big paint kit that came with something like 20 or 25 different colors of paint and a selection of brushes and asked me how many minis I'd paint for him if he gave it all to me.

This lead to me painting for nearly everyone in the group at some point or another. Any time anyone had a miniature or unit of miniatures they wanted to look especially good, they brought them to me. I spent several years painting figures for people and not painting my own.

The strangest thing in all of this, though, is that one day I went into this comic shop, a little hole-in-the-wall shop, that I had never been in before. I often stopped in small shops like that, because you could often find good deals on "hot" issues of comics, so I'd stopped in to look around. My cousin may have been with me. I think someone was, at any rate, because, somehow, my name got mentioned, and this guy, the owner of this shop, a guy I had never seen before, knew who I was. "You're that guy that paints, right?" I think I had that deer looking at headlights look, but, evidently, my fame, or whatever it was, had proceeded me.

This guy literally pulled out a couple hundred Essex 15mm Confederate troop miniatures and said, "What would you charge me to paint these?" I think I made a bad deal in regards to those particular miniatures, because I'd never done 15mm figures before, and I just didn't know the kind of monotony I was getting myself into by agreeing. I used so much grey paint over the years painting figures for him it wasn't even funny. Except, I think it was funny to my cousin, because he used to laugh at my Confederate soldier painting assembly line. At any rate, the rates for me painting for him went up every time I took on a new order, and I was so sick of those guys by the end, but I couldn't bring myself to just tell him "no," because he couldn't do it himself (he showed me some of the figures he'd tried to do), and no one else could either. No one he knew, anyway. I wish I had a picture of that army that I painted for him, but this was more than 15 years ago, and it never occurred to me that I would have a reason to have pictures of them one day.

The point, here, for this section of this story is that it's not a good idea, necessarily to marry yourself to just one medium. Or on genre. Or whatever. It's good to try new things. Of course, the big issue for me at the time is that I couldn't see the benefit in reinvesting. I figured I'd been doing fine with oils for, well, years, and the truth was that I had been doing fine with them. BUT! But I surpassed everything I'd been doing in oils by the switch to acrylics. There was just so much more I could do. Washes, inks, dry brushing, detailing. I couldn't do any of that stuff with oils, and I knew that, but I'd lost sight of the value in it from not having worked with acrylics in about 10 years, since I'd stopped doing the ceramic stuff.

In the same way, I don't want to get trapped in any one particular literary genre. I like fantasy. I really do. I probably prefer fantasy, in fact, in my reading, but I like a lot of other stuff, too, and I'm finding I'm having more and more story ideas that aren't related to fantasy at all. I want to try new things.

I think a lot of people trap themselves in their own heads with these identity ideas, "I'm a romance writer" or "I'm a fantasy writer" or "I'm a sci-fi writer." It's like locking yourself in a box. Get out of the box. Try new things. Write new things. Play with new things. There's no telling what you may find that you're good at!

Next time, we'll finish this story up.

Allegory of the Miniatures (part 3)

Which brings us to college...
And this is a much longer story, but I'm gonna cut to the part where I was working in a used book store in charge of the comic books. It was rather like a dream job at the time. Heck, it's still kind of a dream job. The owner of the place bought things, frequently, on whims, which was the state of things when I started working for him. For whatever reason, he had miniature sets kind of all over the place, but, mostly, he had Grenadier's Dragon of the Month kits.

During my freshman year at college, a bunch of us had started playing Battletech, so I had started painting again. And my boss had all of these dragons lying around. I started lusting after them. I couldn't afford them, though; however, all I really wanted to do was paint them.

Now, he'd had these sets lying around for, well, years, actually and never sold a single one, which is I why he gave me the job of being in charge of the comics and everything that went along with them, because, as evidenced, he was no good at deciding what to stock. But that's beside the point. Because he's had them lying around for years, I said, "Hey, why don't you let me paint a couple of these, and we'll put them on display and see if they sell." What the heck, right?

Just a note: I was still using oils, but oils had these great metallics that you couldn't get in acrylics at the time. Games Workshop rectified that sometime or other and, eventually, other companies followed with some excellent (acrylic) paints. [Just a personal note to any of you out there involved in this stuff: Games Workshop has what are probably the highest quality miniatures on the market if you're using them for gaming. They lack diversity, though, because their minis support their games. However, I don't much care for their paints. They tend to dry too glossy for my tastes.]

