I had jury duty earlier this week! It was a bit of a roller coaster. I was assigned to a trial which was over very quickly, but still had a lot of interesting elements.

Shoutout to the lawyer whose defense included a PowerPoint presentation featuring clipart of scales, and doves, and cartoon Sherlock Holmes

— David Malki ! (@malki) February 3, 2016

the underlined words “NOT GUILTY” splashing inconsequentially on the wall 20 feet behind the screen — David Malki ! (@malki) February 3, 2016

You can read the entire sordid account here!

A couple years back, I published a small book called Horrid Little Stories: Sixty Dark and Tiny Tales of Misery and Woe.

It’s a 150-page collection of all the art and verses from the annual Wondermark calendars of 2008-2012 (and a few bonus verses besides!).

Stylistically, it’s a bit of an homage to Gorey, where the stories are all told in rhyme and everything always ends in tears.

The book has been available for some time in my own store (where it can be bundled with greeting cards), in my TopatoCo store (where it can be bundled with T-shirts), and on Amazon (where it can be bundled with a 27-lb tub of cat litter).

But that’s always been for a flimsy, paper edition!

Today I’m pleased to announce that this book is available for Kindle, as well:

Because it’s a heavily illustrated book, this is a bit of an experiment for me with Kindle’s page layout capabilities — I’ve never offered any sort of comic collection on Kindle, because it doesn’t seem like it’d be that easy to read. But this book, which is half illustrations and half text, works pretty well for e-reading!

If you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, you can even read it for free… Or, if you are just a normal person who likes Kindle books, it’s a mere few dollars. Cheaper than that 27-lb bucket of cat litter, and it stays in your life longer, too!

Hope you check it out!! I want to move more of my book catalog to the various ebook formats as time goes on, so I am interested to hear if you like this, and whether the format works well enough for this material.

Like I did last year, I made a simple progressive calendar for myself to use in my studio — and if you want to use it too, you can download it for free! Here’s the 6-page PDF.

Longtime readers know about my fondness for the “progressive” style of calendar (a term I think I made up), which leaves no unnecessary gaps between months and thus more accurately mimics how human beings experience the phenomenon of time.

I made this calendar super big and clear, so it can be read at a glance from across the room. Since most of the events I attend (conventions and so on) occur on weekends, I prefer to group the weekend days together on the right side.

One change I made from last year is that I didn’t indicate any holidays! I figure anyone who’s willing to print out and hang a calendar like this can also figure out how to mark off whatever holidays are relevant to their country, province, subculture, etc. — and also might appreciate not being bothered by possibly irrelevant information. In other words, by not marking holidays, this single 33-kilobyte PDF file becomes universally usable worldwide.

The PDF is six pages long and, just because of how many dates fit onto a full page, runs all the way through mid-February 2017. In the picture above, I’ve trimmed the tops off pages 2, 3, 5, and 6, so as to present the entire year as two impassive columns.

OR, GO SMALL: I’m also a big fan of David Seah’s Compact Calendar, which applies the progressive concept to a single sheet of paper. This one’s super handy for planning out a whole year’s events in broad strokes. Check out and download his version here!

David’s got a ton of other cool printable productivity tools on his site, too — I’ve played around with quite a few of them in the past, instead of doing actual work. Enjoy!