Upcoming Stories and Drawings

I know, it's been a long time since I have posted a new story and illustration. Sometimes life just gets in the way of things that are fun, and this blog is one of those fun things that gets elbow.

I came back from my Christmas break to find my studio completely wiped out due to a busted pipe. The reconstruction took over a month, and then several more weeks passed before I was settled back in to work. Then I had to leave town for two weeks to write for a sports memorabilia auction house in New Jersey. Tack on top of all that the daily running of my regular design business, and my time was pretty booked up.

Then there was the finishing and publication of 21. This journal has been a project I've been working on for more than 6 years, and after a few starts and stops, I finally got it to where I was happy with the cost, quality and length. With this publication, I have an outlet for my work that is easier and more spontaneous than a full-blown hard cover book, but also has the quality and content of my The League of Outsider Baseball.

Even though I have not posted anything lately, I really have been working on new stories and drawings. Really. Some of the pieces I am saving for the next issue of 21, and others I just haven't gotten around to finishing up to my satisfaction. 

That's the problem when you're doing something that has no clear direction, like "The Infinite Baseball Card Set". As you all know, I rarely have any consistent "theme" or "story line", rather, I like to just write and draw whatever and whomever I feel like at the time. Usually this works out best, I like the spontaneity of it, and it keeps me from feeling like it is becoming a job. But, on the other hand, sometimes the shotgun way of researching leads me in so many different directions I fail to wrap up any of them.

That's pretty much what's happened in the last 6 months or so. This bottleneck has been compounded by the heavy amount of work I put into the last issue of 21, plus the self-promotion that goes along with a self-published work. So, not only have I been side tracked by 21, but I am also continuously torn between publishing a story/illustration on the blog or saving it for a future 21. 

I guess that's a better place to be than to have severe "writer's/artist's block", because I am producing an awful lot of quality work - it just hasn't seen the light of day yet. I'm going to be publishing a new story within a few days. What it will be, I have no idea yet! Like I said, I have many to choose from, it's just a matter of selecting one and tidying it up for publication. 

Just to spread a little expectation around, here's a few of the close-to-completion pieces I have in the arsenal:

• Joe DiMaggio - His Lost 1943 Season with the Santa Ana Army Flyers

• Jack Kloza - The Forgotten Home Run Champion

• Sam Bankhead - The Real Player Behind "Fences" Troy Maxson

• George Selkirk - A Scapegoat for Doing Nothin' Except Playing Ball

• Morris Buttermaker - A Special "Where Is He Now?" Interview

• Happy Evans - Utility Man for the Greatest Negro League Team of All-Time

And there's much more in the pipeline, but I'll leave the list at that for now. So please keep checking in with me here at The Infinite Baseball Card Set. It's a bit sporadic at the moment, but when I get the bottleneck plunged out, we should have some quality baseball obscurities flowing from the tap!

And if you haven't already ordered a copy of the Spring 2017 edition of 21: The Illustrated Journal of Outsider Baseball, do so now - I just received the second shipment of copies in this week and they're going fast...