J.B. Sommerset

"The Way Down" (c) J.B. Sommerset 2024 Posts have slowed as the weather gets cooler. In the words of Jon Snow, "Winter is coming". Which means that I have been preparing for the colder months. We get lots of snow up here- around 7 feet and the temperatures frequently drop down below zero (Fahrenheit). Last year we hit -19 in January and it stayed that way for a couple weeks. This year, who knows? So I have been chopping wood and doing the maintenance on the craw space, the shop, and the snow plow. This year we had a nice stove installed. There are a lot of power outages up here, and it's nice to have a way to keep the pipes from freezing. We are going to run out of wood any time soon. We live in the middle of the forest. Our driveway is 2 miles long and every year trees fall across it and become firewood. This year everything will be ready when the snow falls, or at the very least most of the way there.  So, stay tuned, there will be more news and stories.  

"Little Yellow Flower", Copywrite J.B. Sommerset (c) 2024 Folks, I am not one for drama, but sometimes people just start things because they can't live without the rush of endorphins that accompanies rumor spreading, bickering, gossiping, complaining, etc. I, in fact can't stand this kind of behavior. Some events recently led me to coin a new quote. So here it is, this is my reply to people who complain that they don't like the way people see them when they behave in certain ways: "You can't show up to the party with a big 'Shit-stirring stick' and expect that people think you are a baker..." J.B. Sommerset Cheers!

"The Rift" J.B. Sommerset (c) 2023 I was talking to an insurance company the other day, wait, hold up, don't click off... This post only starts with something as boring as an insurance company. It's the quote of the week, so it's the situation that inspired the quote. It needs some context. I kept hitting the prompts trying to talk to a real person, and all that happened was that I got sent around and around- I didn't even get a lousy tee from it. Nothing got accomplished in that two hours of my life. It was all about bureaucracy. Here's your quote of the week: "Bureaucracy is a tool of unimaginative and boring people. It's purpose is to bind and control those who think beyond rules and regulations." J.B. Sommerset Cheers!

  "Orange Juice Sunset" By J.B. Sommerset (c) 2024 It doesn't quite feel like summer yet, at least not where I live, but I get the feeling it's coming- that is with hope. Hope is an interesting thing, an intangible piece of magic in an sometimes dark world. Hope guides us through dark waters without asking much. This week is all about hope. So here it is, your quote of the week. “Always guard your hope because without it you are hopeless.” J.B. Sommerset Cheers!

A while back in an update, I promised more of my art would be uploaded soon. While it's been hard to find time, I assure you, I am still making art. My newer stuff is more experimental. I have been meaning to update my Youtube channel as well, but haven't gotten to it yet. I do have have a few new videos in raw format, but they  need editing and I just don't have the time yet. There is a lot of new technology I have been learning. Being an old timer, it's hard to keep up with tech things, and I still don't have my new rig set up.  A lot of the videos in the future will most likely be partial pen and ink, and screen captures. I am learning the "new ways" to art. For a while my art is going to be a hybrid of digital and pen and ink.  For today, I thought I'd post one of my favorite videos from the channel here, of course, for your enjoyment. This is one I originally did for the cover of " The Lost Pilgrim ", it didn't make the cover, but I ...

This one goes out to anyone who has ever had to grind to make a living. The kind of grinding you can only get from working as a line chef at the local truck stop, you know, where "Larry" is the name of every third person through the door. Where the coffee is hard, like concrete, and the eggs are what you eat when you have an overnighter to Tulsa and don't want to shit your pants.  "Maybe, if you work hard enough at doing nothing, that has no meaning, purpose, or importance... Maybe one day you'll be able to tell other people how to do nothing, and you'll get paid more to do it." J.B. Sommerset Cheers!

I wanted to share a little piece of the next chapter of the book of Sommerset. I have mentioned that I am moving back to the woods, I have also said that I am currently trying to finish building a house- it's pretty easy to put the clues together and figure out what is going on. I am building a home in the country. No, I don't mean big pickup trucks, cattle, and 40 acres of pasture with barns and fields. No, what I mean is remote, on a mountainside, and surrounded by forest.  This will be my forest stronghold where I will work on my art, my writing, and my web presence via satellite technologies (As much as I do not like some of this world's billionaires, I must succumb to some of the products they create- this time there was no way around it). So expect me to keep posting and updating. I will have a studio there, for both videography and sound. Hopefully, the youtube channel will gain some traction and I can post more and more of my art. Also maybe so collaborations, we wi...

Just a quick update since I have been so sporadic about updating the "NEWS" page. It's been few and far between the updates. The last one was almost 4 months apart from the previous post, which tells me I don't need a news page and that all news and updates will be posted here on the feed to make things simpler.  So some news for the site. First off, I am still considering changing platforms and making a special gallery page for the art I post. The current one is too simplistic and outdated.  Secondly, I plan to add a new section on the site for ongoing works where I will post the before editing and the after editing for some of my current content, meaning that I might post a paragraph in rough, rewrite, and final with the mark up for anyone out there looking to see how I do it.  Lastly, I plan to find new platforms for my stores and consolidate them into one place. I like the services I have used, but I noticed that the end products were not the quality I wanted them...