So here's how this worked:
These dragon kits sold for $10.00. They were lead, and they were heavy. He paid me $5.00 each to paint a few of them, and he put them up in display case (with the expensive comics) for $20.00 each. Remember, he'd been collecting these up for years and had never sold a single one (I think he had something like 3 dozen dragons. I know! He couldn't tell me why he'd kept buying them, either, but there it was). As soon as he started putting them in the case, people started buying them. I  literally could not paint them quickly enough. People started coming in just looking for the dragons. Even after he marked them up to $30.00. No, I didn't get a raise in how much I was being paid to paint them.

I still have one of them, though.

The only reason I have it is that my boss, the owner of the store, died, and it was the last one I had painted. That's not the original paint job. After he died, his son (or someone) boxed up a bunch of stuff that was mine (the dragon was mine because he didn't want it, I guess); he dropped it or something and broke it to pieces. Maybe that's why he gave it me. At any rate, that dragon had a hard life of having to be fixed over and over again. Eventually, I re-primed him and painted him with acrylics (you could never get a look like this with oils).

I do, now, have a large collection of (unpainted) dragons. Unpainted, because I've never had anywhere to display them if I did paint them, and they're easier to store in their disassembled states. One day, though...

In a lot of ways, this was like working for a publisher. I did the work, and he made the money. Sure, I got paid a decent amount for doing the painting, I suppose, and I got the enjoyment of doing the painting, but he made four times off of each figure what I did, and that was when he was selling them for $30.00, because there were certain of the dragons, like the Gold Dragon

and the Spectral Dragon,

that he would sell for $50.00. You could say that both of us got what we wanted out of it, and, in some respects, that would be true, but I was never happy with the disparity; there was just nothing I could do about it if I wanted to get to paint the dragons.

It's too bad miniatures cost so much these days, or I might consider going back into dragon painting. However, your general dragon miniature starts at around $25.00 these days, and the nice ones (the ones that are more along the scale of the Grenadier dragons) are much higher (like this one from Games Workshop that's more than $50.00).

So... I've kept it no secret about how I feel about traditional publishing and the way traditional publishers are just out to use authors for monetary gain, but, by my own experience, I can't say that there's not a time and a place for them. I would never enter into a deal, now, like the one I was in then, but at that time and in that place, it served my needs. I suppose what I would say about that in relation to traditional publishing, now, is that, if you're looking at traditional publishing, do make sure that it is actually going to serve your needs. Don't find out after the fact that you've been lead into a relationship that is only going to take advantage of you and give you nothing in return.

Next: how I spent years painting a Confederate army and how I came to hate the color grey.

Oh, and, just in case anyone is interested, that Green Dragon is still for sale. heh

Allegory of the Miniatures (part 2)

So... Giant robot models. They were a turning point I didn't see coming. These things

were fully articulated, which was really cool. They were a whole new level of complexity and a lot of fun to build, because, if you messed them up, they wouldn't move, and you didn't want that. My robot models were the envy of the neighborhood and the end of my career selling models. See, after I started on the robots, I never went back to mere airplanes again, and I wouldn't sell my robots. Period. I had a table in my room with all of them set up on it. This was one of my favorites:

A few of them even transformed.

There were at least three variations on the transforming kit. Basically, they were all the same model, but, you know, I had to have each one. Besides, they were the most challenging, because  the pieces had to be able to slide around. A kid that lived across the street bought one, because I wouldn't sell him mine, and he didn't even get the basic airplane mode out of his. His ended up a huge mess that he dumped on me to see if I could fix, but, you know, once those things are glued, there's not much you can do with them.

Anyway... High school started. I had this one friend; he was kind of my only friend at the time. Yeah, middle school was not a happy time for me, but, then, who is it a happy time for? But I digress...
I had this one friend who was in the school D&D club. Now, I didn't play D&D or any RPGs or anything, because, well, my parents wouldn't have approved. Not that I ever asked, because, when I was in about 6th grade, I'd ordered the books Clash of the Titans and Dragonslayer from my Scholastic order form at school, and my dad threw them away when I brought them home, because they had "magic" in them. It was rather traumatic and the end of any discussion with my parents about what I was reading. I figured role playing games were a bit too far to push it, though, so I'd never gotten involved. At that point.

