Damn this sure is Moebiussy. Are you surprised that everyone involved in this is French?

Why did it take me something like six hours just to get up the energy to take my laundry out to the laundry room?

Oh. Right.

Hello, winter. Hello, False God.

Man, it’s good to be able to do some of my usual routines again. I went to the farmer’s market for the first time in three weeks; I was out at conventions the last two weekends and missed it. So now I have REALLY SPICY CHEESE and AWESOME HEIRLOOM TOMATOES for salads.

I puttered around the house for a while doing things like folding my socks – this takes a while when every pair is different, and when part of me insists they have to be sorted by color – and neurotically refreshing the page for the Rita 2 Kickstarter. Eventually I said “fuck this”, grabbed the iPad and a sketchbook, and went out to work on the layouts for a 5-page short I’ve promised to do in the next couple of months. I got four pages done; I’ll need to do some reorganizing of the third and shuffle some stuff from 4 onto 3 before I can really finish it. It’s a first draft, and it mostly works, so I’m happy.

I also grabbed a new mechanical pencil on my way out to work on that. The sketchbook I had on me was too small for really working out pages with a slowly-blunting 2B. I used to use .5mm mechanical pencils ALL THE TIME when I was in high school and college, then abandoned them when I discovered the joys of roughing stuff in with the side of a wooden pencil. I’d had a nice mechanical .5 one in the past few years, but I gave it away to a friend who was positively drooling over it, then the place I’d gotten it from never had it again. So I looked at the stuff in the closed display case at the UW bookstore’s art department, and ended up getting a .7mm Pentel Graphgear, with this really cool retractible tip – most drafting-oriented mechanical pencils have a little metal sleeve sticking out a quarter of an inch or so, to protect the lead when you’re drawing against a ruler/template/etc, and also tends to snag in a pocket; this one has that but can pull it back in. I loaded it up with 2B lead and I’m really liking the experience a lot; the slightly thicker lead feels a lot less snap-prone than .5mm was. I used to scoff at the idea of anything thicker than .5mm; I guess things change as we age, huh? I tried a .9mm as well, but found it to be too thick for what I was looking for. Also the .9 was yellow and silver, while the .7 was blue and silver. Yes I am a shallow thing who likes surface appearances.

The Kickstarter is taking longer than I’d initially hoped – I’d thought I might end up celebrating 100% funding last weekend – but I’m not complaining. $6000 in two weeks (I figure it’ll hit 100% tomorrow or Sunday) is still a little more than twice as fast as it took book 1 to crrraaaawllllll to a little short of its $6000 stretch goal. I dunno if I’ll hit any of the stretch goals I’ve got planned, but I’m not really much bothered if I do – spot gloss on the cover would be nice, but is by no means as crucial as spot gloss on the interiors is. Having the “two books” tier REALLY HELPED; right now that’s both the most popular reward, and the biggest chunk of the money. In fact, given that it’s accounting for almost $2200 right now, it will probably always be the biggest chunk of money – even if all the sponsor-level slots are taken, those are still limited to a total of $2500 because they involve me actually drawing unique stuff. I said when I started that I wanted this campaign to work primarily by just selling some books to more people than I did with the first volume, and it’s doing just that. (In fact, I just did some counting – as of now, 107 people have pledged at a tier that gets them a copy of Rita 2 and possibly more, versus 102 people who got a copy of Rita 1.) I’m pretty happy with that result. It’s not INSTANT INTERNET BEST-SELLER EXPLOSION!!! but it’s looking pretty damn good, and I figure Rita 3 will go even better.

Dear Republicans, can you please just fragment your party already? Split off all of these obstructionist fundamentalists who will accept no compromise into their own Whiny Two Year Old Babies Who Only Know The Word “NO” party and start a new one based on the things you actually think are good for the country.

Thank you very much, from a liberal poly transwoman who is just really fucking sick of this shit.

Here’s a quick rundown of RF.

Thursday: I got in just as the dealer’s room was closing. I’m told that there were some serious amounts of money flying around the room that day – one friend sold a fursuit she’d brought mostly as a teaser display for her fursuit-building services and thus had her con more than paid for – but I didn’t see it myself. All I was able to do was drop my suitcase full of merch behind the table and be chased out before they locked the room down for the night.