It's been a long time since I posted an excerpt from my work. Last week I talked about a novel I wrote when I was a teenager. It got me thinking. I couldn't really remember much about it other than that I was highly inexperienced when I wrote it. Some parts of it were drafted when I was fifteen. It was finished, roughly, when I was seventeen, just before I graduated. When I graduated I re-read it. I remember how rough I thought it was. I put it down with plans to revisit it in a couple of months, maybe a year or two- tops.  I was really naive back then. Real life happened, and I never returned to it, so it sat there. Recently I have been thinking more and more about it. After my last post, I decided to fish it out of the literary locker where it has been chained in the dark. Maybe I've aged, or maybe I am as ugly as it is, but for some reason, I saw some beauty there, so I decided to post an excerpt here and see what happens.  I hope you all enjoy it; I decided not to leave...

Just a quick post, I was going through some of my old work and found a piece I thought deserved a little more credit. This was a picture I was working on that was supposed to have a second part, like a comic book pane. I never got around to the second half, I think I might work on that in in the near future. Anyways, here it is, enjoy.  Cheers!

 Sometimes it's super hard to find the time to write or make art.  Over the last two months, my posts have thinned. As I have mentioned, I have a lot of projects up in the air right now—these projects are both personal and professional. One of the largest is the construction of my future home, even though the house is very modest. The construction part isn't the problem. It's the bureaucracy surrounding it. It's the permits, the land, and site prep. The county and country where I live has restricted certain types of houses, and also construction on certain types of land. Washington state has some badass energy requirements too (they really tripped us up). We're talking triple-pane windows and radiant floor heating to meet them. It's frustrating to jump through all these hoops so that I can have a nice little place in the country. Sometimes it feels like pissing in the wind- it will leave a bad taste in your mouth. However, I still want a place where I can write ...

Hey y'all,  I have uploaded more content to the youtube channel. This one was a short doodle I did while on break. There is a story behind it, and someday I will write about it, but not today. For now, this was one of the works I call "Quickies" (short doodles that take me a few minutes to draw). I drew this one after a conversation with an old friend. Enjoy, and please watch the video too. Thanks! Cheers, and keep on creating!

This will be a quick post.  The other day I was writing a post and realized, I recommend a lot of stuff in my posts, and decided it was time that I have a links page to all the things I use and recommend. An "ol'skool" idea that a lot of sites used to have. So I added one. It has a number of my favorite things on it, and I will most likely be reviewing the things I add there, that is, if they have anything to do with creating, writing, art, or any combination thereof. Check it out, right above in the navbar or on the side navbar. Enjoy, and I hope you find some of my recommendations useful to your own craft. Cheers, and keep on creating!

Good news, "Stories from Oearth, Vol. 1" has been updated. The second edition is now available on Amazon in paperback and for the first time in EPUB/EBOOK.  For those who have already read it, not too much has changed. Some of the formatting was a little off for the length of the novel so the gutter was updated to make the pages look more centered, and the pages were concatenated so the overall length is reflected rather than each story. Other than that, it's the same. For those of you who are about to read it- you're going to love it! Click the picture or the links below to purchase!  ( Paperback or EPUB ) Cheers!

It's been such a long time since I wasn't bound to a project commitment. It's good to be done with the last one. Now I want to move on to more. It's hard to choose because I have so many ideas and so little time. I usually have one novel being typed and one being penned. The one being written is not a priority- it gets a page here and there whenever I feel like it. I learned a while ago that focus is essential to finishing works. So, I try (and it's tough) to keep on track with one at a time.  There have been many times where I have written two simultaneously, it worked, but I think it was quicker doing just one. I also find that focused work is always better. I must be in a particular place (the zone) to complete two at the same time. The older I get, the more accurate this rule becomes. The problem is that it goes against my process, which is letting the pen do the work and catching as many good ideas as possible. Consequently, I have a half-started folder and hal...

It’s been a while since I updated about my next book, “The Lost Pilgrim”. It took a little longer than I thought it would to go back through and edit. But I am happy to announce, it’s done. The proofs are arriving in a couple of days (woo-hoo!). I went through it several times and each time, I wanted to add more to the story. This is one of the hardest things about writing. Most of the parts I wanted to add didn’t contribute anything to the story, so I had a real hard time keeping them out of the text. Instead, I put them aside and took notes on them (they will show up in other stories). That being said, I made it, I finished it. For now, I feel that there is nothing else that needs to be done with the novel except a print check and to make sure all the text is formatted correctly for the transition to EPUB. The good news is it doesn’t take that long to complete the eBook format, it’s just tedious and kind of a pain in the ass. Rest assured, for all you e-readers out there, there w...

So over the weekend, I noticed that the share buttons were not visible in the profile menu (it has something to do with the layers). So I moved them. For anyone out there who likes to share the site, they are now located in the lower right corner. The little red circle with the white arrow curving to the right in it. When you click on that they will pop up. Cheers!