I’m still not unpacked from Rainfurrest. I want to but I know I’m leaving for APE in a few days and somehow that makes it hard to want to bother putting the suitcases away – even though I pulled about half the stuff out of them.
This between-cons space is also making it incredibly hard to try to get any work done. I know I’ve got no chance of getting into a long-term groove, I’ll be uprooting myself in a couple days. Multiple cons in the middle of summer was stressful in the same way; arguably I still haven’t recovered from the groove-killing blow of Sakura/Norwes in one weekend and ECCC in the next. I think the big lesson for this year is “don’t do more than one con in a month”. If not “in a quarter”. Hanging stuff in Foolscap one weekend, then doing Rainfurrest the next weekend, then doing APE the next, is just a ton of stress.
I’m trying out a bunch of new cons this year and the coming year, in general. And I think I’ll want to pull back to just the ones where I have a good time and decent sales. Sadly my “try to do some comic cons” experiment will take a year longer than I really want it to, as the Artist’s Alleys in both ECCC and SDCC turn out to go super fast. I’m almost kinda tempted to get a full table at ECCC, despite it being $700. Just to find out what kind of business I’ll do there and get it over with, instead of putting it off yet another year. I am quite sure I will take a loss if I do this, and I’m not quite sure I want to go into a con pretty much 100% sure I’ll be losing money; on the one hand it might end up being quite freeing, as I’m then freed of any expectations to perform, but on the other hand that price makes me go “oh god holy fuck”. I guess I’ll see how I do at APE, lost somewhere in the middle of that vast hall, and make some decisions based on that. I really wish I was going to be going into it with the Rita book as well as the tarot deck.
Yesterday certainly didn’t help my feeling of lethargy today. I went in for another session of tattooing, which is less of a big deal than it was at first – especially since this session went faster than normal due to some unexpectedly simple areas – but is still an insult to a not-insignificant amount of my skin. And then Nick came over, and we stayed up late getting high and playing Race for the Galaxy. It was the first time I’d played in forever; I gave up any hope of winning my first round, and ended up with some lucky draws that I parlayed into a personal record of 90 points. The second round, I was pretty sure I was losing, but ended up with something like 70 points. Which Nick beat. The scores in that game have gotten really insane compared to the basic set.
I’ve also been stressed and frustrated by my Mac deciding it hates my router, and routinely refusing to hold a connection very long. This is a bug that popped up with the latest OS update; I thought I managed to make it go away the other day but it’s back today and is astoundingly annoying. My iPad works fine with the router, my Mac works fine with other routers; it’s just some weird mutual hate issue.
I guess I need to figure out what I’m going to do today. There is art that needs doing. But there are also some errands that need running, and tonight is aikido. I dunno.
I still miss that casual mid-day burlesque class. It stopped around the same time my energy seemed to leave me, and I haven’t found anything to really take its place.