Category Archives: Journal

This is me rambling about me, mostly. Current stuff: home, family, my head’s on fire… that kind of thing. This also includes everything imported from LiveJournal.

Journal

Ten Years: Ask Me Anything

On Tuesday the 23rd I’ll be doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) in r/fantasy over on Reddit. Why? Because I’ve been self-employed for ten years now.

2004, September 20th, a Monday… that was my last day at Novell. Tuesday the 21st was my first day cartooning full-time.

And here we are in 2014. I think that the right day for celebrating a decade of Schlock Mercenary as my day job is the 21st, because while quitting was satisfying, I’d rather celebrate the beginning of the next thing than the ending of the previous thing. That said, here’s what I wrote ten years ago on September 20th:

In the face of this new-found freedom, I’m going to spend the next 90 days pretending to be a full-time cartoonist. It may be little more than a sabbatical, or perhaps a pilgrimage-at-the-drawing-table. Then again, it may be a pretense that dictates the shape of reality. I’m not unemployed. I’m SELF-employed. Pretend that with me, please.

The game of pretend has turned out pretty well thus far. I look forward to the perpetuation of the pretense for another decade and beyond…

 

Journal

Salt Lake Comic Con ’14: “Wonderful, notwithstanding…”

SLCC14-BadgeSalt Lake Comic Con is a great show.

It has some problems, and some of them are big and painful, but the good outweighed the bad for me this time around. I still think the registration issue is something the top brass need to fall on their swords for (last I heard they were blaming subordinates rather than admitting their own egregious failings in the matter) and the convention center itself is not nearly as pleasant a place as the San Diego, Phoenix, or Indianapolis convention centers with which I’m familiar, but at the end of the show there were happy crowds, happy vendors, and I had an energized sort of exhaustion that said “this was worth it” rather than “I don’t know why we do these things.”

If I point out problems, it’s because I want the show to be better, but I can now state with confidence that it’s a really good show.

My panels were a blast, and had good crowds. The panel discussions weren’t quite as erudite or deep as the panels at literary-focused genre events like LTUE, LDStorymakers, or the GenCon Writer’s Symposium, but those are events for writers, and the SLCC panels were, for the most part, events for fans (some of whom are writers, but they’re a small minority.) The important thing for this show is that the panels were fun–at least the ones I was involved in. I did catch a little mumbling from attendees coming out of one panel or another along the lines of “I was hoping it would be about…” or “I wish they’d covered…” but I think that’s as much an issue of setting the audience’s expectations as it is about delivering the goods.

Sandra had good panels as well, and that’s important to me. As a micro-publisher, editor, designer, and writer, she has at least as many important things to bring to a discussion as I do, and at Salt Lake Comic Con she got to bring ’em, and she came back from her events at least as energized as I did.

Some key differences between SLCC ’14 and SLCC ’13:

  • The aisles got wider
  • The Expo Hall’s hours got shorter
  • The Expo Hall’s hours didn’t get changed at the last minute
  • Security was managed professionally

This meant that the crowds flowed well, even when the show was full, and that vendors like me could have a reasonable 9-hour work day, allowing us to keep that game face on without needing to chew helpless, innocent attendees’ faces off when the last layer of battered veneer of our humanity finally sloughed away. It also meant that I was able to spend time with fellow professionals after floor hours. I had a delightful dinner with fellow cartoonists, including Pat Bagley, Dave Kellett, and Jake Parker, and was able to have a decompression dinner Saturday night with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Sandra, and Brian McClellan (who was a great booth-mate.)

Oh, and we made decent money. Return-wise, the first SLCC was the worst large show I have ever done. The second barely broke even. This one, though, made twice as much for us as the first two put together. Finally I can look at the event with confidence and start planning my year around doing it regularly.

Admittedly, I don’t know what the average attendee’s experience was. I think most folks at the show were there to stand in line for celebrity signings or photo-ops, and that’s way outside my area of interest. The fans who showed up at my booth were happy, and they were fun to talk to.

How big was it, really? Here’s what it looked like empty, as seen from the Green Room:

Looking south from the Green Room
Looking south from the Green Room
Looking west from the Green Room
Looking west from the Green Room

These pictures obviously don’t do the crowds justice. From my booth, which was in the southwest corner of the south wing, it took about 15 minutes to get to booths or events on the west end of the west wing… unless I flashed my exhibitor’s badge and slipped out and back in through the loading docks.

Here are the big hurdles that Salt Lake Comic Con needs to clear for their next event:

  • Get everybody into the hall within 3 hours on Thursday. Issue badges via mail, and open the on-site registration on Tuesday and Wednesday.
  • Attendee names on badges, at least for the adults, the vendors, and the professionals.
  • Roll out carpet. This will reduce noise, reduce fatigue, and class the event up a LOT. (AFAIK, right now the Salt Palace does not own enough carpet to do this.)
  • Lock in the panel schedule 60 days in advance.
  • Print a meaningful map, and hang better signage in the Expo Hall

But the show was wonderful, notwithstanding the problems I’ve described. Sandra and I have already begun planning how best to exhibit and attend the “Fan Experience” version of this event in April.

 

 

Essays, Journal, Reviews

The New Doctor’s New Clothes

So, the emperor is basically naked.

