I met a veteran at the Scrapyard Release Party.

I should point out that there were probably several vets there, but this young man introduced himself as such, and pointed out that he got hooked on the comic while on tour in Iraq.

He asked me, in a quite goodnatured way, with no guile whatsoever, if my practice of sending free books to APO addresses was a marketing thing.

That was a tough question to answer, but today, Memorial Day, is a good day to write about it. See, no matter how charitable that act, the fact that it is good for my business will always call my motives into question. Whether or not I meant it to be good marketing, it IS good marketing, and that casts a long, long shadow.

The practice is a simple one. If an order comes in that is to be shipped to an APO address, Sandra and I put extra books in the box. We include cardstock bookmarks explaining ourselves. They read something like this:

Hey, look at that. A free book!

It’s yours because I respect what you’re doing to help me live in a free country. “Free Country” may not always mean “Free Book,” but for you and your buddies, today, it does.

I know that you’re part of the finest military the world has ever seen, and that you are a force for good. I know that you stand in harm’s way so that me and mine don’t have to. My prayers and the prayers of millions of others around the world are with you every day. We are thankful for your service, and humbled by the work you do.

Enjoy the book, and pass it around your unit. I fully expect it to be dog-eared, heat-warped, and hammered inside of two weeks. “Mint condition” is a waste of perfectly good reading material.

You can find more Schlock Mercenary online and it’ll always be there, so don’t worry if you don’t have internet access right now. Just be sure to come home safely. We miss you.

I asked this young man, this honorable veteran, whether he’d gotten the bookmark. He had, but he seemed to want to hear those words with his own ears. I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d written on the bookmarks, but I told him that the free books are something I do because they’re something I CAN do. They’re a gesture of gratitude, albeit a small one. I understand there is an epic level of boredom out there, with an underlying tension that is equally epic. If a good book and a good laugh dispels that just a bit, maybe for an hour or two, I feel like perhaps I’ve helped.

He told me that the extra books ended up on a bookshelf there in his camp, and were getting passed around pretty regularly. I was very, very happy to hear that.

He bought more books at the party, and I thanked him. But he and I both knew that I wasn’t thanking him for buying books.

Brains are weird.

I just finished scripting a Thursday comic, and I got to the “Save As” dialog and brain-cramped.

My naming scheme for scripts goes like this: YYYYMMDDdayabbrev-punchline. I’ve been using this scheme since July of 2000. The script in question was going to be 20090604Thurs-Discreet.doc, but as I typed I couldn’t remember whether it was supposed to be “Thur” or “Thurs” for the abbreviation.

I’ve typed that abbreviation the same way (or at least never questioned how I was typing it) over 450 times in the last nine years. And suddenly I could not for the life of me figure out which way it was supposed to go. So I flipped to my “Drawn Scripts” folder and checked. “Thurs.” Fine.

Senility? Senescence? Somnambulance? I’m forty-one, after all, and I am a little drowsy.

Brains are weird.

“Dad, when is it going to be not tilted?” Patch asks. Patch is six, and I have no idea what he’s talking about. I’m coloring comics at my computer.

“What?”

“It’s still tilted.” He gestures at the drawing table adjacent my computer station, a monsterous spring-loaded thing that can be adjusted quite a bit.

The light comes on. Before I started work on XDM, that particular drawing table was horizontal most of the time because I used it for recreation. I painted miniatures on it, and it was usually covered with little pewter figurines in various degrees of undress unpaint. One of Patch’s very favorite things to do was to sit at that table with some fully-painted Cygnaran Stormblades, a few fully-painted Trollbloods, and carry on as six-year-olds are wont to carry on with such toys — making explosion sounds and playing at warfare. I always trusted him to play gently. It was a privilege to play with Daddy’s Stormblades, and he respected that.

But then came the crushing workload of “get this book illustrated in a month,” and I put all my toys away, angled the table for drawing, and there it stayed.

Recently I decided to leave it angled, and to use it for marker-art. Just today, in fact, I markered a fresh background for the comic. Patch’s playground is doomed to remain angled, because the moment I make it flat again it’ll get covered with clutter.