I hooked up with Nick for the panel he was doing on writing for erotic comics; he kinda dragged me up onto it and I had some things to say about our process when we did Absinthe. Plus near the end I took a moment to urge people to just get off their asses and make something, because if you plan and plan and worry you’ll never get anywhere – make a first attempt, critique it, try again and do your best to not make the same mistakes again; repeat until awesome.

Who did I eat dinner with? I don’t remember! Aargh. Maybe I ate alone? I know I went to the steakhouse in the hotel alone, then bailed when I realized the only thing on the menu was streaks priced for expense accounts; I knew I’d be making money but I didn’t feel like spending $50 for a hotel restaurant meal before seeing how the con would go. Oh right! Then I went up to Maly and Jon’s room and helped save them from the pizzas they’d ordered while they slouched around in their costume pajamas and put together the racks for their table. Maly had this absolutely absurd pink inflatable dolphin with a long rainbow shaft coming out of its belly – in a way that totally did not look anywhere as near as dirty as it sounds to type – which I dubbed “The Ancient Dolphin Hammer of Zillyhoo” because while I am not A Homestuck I have read pretty much the entirety of that comic.

I danced for a bit. Didn’t push myself to stay too long, I wanted to get up in time to set up in the morning.

Amara and Josh got in around midnight, and sleep happened.

Friday: I got out of bed and went to the dealer’s room. Set up in time for it to open. I got a couple of complex commissions – one from a regular, the other from a friend of said regular – and got one of them done at the table that day, in between selling enough stuff to pay for my con even if I wasn’t sharing a room. I only had two so far, so I felt no qualms about taking my time and really knocking them out of the park. The first one required searching the net for images of wood lice.

I failed to show up for the panel on webcomics I was supposed to do with Dana; I’d put it into my calendar as being on Saturday some time ago. Possibly when looking at an earlier version of the panel grid, possibly I was just an idiot, I dunno. She said she handled it well herself, and was even kind enough to plug my comic and its Kickstarter for me.

I went out to dinner with Erin, Berbalang, Sigil, and like five other people whose names I do not remember. It was pretty good; I got rather tipsy off of the glass of cider I had with my meal, and was thus dancing pretty crazily and loosely when I got back to the con and hit the dance for an hour or two.

Saturday: Business was slower. I forgot my cashbox in the room, but it really wasn’t a problem – ever since the introduction of Square, furry cons have really shifted over to credit cards for the most part. It varies from con to con; some are still more cash-based (I was shocked by how much cash I did at Anthrocon), but for the most part I really bring the cashbox to furry cons as a formality. Comic cons, on the other hand, seem to still love cash. I didn’t go back to get it, and it wasn’t really a problem – I think I had to bug Amara (who was sitting next to me) for change all of once.

I didn’t have a chance to go get the cashbox because I’d had to go back home for a box full of Tarot decks; I’d only brought like a half-dozen, after most of my sales at the comic con last week being Rita, and I was down to one after Friday. Orv was kind enough to give me a lift, so it was only about eleven when I got back into the dealer’s room with the decks instead of probably like… two? if I’d taken the bus home for it. I gave him the second badge I’d somehow ended up with due to some mix-ups with getting my badge late on Thursday when the dealer badges were being shuffled between the dealer’s room and registration.

I started handing out fliers for Rita with a secret code on the back: when the Kickstarter for volume 2 gets to the fulfillment survey stage, I’m going to have a place for low-end purchasers to enter this code, and they’ll get it signed with a little head drawing as if they’d bought it directly from me at a con. A little bonus, and maybe a gentle little push to go pledge for it soon.

I got my second table commission done. It involved googling for images of thrones, bearded dragons, and naked old ladies. Near the end of the day, I took a couple of simpler ones which I figured I’d get done Sunday.

I hooked up with Dana, Orv, and Nikki for dinner. We went to a pizza joint; we decided to punt on negotiation for a big pizza and just order individual ones, which I was QUITE HAPPY with after two days of sitting behind a table gently encouraging people to buy my stuff. We shared a pitcher of beer though.

They dropped me off at the con, then went home – they live close enough to the airport that they’re not getting a room. I, of course, hit the dance floor. Sadly it was “retro night”, which I never warm to; it was made worse by the fact that the DJ I came in on had a habit of inserting minute-long breaks with absolutely no beat to them between tracks. In my opinion, if a DJ looks out on the floor and sees a bunch of people just kinda vaguely swaying to no particular rhythm, they are Doing It Wrong. It picked up for one set, then went back to being stunningly uninteresting to my booty, so I went back to the room and slept around one. Amara was done with the huge pile of homework she’d ended up with and gearing up to go out in her bird costume around then.

