Today, I lay in bed with the ipad for a few hours. Didn’t feel like getting up. When I finally did, I looked outside as I had my late breakfast. The sun was out in a nearly cloudless sky, and it was only a little chilly. I knew what I had to do.

I got dressed and grabbed a book. Not one of the new comics I got at the con, either. A paper book from my library. I didn’t want to think about comics at all today. And I left my phone behind as I went out to a little park a couple blocks from my place.

I lay spread-eagled on the grass for a while. I’d been intending to read, but I guess I wasn’t quite up to it just yet. I just basked in the sun for a bit.

Eventually a wisp of cloud passed over the sun, and I started to get chilly. I got up and went for a sandwich, and started reading.

The book I’d chosen was an old friend. Swanwick’s “Stations Of The Tide“. It’s not the first thing I’d read by him, nor is it the wildest. But it’s the one I come back to every now and then. It’s one of the few books I bought a new copy of after Katrina took my library; it means something that I can never quite decide on.

Sometime I feel like reading it for the first time changed something deep down in the bottom of my head, and I would have taken a different path if not for it. I can’t quite tell you what. In part because I can’t put it into words; in part because the bits I can put into words feel intensely private.

I read the first few chapters, then paused, sated. Unusual, that. Usually I inhale a whole book in one long gulp. But after the constant stimulation of the con, I wanted to slow down and savor things; I wanted to think slow, large thoughts today. I tried to eschew my usual speed-reading habits and pass every single word through the verbal parts of my brain instead of unconsciously skimming along. (I never trained myself to speed-read; it’s how I’ve always read, since as long as I can remember.)

I left the sandwich shop and deposited my con cash in the bank. I gave twenty bucks of my net profits to a girl busking at the corner; I only made about fifty or sixty dollars over my half of the booth fee, and to be honest I kinda felt like I needed to do something to balance taking part in a 75,000-person festival of consumerism.

Then I was off to a cafe to read more of my book while sipping a cider/chai drink. I found myself wanting to try and draw the characters. I’m not too satisfied with my first attempts; maybe I’ll refine them tonight or this week. They don’t have the right contrast of shapes, there’s not enough angles, and they’re just not… I dunno. They’re too prosaic. Not otherworldly enough. Not enough of a dream.

I came home and sat in the studio chair, reading a bit more, then just lounging. Now I’m in bed again. I’m not so much physically tired as mentally. The con was an emotional rollercoaster. And I had to do a LOT of social processing. Which gets easier, but is still something I don’t really have the hardware co-processors for most people seem to.

I don’t think there will be a page of Rita tomorrow. Maybe Thursday; I have a first draft of the script. But no rough drawings, no gleam to the words. I’m going to skip aikido tonight, too. My legs are just tired enough that the last thing I want to do is walk for a half hour and jump around.

Nap time.

Overall, a pretty god con. Glad I went.

Highlights:
“Thanks for the masterclass in chiaroscuro, Mike Mignola. I’d like to give reverse the usual order off things and give you my book.” “Cool, thanks. *flip through book* Oooh, cool! *keeps flipping* This is really cool!” Then I said I’d love to do a Hellboy short someday. He said they ain’t doing those now but he’s definitely keeping my book and you never know what will happen.

At the Prophet table, Simon Roy:”Before I sign this, do you like dicks?” “Oh hell yes I am all about the dicks.” “Cool!” Then there was a discussion about dick cosplay and the fact that Brandon Graham’s neck is about as wide as his head, which resulted in me sneaking back and snickering as I handed off a little drawing of Brandon’s DICKSONA. (They had been talking about how some people DID NOT LIKE IT when Simon drew dicks while signing, so now he asks first.)

“Oh, wow, you have really great River Song and Doctor Who outfits.” “We’re not cosplaying!” “Yeah, we just decided to dress up for the con! I was thinking of wearing my tux.” (They were DEAD RINGERS except for having American accents, I suspect they may have been the real thing undergoing a reality slip.)

Chatting with Amara’s sister Raina about, well, Amara, since Amara’s a good friend of mine and Raina’s next book is about growing up with Amara.