This is not a digression from a first-person, present-tense narrative. These last three paragraphs are what run through my head. Especially the part about Patch’s playground being doomed.

“It has to stay tilted” I tell him, and his face falls. “Did you want to play with some miniatures?” I ask, hoping he can be placated with $200 worth of nigh-indestructible Monsterpocalypse plastic figs rather than 200 hours worth of hand-painted pewter.

“Yeah. I want the Stormblades.”

It is time for me to man up to this “Dad” thing I’ve been doing for thirteen years now. My youngest is my responsibility this evening, and I can make a minor concession.

“I tell you what… go get a TV table, and I’ll set it up for you.”

He does, and I do. And I wriggle past my marker-stand into my crowded closet to fish out a pair of boxy bags whose foam trays protect some 300 or so pewter figs.

“Which ones do you want?”

“The Stormblades. And some robots. And the big robot. The biggest one. And the wreck markers.”

“For bad guys do you want the Trolls, or do you want the Undead?” I’m hoping he chooses the Undead. Alexia Ciannor and The Risen are an easy unit for me to fish out, while the Trolls will required digging into the BIG bag.

He pauses. “Undead.” Good boy.

And so he sits and plays at a TV table next to me while I color. This goes on for half an hour or so, at which point he decides the Undead are not enough of a challenge for the Stormblades, two light Warjacks, and one heavy Defender Warjack. Good eye, son. That’s because you’ve got close to four hundred points of Cygnarans up against maybe fifty points of Undead. No, wait. A hundred. They’ve got an Ogrun with them. But I don’t say that. I get out the Trolls.

Half an hour later he’s done. I send him off for a bath, and I carefully pack everything away.

And I get back to work. I’m way behind schedule. I could have knocked down four strips during that hour, and only managed one and a half. All the packing and unpacking, plus the broken concentration… it’s expensive, time-wise. Oh, and one of the miniatures is broken. I examine it closely and decide it’s an easy fix – it’s not broken pewter, it’s a separated joint. Super-glue and a daub of paint will do the trick.

Twenty minutes later he returns from his bath with his Mom. Sandra lets me know that during bath-time he could talk about nothing besides his hour in my office. I briefly consider calling his attention to the broken miniature, and hold my tongue as I realize that being in my office with me and my expensive toys was the best part of his day — a day that included hours of Lego Star-Wars games with a friend, bike-riding, two different stints on a trampoline, and pizza.

I pick him up and collect a hug. “Goodnight, buddy. I love you.” We part, him off to bed with happy thoughts of victorious Cygnarans, me alone again in my office with introspection.

I realize that the best part of his day was the part that I almost sent him away from, and very nearly ruined after the fact with a scolding. I realize that I almost decided that I was too busy, that he could just play more video games, or make do with a lesser set of miniatures. I realize that if I am a Good Dad it’s only accidentally.

Hopefully the act of writing this down will help me remember to have this kind of accident more often.

I refer to my years at Novell as time spent in “Day-Job Land.” I haven’t had a similarly apt descriptor for the land where I get to be a cartoonist, working for myself, playing with my family.

A private conversation with David Malki of Wondermark shook loose the descriptor I want to use. “The Land of Make Believe.”

Yeah, it’s been trademarked and copyrighted and all that by somebody else. I think it’s an amusement park in Jersey. But the idea is bigger than that.

My Land of Make Believe is not just about pretending, it’s not “make-believe” in the child’s play sense. No, this is the Land where every day I get to Make the things that I Believe in. I build universes and draw pictures about them. I share my stories and pictures with others, and I Make them Believe too. I’ve said before that few things are as flattering as learning that I’ve captured the imagination of another human being. I can’t bring myself to think of “fans” without feeling both humbled and exalted by their very existence.

But my Land of Make Believe is not just about creating worlds and inviting others to experience them with me. It’s also about Believing that these worlds, this shared experience can somehow support me and my family, and then Making that happen.

And every so often it’s about looking a skeptic or a critic right in the eye and Making him or her Believe, too. It’s a land of proof in the pudding, and then second helpings of pudding.

And yes, sometimes it’s about pretending I know what I’m doing, and then getting on with my day.