Getting a long-arms permit in NYC feels a bit like time-travel. You walk into this building built in 1948, which is in beautiful condition. A guard directs you down the stairs to a sub-lobby, which is all gleaming granite and with lightwells letting in the sun. Then you go down another set of stairs and suddenly you are in a 1940s horror film basement. Everything is institutional brown. The corridor twists suddenly and randomly, so that if someone is following you, it would be easy for them to hide. Exposed pipes snake across the ceiling.

Eventually, you find your way back to a wood door with “Rifle/Shotguns Permit Division.” Inside, are shiny new computers sitting on desks unchanged since 1950. There’s also a ledger book, which the clerk swears is new. I just wonder which year it belongs to.

You get finger-printed, have your picture made — despite having brought four passport photos as requested — and eventually get a shiny new permit.

Now to get the guns.

Weapons Specialists is a fantastic organization. The folks who run it are incredibly knowledgeable and willing to spend time with you to make certain that you are comfortable with the weapon. I loaded and test-fired three shotguns today with 1/4 charge ammunition.

I have learned some things that might be helpful in fiction.

• When putting down an animal, don’t put the muzzle directly on it or you risk creating a closed system which could blow the shell back up at you. That would be bad.
• Deer can’t see orange but they can see blue. Blue jeans stand out like neon.
• Birds can see orange.

Plus just the nuances of loading, dealing with the safety, and such. I got the guns safely dropped at the theater, introduced the cast to them and then ran away.

Since we have some new readers, let me catch you up a bit. When my bio says that I’m a professional puppeteer, it really means it. So after feeling like a rock star this weekend, I’ve come back to the grind of daily routine, which happens to include building a springer spaniel.

To do that, I use an actual dog skull in order to make sure that I’ve got the dentition right. This one arrived the day before LaunchPad, so I kind of opened the box, went, “Yep, skull” and ignored it.

I pulled it out of the box today, along with the pair of eyeballs that arrived while I was gone. As before, the skull is a beautiful thing and striking in how different it is from the last dog skull. Spaniels have a much more pronounced forehead.

Now… do you see that oblong dark spot in the jaw? That would be a dried dermestid beetle. It’s wedged in a small hole in the bone. There are very few things that wig me out, but maggoty things fall into that category. Now, granted, this is a beetle and has a hard shell. It’s only the shape that is at all maggoty and yet… The notion of trying to pick it out makes my skin feel like a bajillion beetles are going to scuttle across me. Part of me wonders if I can get way with just encasing it in foam and pretending it doesn’t exist, except then, of course, the darn thing would fall out at an unexpected moment.

So there you go! The glamour of puppetry.

Today was largely uneventful.  I picked up a check so I could start building the springer spaniel I need to make for a show.  I’ll tell you, standing around on the sidewalk with the artistic director and having a conversation about how much blood you want the dog to have on it and how it should twitch when it gets shot is… well, even in NYC I felt a little exposed.

Mostly I felt sorry for the two dachsunds tied up next to us.  Everytime we mimicked the sort of yelp the dog should give in the show, the dachsunds looked panicked.

Now I’m trying to prep my office so it’s ready for the build.  I won’t be able to really work on it until I come back from Readercon because I have to wait for the skull to arrive.

It’s hard to be upset about things breaking when you get to have this conversation.

Stage Manager: Hi. I hate to bother you, but the chair isn’t spurting blood anymore.

Me: What’s it doing?

SM: Blood just dribbles out onto the stage instead of shooting across. We really need spurting blood.

I went down to take a look and couldn’t duplicate the problem. So, I fiddled with things. Everyone agreed that it was working. I went home.

After the show, I got another call, this time from the technical director.

TD: It stopped spurting blood again.

Me: You’re kidding.

TD: I figured out why none of us could get it to fail. We weren’t letting the blood sit for an hour before spurting.

The theory is that there’s a hole somewhere in the line that is allowing air to enter and that the chair is spurting air bubbles instead of blood. We got nothing else to work with so I’m going down tomorrow to replace the tubing.

For the new show I’m working on, Rags and Bones, I have to make a trick chair that spurts blood and hides human hearts. Actually, I have to make it look like an actor is spurting blood, but the chair is the easiest way to deliver said fluid.