I bought Hero With A Thousand Faces as an audiobook today and started listening. I’m about 10% through the abridged version.

Some thoughts:

1) No, this isn’t going to ruin me as a writer.
2) The reading is kind of flat, but that doesn’t stop the prose from kicking my head in.
3) I get the feeling that for this material to be useful for a writer, he/she needs to read (or listen to) the book, and then keep a cheat-sheet around.
4) I’ve already read the cheat-sheets. It’s possible that the book doesn’t need to be read (or listened to) at all.
5) Except that the prose still kicks my head in. I tried listening while drawing… CAN’T DO IT. Campbell needs the whole brain.

In completely unrelated news, there is now a Schlock Mercenary RSS feed.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS

WorldCon 66 has been amazing thus far, and I don’t expect to be at all disappointed for the remaining three days.

As always, the highlights are the people. Countless (or at least “I lost count”) fans have stopped by to say hi, buy stuff, gush, or otherwise interact. It’s great fun for me, and Sandra has been enjoying it as well.

Then, of course, there are the fellow professionals with whom I’m privileged to rub shoulders. We had dinner with Phil and Kaja Foglio and friends on Wednesday night, and Steve Jackson and Monica Stephens on Thursday. After each of those meals we wandered the room parties and the con suite as a posse, meeting and greeting other notables, fans, and friends along the way.

And for all that there are still a million-zillion-bobillion people here I don’t know, but who I can meet if I want to. I expect I’ll be meeting a bunch more tomorrow, because the comic I created for the newsletter has no dialog — it’s a “caption this” contest. I hold out reasonable hope that in this festival of creative minds SOMEBODY can make me laugh hard enough that I give them free books.

For those of you who have been by to buy stuff — THANK YOU. Sandra and I were worried that the large expense of this trip (flying our children off to California for fun at Grandma’s falls under “babysitting,” for instance) would make it unprofitable, but apparently we’ve more than broken even already.

For those of you who plan to come by to buy stuff — HURRY. We’re already running out of T-shirt sizes, magnet sets, and mouse-mats, and at this rate it looks like we’ll run out of books before Sunday. Yes, you can buy this stuff online, but here at WorldCon there’s no shipping fee, and we’re eating the sales tax.

My only complaint with WorldCon 66 here in Denver is that it’s very spread out compared to WorldCon 64 in Los Angeles. We’re in six or eight different hotels, the Convention Center is being shared with two other events, and the result is that fandom doesn’t seem to be developing the critical mass it did two years ago. We’re just a little too far apart, and when we leave the Convention Center for hotels, we scatter, rather than clumping up and raising the ambient temperature of the networking.

Still, it’s a good event. No, a GREAT event. I’m having a fantastic time.

When I walked through the door at home last night I was pretty strung-out. I caught a pretty harsh cold at Comic-Con, and self-medicated for the eleven-hour drive from San Diego to Orem.

I left San Diego at 8:20am and got home at 8:45pm, one time-zone later. I made pretty good time, stopping in Barstow, CA for gas and food, Primm, NV for a nap at poolside at Whiskey Pete’s, and St. George for gas and food.

But that’s not the strung-out bit.

Have you ever tried those little two-ounce energy drinks? They’re loaded with caffeine and other stuff, and claim to offer five hours of no-crash-afterwards energy. Well, for my eleven hours of “pretend you’re not sick” I took four of those things, 2000 mg of tylenol, and four pseudoephedrine.

I was alert, I wasn’t jittery, and though I could tell I was sick I actually felt like I was on the mend.

Then I walked through the door and it was like somebody cut the strings. Twelve hours of pent-up jitters arrived all at once as my body said “it’s time to lie down.” So I added MORE chemistry, threw back some Nyquil, and slept like a fresh corpse.

Today I’m convalescing, which is very boring. I’ve had a couple of small, soda-can doses of caffeine in order to prevent a decaffeination headache, and I’ve slept a lot. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be better, because in less than a week Sandra and I are driving to WorldCon in Denver, and I’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then.

Yet another post from Sandra because Howard is still away:

That whole post about potential problems with the schlock site is now moot.  We made sure that Mr. Murphy and his rules couldn’t take the Schlock comic out of commission, so he instead opted for making me look like Chicken Little.  The domain registration renewal went through mere hours after I ran around making posts anywhere and everywhere I could think that fans might go looking for information.  Now I get to run around and spam every place again to say “Never mind.”

Can I tell you how happy I am to be Chicken Little?  It is so much better than having site downtime.

Cheep! Cheep!