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.

Quick announcement/reminder: Pre-orders for Schlock Mercenary: The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance open tomorrow at 8:00am Mountain (roughly 24-point-five hours from this post.)

I’m not talking about the recovery of my computer after its power supply failed. That wasn’t just now. That was last night.

No, I’m talking about not burning myself because my hand was wet and my brain was on.

I just finished cooking breakfast in the oven, and our gas oven has a vent that blows across the back of the stovetop. Not an ideal design — it tends to heat pot-handles if you’ve been careless enough to leave them turned towards the vent. It also heats the back of the small Corelle serving tray we use to set spatulas on so their drips are contained.

I was giving a quick wash to the tools I used at breakfast — spatula, cheese slicer, cheese grater, pizza-cutter — and saw that the Corelle tray was full of gunk from my project and the breakfast Sandra made for the kids (French toast and scrambled eggs; there was a big yellow puddle). So I reached out and grabbed it by the non-sticky-yellow end, which happened to be the end closest to the vent.

That noise you hear when you drip water onto a griddle? That came off of my fingers. I could FEEL the water on my fingertips boiling away. In less than a second (what IS minimum human reaction time? Figure that long plus a little change) I had snatched my hand away and stuck it back under the running water in the sink. I checked my fingertips.

No burns. No redness. No sensation of ANYTHING other than normal “hi, I’m your fingertip, touch the world with me” I usually get.

I boiled water off of my fingertips, and didn’t get burned. Whew!