It took me two seasons of on-again, off-again viewing to figure it out, and it pains me greatly to say it because he’s been such a fun emperor in times past (and times future!) but, oh my, that’s pretty naked.

Further stretching the metaphor, his outfits have ranged from simple-yet-serviceable to extravagant-and-exhilarating, I have adored many of them, and envied not a few! Lately, however they seem to run somewhere between threadbare and last-year’s-fashion. Very recently I began to worry that the Emperor’s Clothier might  have a supply-side problem.

Nope. Or rather, yes, the clothier has a problem. He’s not supplying any clothing at all. The Emperor is, in point of fact, stark naked. And in case you haven’t closed the loop already, what I’m saying is that the season 8 premiere episode of Doctor Who, “Draw Breath,” starring the brilliant and versatile Peter Capaldi as the latest incarnation of the nigh-immortal, eponymous time lord, was awful.

I don’t mean to imply that those who loved it are somehow blind to the emperor’s nakedness, but let’s crank up the A/C a bit and see whether this supposedly well-appointed fellow shivers, and okay, maybe I AM implying something.

Also, I’m declaring this metaphor broken. I don’t have an A/C knob to turn up, and I don’t know what Doctor Who would look like with the metaphorical shivers.

I can, however, list some of my complaints:

SPOILER ALERT

(and with that out of the way…)

The conceit of “Deep Breath,” (Season 8 Episode 1) was that the Doctor experiences emotional distress when he regenerates, because all of his friends can no longer see him, the real him, through the new skin. This is a GREAT IDEA. And then it got told in the most ham-handed way possible, so that this truly touching bit of human truth gets lost as it knocks about in re-hashed robots, other people’s trademarks, and the requisite eye-candy dinosaur.

In short, the episode squandered a brilliant character insight that can ONLY be executed on when  a new Doctor arrives.

I knew I was in trouble when the Doctor was ranting about the bedroom, and I thought to myself “sleeping in a bed would be more enjoyable than this.” Sure, I was tired, but I’ve stayed up late watching recorded programming on many a night.  That, by the way, was about the time that Sandra stopped sitting up straight, and opted to lie down on the rest of the couch. Wise woman.

There was clever dialog scattered here and there throughout the episode, but it felt like shiny bits of pretty wrapping paper taped haphazardly to an anvil–the anvil being the cluttered, confused plot and its numerous call-backs to episodes I have enjoyed. Being reminded of a fun thing is not the same as delivering a new fun thing.

Back to the new metaphor: with enough of the shiny bits you can convince folks to admire the wrapping, but when this bundle gets launched from the satellite on its way to my TV screen it is supposed to glide in, not lithobrake into the Yucatan and kill off the dinosaurs.

(It was a big anvil. Made of old stuff. And there WAS a dinosaur. And another metaphor snaps from over-extension.)

The dinosaur! It featured prominently in the adverts and teasers, but it was too big to be believable. Sure, it HAD to be too big because Moffat needed it to cough up a Tardis, but if you’re going to blow the CG budget on something that shiny, you should at least use it to good effect. The dinosaur coughs up the Tardis, bemoans its lonely fate (as translated by The Doctor, who speaks the language of grossly oversized tyrannosaurs), and then burns to death. End of dino.

Another squandered opportunity. The dinosaur could have been used to point up the “see beneath the skin” conceit, but only if it did more for the plot than deliver the Tardis and then turn into a greasy, burned clue.

On to the trio of Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint, and Strax (aka lizard lady, the maidservant, and the Sontaran): I like these characters. Strax delivered some of the best comic relief in the episode, even if doing so did ding his character a bit. Using the relationship between Vastra and Jenny to discuss non-traditional familial relationships was clever, but felt really forced. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that they’ll do better in future episodes, but I don’t think I have any future episodes in me.

Why not?

One word: Daleks.

The teaser for the next episode showed Daleks. Honestly, I don’t care about Daleks. I understand that it might be too expensive for them to just discard a bunch of props because the writers have moved on to new things, but every time they come back to Daleks I feel like I’m supposed to be surprised and terrified and thrilled, but all I really am is bored. Very bored. And disappointed.

So I’m done. At least until someone who is NOT a hard-core fan comes to me and says “hey, you know what? This one episode from the middle of Season 8 is huge fun. Capaldi chews scenery like an Eeetabrox, and oh, the Eeetabrox are these really cool, brand new aliens….” and then I’ll tune the person out while making a note to myself of the episode number.

 

Announcements, Journal

Naked in Public

Today I published my creative non-fiction story, “No. I’m Fine.”

NoI'mFine-CoverIt’s just 1,730 words long. It’s free. It’s here.

It’s intensely personal and it makes me nervous to have it out there, but I want people to be able to read it, and maybe understand their depressed, anxious, or otherwise mentally-challenged friends.  Of course, in order to accomplish that I let the reader all the way inside my head.

So. Naked in public.

The publishing process–making an ebook out of a Word document–was educational, and very time-consuming. I still don’t know how to add the cover image shown here to the epub and mobi files, at least not without buying software for the job. Also, I learned that I can’t make an ebook “always free” on Amazon. I don’t want to charge money for this, and I certainly don’t want to make people pay Amazon in order to read it.

But the salient point is that it’s available, and you can read it for free, and after reviewing the feedback from a bunch of volunteer beta-readers, I’m pretty sure you can read it on just about any device.