Sunday: I left my cash box in the room again! Though this time I went back to get it as I’d made it in well before the doors opened. I’d been hoping to work on the first of the two commissions I had left in that time, but I ended up running around instead.

On the way to the dealer’s room, I saw a 7′ tall inflatable blue plesiosaur in the hotel lobby. There were some guys standing around it talking; one of them was sitting on its back as casually as if it was an every day occurrence. This kind of thing is a large part of why I love coming to furry cons – I’m starting to expand my horizons to comic book conventions and finding some success there, but I just don’t see anywhere as much whimsey there. Comic cons are about business, furry cons are about the crazy party.

I got one of my two remaining commissions done that day. I ended up putting an environment on it, and that got a little complicated. I’ll be doing the last one in the next few days.

I hauled most of my stuff out of the dealer’s room, then ran back to that area and slipped into the back door of the closing ceremonies so I could sit up front. This was so I could stand up during the ceremonies when next year’s con chair announced the artist GOH, and then later stand up and unfurl the poster-sized prints of the fliers I’d done when he announced the theme. As I left to pick up the rest of my stuff, it was a major blast to see people clustered around copies of my drawing, excitedly discussing how much they were going to enjoy next year’s theme.

I chatted with a few people who congratulated me, then went back to the hotel room and just crashed. I kind of decided to blow off the dead dog dance; I felt more tired than I feel like I usually do at the end of RF. My guess is that I was kind of running on fumes when I started, due to doing Rose City Comic-Con down in Portland the weekend before, and crunching to launch the Kickstarter before the con in the hopes of getting a little boost to it when people went to learn a little about next year’s Rainfurrest artist GoH. At any rate, I reluctantly figured I’d be waking up Monday morning. But that was not to be; Josh came in around midnight with some friends who chatted and woke me up. After everyone else left, I decided, well, I’m awake, and there’s still some dead dog dance left. I pulled on my galaxy-print catsuit, went on down to the dance, and danced the con into the ground.

I’ve been making a habit of staying Sunday night and hitting the dead dog dance at the past few furry cons I’ve been dealing at. It feels good to just move my body for a couple hours after all that sitting, and it also makes me feel good to kind of participate in ritually closing the space of the convention – a furry con is not Normal Life; it’s got a bit of the wild carnival bacchanalia nature of something like Burning Man nowadays, and things like that need closure.

And then I came back to the hotel and went to sleep. Woke up around nineish, got most of my stuff packed up, put my phone on to charge (it’s thoroughly drained right now), and started writing this.

In general, I feel like I did good this con. I made money, I had a lot of fun. I tried a new thing with my table commissions – I was doing stuff in ink, then throwing down a tiny bit of grey marker to make things really pop – and it worked out. And next year I’ll probably have a LOT more attention on me. I’m gonna need to get a minion, what with being the artist GOH!

I keep on thinking I want to start offering at-con Illustrator commissions, especially now that I have a laptop that can go pretty much all day without a recharge. I dunno. I may try it at FC. Former artist GoHs, did you have any time left for table commissions between dealing with selling stuff like crazy all con long?

Rainfurrest 2013 was pretty damn good. Big thanks to everyone who stopped by my table and made it profitable and fun!

And now that the closing ceremonies are over, I can finally post the news I’ve been keeping mum about for the past month.

I think you should be able to tell what the theme is from my flier.

Today felt a lot slower than yesterday. I did about half the business I did Saturday. Looking at my numbers, if I’d made it into the room block for dealers I would have just about broken even; not bad for my first time at a con. Add to that the events mentioned yesterday, and I think this was a success – I filled in the form to sign up for next year.

Also, this morning Evan Dahm was talking about Miéville’s “The City & The City” on Twitter. Which lead me to do a quick little sketch of how I’d handle it if I adapted it to a comic – the basic schtick is that it takes place in two cities that share the same location but absolutely nothing else, and it is flat-out illegal to interact with, or take note of anything happening in the city you’re not “in”. I, unsurprisingly, would use different limited palettes to depict things in the two cities.