Storycomic Weekly Newsletter: October 3rd
ALWAYS POSTED A WEEK EARLIER ON PATREON
🚨 Storycomic Patreon Update for Creators 🚨
If you're an author, indie comic creator, game designer, or storyteller looking for more visibility, the Storycomic Patreon is one of the easiest ways to get your work in front of a growing audience.
For just $5 a month (about the price of a cup of coffee), you get some real promotional benefits:
🎙 Front-of-the-Line Recording Access
I’m often booking podcast interviews three months in advance, but Patreon members jump to the front of the line. This is especially helpful if you have a time-sensitive launch, Kickstarter, or new release coming up.
🔗 Permanent Show Notes Promotion
Your website or project link will be included in the show notes of all interviews as long as you’re a member.
📣 Social Media Promotion
We’ll regularly help promote your projects across Storycomic’s social media channels.
And remember, the Storycomic podcast has over 30,000 downloads, so it’s a great way to get your work discovered by readers and fellow creators.
For the cost of a coffee each month, you get promotion, visibility, and priority booking.
If you’re a creative looking to grow your audience, it’s a pretty great deal.
👉 Join us on Patreon and let’s share your story with the world.
Alan Bisson talks Celery Man, poetry, and local creativity
In my newest interview, I’m joined by Alan Bisson, a local poet and performer who has recently been getting attention for his Celery Man TikTok videos.
At first glance, Celery Man might seem like a funny internet character — strange, memorable, and very hard to scroll past. But Alan’s work also opens the door to a larger conversation about poetry, performance, humor, and what it means to find an audience in an unexpected way.
Alan’s online presence connects Celery Man with poetry-related tags including #poetry, #poetrydagger, and #ThePeoplesPoet, suggesting that the character is part of a broader creative identity rather than just a one-off joke. IDCrawl Locally, Celery Man has already become a conversation starter, with Vermonters reacting online to the odd, funny, and oddly joyful nature of the performance. Reddit
In our conversation, we talk about how Celery Man began, what it feels like to get online attention, how poetry fits into performance, and why local creativity matters.
It is a fun, unusual, and surprisingly thoughtful conversation about art, humor, vulnerability, and being willing to put something strange into the world.
Tricia Gardella inspires young explorers with Mouse Visits Everglades National Park
In my newest interview, I’m joined by Tricia Gardella, affectionately known as “National Park Gramma,” to talk about her newest children’s book, Mouse Visits Everglades National Park.
The book is the 10th installment in Tricia’s Mouse Traveler series, which introduces young readers to America’s National Parks, monuments, wildlife, geography, history, and conservation through the adventures of a curious little mouse.
In this newest story, Mouse explores Everglades National Park, one of the most unique ecosystems in the country. Young readers learn that the Everglades are the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles live side by side, and that the park was the first national park in the United States established to protect an ecosystem from urban development and agriculture.
Tricia’s books are designed to encourage curiosity, safe exploration, family connection, and respect for nature. They combine colorful illustrations, playful storytelling, fun facts, and a conservation message that invites children to think about protecting special places for future generations.
In our conversation, we also talk about Tricia’s own inspiring journey: earning her college degree at 75, building businesses, writing books, and proving that creativity has no expiration date.
David Deane Haskell on healing the past and imagining the future
In my newest interview, I’m joined by David Deane Haskell, an author, educator, musician, and storyteller whose work spans personal nonfiction and speculative science fiction.
His book Wounded Angels is a deeply personal account of childhood trauma, addiction, shame, inner-child healing, and the difficult work of rebuilding a self after harm. David describes it not as a traditional self-help manual, but as a lived record of transformation written while he was actively working through those experiences. Google Books
His science fiction novel The Solarian Deep goes in a completely different direction. The first book in the Technoquatics series, it takes place in a post-apocalyptic underwater society and follows Calistya, a young woman who discovers a mystery that challenges everything she has been told about survival, evolution, and what it means to belong. David Deane Haskell
What connects the two books is transformation. David has spoken openly about returning to writing after a five-year creative block and how both fiction and nonfiction began pouring out during a new phase of his life. The Reading Cafe
In our conversation, we talk about recovery, writer’s block, science fiction, music, identity, underwater worldbuilding, and how very different books can come from the same human need to understand who we are.
