I’m at Salt Lake Comic Con this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday!
Schlock Mercenary merchandise will be in booth 1600, but that number is misleading. We’re at the west end of Aisle 700, right across from The Pie Pizzeria booth. My full schedule is below, but the booth will be staffed the whole time the expo hall is open.
THURSDAY
1:00pm-5:30pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600 – I’ll sign and sketch in books at no charge. If it gets slow, I’ll be penciling and inking strips. Come watch me work!
6:00pm-6:50pm: Room 251 – Choose Your Own Apocalypse! It’s an audience-participation game show type thing in which each of the panelists tries to woo the audience over to their point of view.
7:00pm-8:00pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600 – signing, sketching, and working on the comic.
FRIDAY
10:00am-noon: Booth 1600
12:00pm-12:50pm: Room 150G – XDM: Xtreme Dungeon Mastery and the Xtreme Player Codex, with Tracy and Curtis Hickman
1:00pm-1:50pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600
2:00pm-2:50pm: Room 255C – Inside Schlock Mercenary! All that behind-the-scenes stuff… ask me anything!
8:00pm-8:50pm: Room250a – Guardians of the Galaxy: Post-Mortem (I guess my movie reviewing makes me an expert?)
SATURDAY
10:00am-11:00am: Expo Hall, Booth 1600
11:00am-11:50am: Publishing, Marketing, and Making a Living from a Digital Comic Book
12:00pm-3:00pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600
4:00pm-4:50pm: Room 255F – Writing Humor: Learning to be Funny on the Page
5:00pm-6:00pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600
7:00pm-7:50pm: Room 255F – Writing Excuses Unplugged, with Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells.
It’s going to be a very busy show for me. I’m sharing booth space with Brian McClellan, so even when I’m not on stage I’ll probably be goofing off in entertaining ways.
I probably shouldn’t promise that. But come see us!
Salt Lake Comic Con is less than a week way. I still don’t know my actual booth number, mostly because Sandra handles that stuff and I wasn’t paying attention, but it’s not the booth I want to call your attention to.
Robison Wells and I will be doing a panel together called “Writing and Mental Health.” We did this at SLCC Fan Experience in April with Peter Wacks and Bree Despain, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. I did a reading from “No. I’m Fine.” which was not yet publicly available.
It’s publicly available now. Whether or not you’re going to be at Salt Lake Comic Con, you can find all the ebook versions right here. And if you are going to be at Salt Lake Comic Con, you should consider attending Writing and Mental Health at 5pm on Friday in room 251a.
This will be a very open discussion. The Q&A we had in April was an amazing experience–definitely the sort of thing we want to have happen again. We’d love to see you there.
This was probably my best-ever year at GenCon Indy. With bullets:
The Wallrike scooped me up at the airport, saving me cab fare, helping me sort out a housing snafu, and basically being excellent company.
The Kokomo Irregulars had the booth completely loaded and assembled by Wednesday at noon.
I got all of my Massively Parallel bonus story rows penciled on Wednesday by dinner time, while sitting in the awesome booth.
I got to hang out with cool people all weekend. Some of them are name-droppable. Some are awesome people whose names only carry cachet with the folks who are privileged enough to have met them.
How many books did I draw in? I don’t know. Pretty sure it was “hundreds.”
My panels went well, with only one exception, and that one went so far off the rails it made for great commiseration fodder.
Our booth did better sales-wise than it has in any prior year. 15% better than our next best number, and up 25% from last year.
I learned important stuff from Jim Zub, who is a great boothmate, a brilliant writer, and a very savvy industry insider.
I came home energized, and I got work done the very next day. No con-crud, no post-convention blues, no problem.
The one blemish on the experience is that this year the one game I managed to play was “D20 roll-off” in which you sit down at the bar and roll dice to see who rolls better. And really, this is the blemish every year. I don’t get to play games. When I’m away from the booth, I’m not making money. Sandra sent us some handy bar graphs that showed just how much money we weren’t making when Jim, Tracy, and I had to be away from the booth.
Adding to the blemishy darkness of this is the fact that while we had plenty of players interested in testing the Schlock Mercenary role-playing game, we never were able to align ourselves for a table and some dice.
Back to the positive notes: Symposium! If you’re a writer, and you want to attend panels in which writers talk intelligently about writing, and do so with the understanding that they’re talking to an audience full of writers, you should seriously consider attending GenCon Indy just for the Writing Symposium. It has attracted an all-star cast, and when the panels are over there are a million things to do. Marc Tassin has done an outstanding job of growing the symposium over the last three years, and when I talked to him about it I could see that he’s committed to continuing to improve it.
It’s publicly available now