Anyway... I had this friend, also a freshman, in the D&D club, and he mentioned to them my giant robot models. For some reason, none of them believed they existed. I think, by this time, the models were no longer being available in stores (I know I wasn't able to find them anymore, at any rate), so he started begging me to bring them to school to show the club. After a few weeks, I succumbed, and I brought a few of them to school with me. I have to say it didn't help my "nerd rating" and I already went to a nerd school, as my brother used to say.

Just to put this in perspective, these giant robots came with pilots. You can see the head of one looking out through the turret from the tank above. The "glass" cockpit cover on the top robot opened, and you could see the cockpit interior and pilot in there, too. These little pilot figures were around the size of 20mm miniatures, the standard size for D&D. Actually, they were slightly smaller, but close enough. And this is where everything changed:

1. I discovered that there was a game called Battletech that was based on this giant robot idea. It was more of a board/tabletop game than an RPG (at the time), and I immediately got interested in it. When my friend moved later that year, he gave me his Battletech stuff, which consisted of the basic game and one book of mechs.

2. I got flooded with requests to paint miniatures from guys in the D&D club. Yeah, they were so impressed with my models that they all wanted me to paint their figures for them. I started out charging $1.00 a figure but pretty quickly found that that wasn't going to work. See, one guy immediately brought me a huge bag of 30-40 loose figures, which I thought was pretty good money, but everyone else started offering me more money to bump their figures up the painting list. In the end, I was getting around $3.00/figure for fairly basic paint jobs. And, remember, I was using oils, because I just kept right on using my model paints. It was what I was used to using. The detail on the minis wasn't great, but it was a lot better than what they'd had doing it themselves, so everyone was happy.

Eventually, I started buying mech miniatures of my own for Battletech and started painting those, too. When I was a junior, the school shut the D&D club down, and, between that and the fact that I was never home anymore, I quit painting for other people. At that time. I continued to use oils on my miniatures for the next many years, but more on that next time...

Here are some pics of my oil painted mechs (ignore the dust contamination (I will never figure out how things accumulate dust while in a box!) and missing antennas). Several of these are the same class as the models I have. Wherever they are.

 Thunderbolts (I have this in model form)

 Hunchback (one of my favorite mechs) and a... Commando? I think. (no models for these)

Rifleman and Archer (no models for these, either)

Crusader (I think there was a model for this one, but I can't remember for sure)

Both of these were models.

As was this one (pictured above).

The only writing lesson I have from this is that sometimes you can take what you learned in one genre (models) and apply it to another genre (miniatures). Although I loved models and would kind of like to sit down and do one now, they never brought the same satisfaction as painting miniatures. I wouldn't have guessed that when I was 12, though. You have to be open to growth and change.

Note:

Make sure you come back on Monday for an awesome give away! 

Yeah, some of you may have what I'll be giving away, but it will still be awesome, and you can tell all your friends that don't have it!

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Exo-suits

Exo-suit isn't really a very common term being tossed around these days, but it's a very exciting concept to me. Let's get you up to date. When you think of an exo-suit, you should think of

Or maybe

Iron man is probably the most famous fictional character to wear an exo-suit, and comics have been the genre where these things have been the most prevalent.

And I could just go on and on posting pictures from comics, but I'm sure you get the idea. Exo-suits have been working their way into movies, too.
From Alien:

And Avatar:

But, for me, it all really started with a game:

That's not what the game I started playing back in the '80s looked like, but it's pretty close. A (board)game where you get inside a big, robotic exo-suit and fight other guys in big, robotic exo-suits. There have been all kinds of video games based on the whome mechwarrior thing along with some tabletop miniature games. I'm still waiting for the MMO.

These things are already entering reality. Not the giant ones, but ones that look like

and

Hybrid Assistive Limb (or HAL)

The HAL is already commercially available in Japan. Currently, it's targeted at people with disabilities, but it allows the wearer, any wearer, to lift up to 5 times as much as they normally can. The newest model, the HAL-5, has a system that is integrated with the wearers nervous sytem, making it the world's first fully integrated cyborg system.

And this is what the US military is working on:

This particular model isn't available yet, but they've been working on prototypes for a while now.

At the moment, Iron Man is just entertainment. A comic book series. Some movies. But it won't be long until an iron man will be coming to a town near you!