Melissa Cronin on trauma, survival, and forgiveness in The Peach
In my newest interview, I’m joined by Vermont writer Melissa H. Cronin, author of the forthcoming memoir The Peach: A Memoir of Trauma, Survival, and Forgiveness.
The book begins with the 2003 Santa Monica Farmers’ Market crash. Melissa was reaching for a peach when an out-of-control vehicle tore through the market, killing ten people and injuring dozens more. She survived, but the crash left her with a traumatic brain injury, PTSD, fractured memory, and a long road of physical and emotional recovery. SAINT JULIAN PRESS, INC.
Before the crash, Melissa worked as a neonatal intensive care nurse. Afterward, she found herself on the other side of medicine — as a patient learning how to navigate an injury that was often invisible to everyone else.
Melissa is also an essayist, journalist, pedestrian advocate, Irish fiddler, gardener, and nature artist. She earned her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and her work has received a Notable Mention in The Best American Essays. Melissa Cronin
In our conversation, we talk about traumatic brain injury, PTSD, memory, anger, caregiving, identity, and what forgiveness really asks of a survivor.
Project Update: A Quiet Week of Editing
It was a pretty slow week on the project front, but I did spend some more time rereading and editing my Old-Time Radio Fate Core game.
Right now, a lot of the work is less about adding new material and more about going back through what I already have, tightening things up, catching little issues, and making sure the whole thing feels consistent. It’s not the most exciting part of creating a game, but it’s definitely an important one.
The project has been gradually shifting toward a more general Golden Age of Radio sitcom setting, rather than being tied too closely to any one classic radio show. So this rereading and editing pass has also been a good chance to look at the material with that broader direction in mind.
Not every week needs to bring a huge breakthrough. Sometimes progress is simply sitting down, rereading what you’ve written, making a few changes, and moving things another step closer to where you want them to be.
Book of the Week: Little Bunny Follows His Nose
One of the sweeter moments this week was reading Little Bunny Follows His Nose by Katherine Howard to Iggy at bedtime.
The copy we have is from 1991, which means the scratch-and-sniff scents are long gone by now. That didn’t stop us from having fun with it, though. We still scratched the pages with our fingers, leaned in close, and tried to smell whatever might still be there. Mostly, all we got was the smell of old paper.
And somehow, that made it even better.
There was something funny and oddly charming about going through the motions anyway, page after page, as if one of those long-lost scents might suddenly come back. Iggy had a good time with it, and I did too.
It also reminded me how much these simple bedtime moments matter. Iggy just turned six, and the kids are growing up faster than I’d like to admit. Reading a story before bed can feel like such a normal part of the routine, but these are the kinds of little moments I know I’ll remember later.
The scratch-and-sniff gimmick may have faded decades ago, but the book still did exactly what a good children’s book should do: gave us a little time together, made us laugh, and turned an ordinary bedtime into something worth remembering.
Sometimes an old book, a six-year-old, and the smell of aging paper are more than enough.
Personal Update: A Busy Week, but a Good One
This was one of those weeks that felt busy from just about every direction.
On the work side, we had some good successes bringing in new clients for both the radio station and the newspaper, which was definitely encouraging. At the same time, things were a little more hectic than usual because my head graphic designer and our front desk person were both on vacation at the same time. That made for a pretty wild week around the office, but we managed to pull through and keep everything moving.
Things were busy at home, too. Our town held its annual festival, so there was plenty going on around the community throughout the week.
I also picked up a leaf-raking machine in preparation for fall cleanup. Iggy helped me put it together, which turned what could have been just another chore into a fun little project for the two of us. With the leaves starting to come down, I have a feeling we’re going to be getting plenty of use out of it before long.
Between work, the festival, and projects around the house, it was definitely a full week—but overall, a productive and pretty successful one.
at Rocktober Fest, the school band returns
frosty night came early this year so the plants are in again for the winter already