J.R. Blackwell

The Bluebeard Room

My goal when I am cleaning is not to have a Bluebeard Room.  A Bluebeard Room is a room that guests must not, under any circumstances, enter, lest they learn your terrible secret. Usually your terrible secret is that you are a slob.

This has often happened to me when visiting the houses of other people, who say things like “NOT THE BEDROOM!” or “You may use the first floor bathroom, but not the second.” or “There is a chain around that door for everyone’s safety.” I have been guilty of having a Bluebeard Room myself. It is a shameful, hilarious practice because most people already know what you are hiding.

There are two ways to solve the Bluebeard Room problem, and though one may have more dignity, they are both valid solutions.

SOLUTION ONE:

Clean your place so that guests can enter any room without bringing shame on you, your family, or your guest.

SOLUTION TWO:

Resolve not to give a fuck and just let everyone know you are a slob and proud of it. They may sit on the crate next to the soda cans and the plastic container of tepid beer water if they wish to spend time with you.

New Opening Line

David drove an ambulance during the apocalypse.

Abundant: ZOMBIE

Part of this project, Abundant, is an inside joke with myself. One of the nice things about being a photographer is that I can control what you see and how you see it. What’s obvious is obscured. I can show you a picture and tell you nothing and hint at everything. There’s some power in that. It’s part of what’s delightful about communicating with your artists - you have these secrets and you get to see who picks them up, who figures you out and who comes along for the ride.

I took another set this week, but it didn’t say anything. The photos were cute, but bland. They didn’t speak, so they didn’t get put up. Maybe I’ll post them later. Or not.

Eleven

bornofanatombomb:

Knight Of Ruin

Way back in December, my wife and I decided to spend the days surrounding Christmas apart. She would be with her side of the family, and I would be with mine. We are not certain we’ll be able to spend the  2012 Christmas season with either side, so to be fair, we decided to be with both.

It did not work out well…

More on the blog

Job Creators

Elected officials talk a lot about about helping job creators, small business, and innovation. Candidates are going on and on about entrepreneurs, the people who take an idea and a plan and make it into a business, a business that turns around and hires people to help them with their business.

I am lucky enough to know a lot of entrepreneurs, people with small businesses that have created jobs for me. When I was laid off last year due to financial constraints, the people that kept me in the black were small business that hired me to create book covers, photo-spreads, and hired me to write fiction. These businesses operate their sales primarily though the internet. They use the internet to Kickstart, to sell, to distribute. They are the people who have hired me and other freelancers. They are my living.

For me, SOPA and PIPA are not just bills that would increase censorship and decrease free speech. They are not just bills that put too much power in the hands of big business. They are bills that could damage my livelihood, and the living of the small businesses, the little upstarts, the people working from home and hiring me to make bookcovers for their self-published book. These are bills that could take away my job. In a time when finding work is difficult for so many, do we really want a bill that will hurt job creators?

If elected officials really want to help job creators, then they won’t pass these bills. Help me keep my job. The EFF has made it INCREDIBLY simple for you to figure out who your representatives are and contact them all at once: https://blacklist.eff.org/

The Zombies are here!

Gimme Shelter, the anthology I produced about the zombie Apocalypse is now available in e-book (2.99) and print (5.99). 

More here: http://galileogames.com/2012/01/the-zombies-are-here/

There seems to be a bunch of new followers here following last weeks post, so I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself. I’m J.R. Blackwell. I’m a writer, photographer and bon-vivant. There will be fiction and my photography here, plus an occasional humorous essay. Now and then, people take my humorous essays VERY seriously, which is hilarious indeed.

I currently work as the Creative Director for Galileo Games, where I am producing a fiction line. I might be putting a call out for submissions soon, so if you’re a writer, you might want to watch out for that. If you like reading fiction, especially genre fiction about space pirates and zombies and magic, then we will be making books for you. If you are looking for fiction about lives of quiet desperation in suburbia, well, we’re not going to have that, but I do wish you luck in finding it.

Other than that, I take photographs of films that never existed, ponies, zombies, and I’m currently working on a self-portrait project I’m calling Abundant. You’ll likely see a bunch of photos from Abundant here.

I wrote a game called Shelter in Place, which is about Zombies, and next week, an anthology I edited, Gimme Shelter, is going up for sale. My website where I post regular updates about my work is www.jrblackwell.com. Thanks for coming along on the ride.

When someone smiles at you from their deathbed, someone you love, it’s becomes a smile that you carry with you for the rest of your life. You never forget it.

Abundant: Glowing

Ten

It’s a lie, and we all know it.

We all know that what we see in magazines and online, images and video can be manipulated. We know that the people on the cover of magazines are photoshopped. We aren’t stupid. We know.

And yet. And yet, even though we know it, we still think “She’s beautiful, he’s let himself go, she’s still got it.”

Images can be manipulated, and I don’t just mean photoshop, I mean makeup and choosing where to point the camera, I mean angles. That’s what an artist does.

Katie West once pointed out, and I’m paraphrasing, that you only see what she wants you to see. I think about this concept a lot when I’m taking photos.

It’s easy to manipulate the eye. That is one of the first things you learn, as a photographer - where to crop, where to look, how to see it. After a while, you can make a healthy, glowing person look ill, and a ill person look healthy. Point the light this way, turn the camera that way and you’ve got your very own reality.

All of us know this, but we still are seduced by the illusion.

I am not sick. I am the healthiest I’ve ever been. Glowing. But I can show you what I want you to see, how I want you to see it. Next time, I’ll show you something else.

From my Portrait Project: Abundant.

Ten

He Kills Me

how-you-die:

He murders me, just like I always said he would.

I told everyone that he was going to kill me; friends, family, co-workers, the police. They find my body and there is no doubt. He killed me.  Everyone knew, and no one could stop it.

Chuck Wendig is doing an art project where people submit how they will die. You can view, follow and submit here: http://how-you-die.tumblr.com/

I created film stills from a movie that never existed, based on a book that’s just been released.

Empire State was written by Adam Christopher, and is a part of the Worldbuilder project, a project that expands the worlds of novels with pro and submitted content. Since Empire State is a sci-fi noir, I decided that I wanted to capture images as if they were from a black and white noir film of the 1940’s. Creating these images required research, location scouting, professional makeup, and recruiting models that fit the look of the area and the characters in the book.  It was quite a bit of work and I’m very proud of it.

The full set is available exclusively here: http://empirestate.cc/2012/01/12/stills-from-the-empire-state-movie/#more-120

Abundant: Delivery

Abundant: Delivery

I told a friend that I’m doing this project because I have something to say about this period in my life. There is an intense pressure right now to be perfect, untainted, fresh and sterile and untouched out of the box. There is a pressure to be like an action figure that never gets unpacked. 

But life isn’t like that. You get colds. You take medicine. You eat processed food. You drink coffee. You have sushi. You don’t get enough sleep. You hug a friend who later tells you that they have the flu. A car nearly rear ends you at a stop light.

This world is full of near misses, of infection, of contamination, of toxins. And wonder. To live is to take yourself out of the box.

Nine

From my Self Portrait project, Abundant.

I dreamed this image, and after dreaming it, had to make it real.

Eight