Woo-hoo! My third novel, Bait, is now available on Amazon! Head on over and read the first few chapters for free!

Bait is a smart, funny book set in contemporary California.

Doreen has a problem. The man she loves is sick and getting worse every day. So she does what anyone would to: she turns to a set of ancient bracelets that claim to heal and protect one person by sucking the life force out of other people.

Doreen’s targets are Jason, an ex-Olympic diver now performing at a run-down theme park, Lucy, a struggling actress who’s just landed a starring role in a terrible play, and Sammy, a small-time con man who has accidentally become a City Councilman.

Smart characters, snappy dialog, an inflatable security guard, hungry sharks, and a pair of overly well-matched twins populate this goofy but warm story of love, jewelry, finding self-confidence, and just desserts.

I’ve just released version 2 of my Andrew’s Utilities Library for Processing!

The two new big things are support for globs, and a function to help you make seamless animation loops. There’s also a bunch of bug fixes.

Read all about it here, then install it from within Processing (choose Sketch/Import Library) and have fun!

I’ve cooked up a cool new 2D geometric primitive. I call it a glob. The idea is that we can join any two circles with a smooth, curvy, controllable neck.

I’ll be making globs a part of my AU Library for Processing very soon. In the meantime, you can read all about them here. At the bottom of that page there’s an interactive demo where you can make your own globs!

I’ve been making and sharing animated loops on my Tumblr for a while now, and I’ve received some questions about how I make them.

One of the most common questions involves how to get lots of moving objects to seamlessly loop, even though they’re all entering and exiting at different times and going different speeds. There are lots of tricks and techniques for doing this. Here’s one of the most basic, but still very flexible and powerful.

Continue reading →

Hooray! My second novel, Freaks of Nurture, is now available on Amazon! Head on over and read the first few chapters for free!

Freaks of Nurture is a fast, funny story with an engaging cast of characters who do their best in weird but comic circumstances.

Dr. Susan Seligman has grown her little walk-in psychotherapy clinic in Seattle into a prospering business. But just as her most important funding sponsor is carrying out a site visit, many of her clients report that someone is reading their minds. When some of her own staff wrap the clinic rooms in tinfoil, things unravel quickly.

Meanwhile, in the building behind the clinic, three brilliant but oddball college students are working in secret to find the source of consciousness. They’ve concocted a mad scientist’s wet dream of a machine to enable them to look into another person’s head. Of course, they don’t know that every test of their gadget is beaming right into the clinic next door, affecting everyone there and causing havoc.

Freaks of Nurture tells the funny story of these two groups of people, both earnest but weird, independently struggling with the mysteries of romance, consciousness, power, and accidental pharmacology.