Hanging out with Dana for a weekend behind a booth.

Lowlights:
90% of Friday. One customer, scarily little traffic in my corner of the con. I was direly afraid it was going to go like this al con and basically had nothing to do but slowly melt down and occasionally tweet my worries. Friday ended with the Mignola signature on a book and the exchange at the top, but I still ended up curling up and crying for a bit when I got home. Now I know better; even a megacon is stupid slow on Friday.

I don’t think I made back my booth cost, but I’ve signed up for next year. My placement note? “Closer to the central flow than 2503 was in the 2013 plan, plz! <3”

What I did definitely make was a decent number of new fans and a few connections. I ran out of Rita fliers, and then I ran out of business cards. And then I printed up a couple sheets Sunday morning and ran out of THOSE by the end of today as well.

Also, my takings must be considered to include this.

I think I spent like… $25 for the whole lot. I’d go up to people whose stuff I wanted, and say “I’d like this book! I can give you money, or would you like to swap for my comic?” All but two people agreed enthusiastically after flipping through Rita. Admittedly about half of them were already aware of my work to some degree but STILL. Twelve comics in exchange for ten copies of Rita and two comics. I shan’t say who said no, I feel like that’s something best left private.

The two times my swap target had a tablemate, they looked at the book too and said “ooh, would you like to swap with me too?” To which I quickly decided my policy is always YES: if the person whose book I want thinks you’re cool enough to spend a whole con with, then I’M GAME. Also I would totally feel like a dick saying no.

(I think the rule of thumb, if anyone else wants to try this game, is “swap with people who are at about the same skill level”. Bonus points if they’re doing the same general kind of stories you are – there are FAR too few good SF comics in America, and I think everyone who makes ’em is hungry for more.)

A chat with one swapper about “my god how can you afford to sell these nice hardcovers so cheap” (answer: “Kickstarter paid for ’em all, plus printing in China!”) resulted in a pointer to his printer. And afterwards I was all, omfg, I have been NETWORKING, and I don’t feel like a sleaze at all. And now there’s several people who’re working on stories close to mine in one way or another, who will kick back with my work and maybe post about it and/or link to it. And we all have cool comics to read!

I also learnt some lessons about selling. Furry cons are small enough that if you’re pro-quality you can just sit back and people will come up to your table without prompting, for the most part. A megacon like this is chock full of people who have been pros for years, and of all kinds of distractions, so I found myself watching what my neighbors (the reMind crew) were doing to draw people to their table and shamelessly swiping. A simple “Hi!” to a passer-by that looks like the type of person to groove on your work; if they slow down and look at me and my wares, then “Would you like to have a look at my comic?” while lifting it up and starting to offer it. Not thrusting it at them, just picking it up. And if they bite, then I give them the elevator pitch (“It’s about a robot lady who’s dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend”), which always got a grin, and enough interest to start flipping through it. (Unless they were drawn to the Tarot deck, in which case I talked about that some. I wasn’t really pushing that; I figured the people who needed it would see it and know.) Dana started playing with an elevator pitch for ‘Heavenly Nostrils’ after seeing how surefire mine was.

And finally here is some photodumpery.

This is basically the best cover signature I have ever seen. DICKS.

Sexy Creeper!

Zombie Mr. Rogers. Please don’t eat my brains, neighbor.

Professor Utonium and all three Powerpuff Girls.

I think I have seen approximately five women dressed as Doctor Who for every one guy I’ve seen as Doctor Who at ECCC.

Also I really really wish more cute guys would wear skintight outfits. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I definitely like seeing ladies going around wearing form-fitting lycra, but I want some beefcake to go with my cheesecake. Instead all the dudes in costumes are either in robey things, or in armor.

That’s my backup drive. 1TB, mostly full. Moving that data off to a new backup drive (I like having backup history going back a year or two, I never know when it’ll come in handy!) is gonna be fuuuuun.

Stuff I did today: Mostly, more cleaning the studio. My desk is almost empty of everything that isn’t either for work or a tchotchke. The pile of papers that had accumulated on it now lives in an expanding file. My coffee table is similarly empty, though there’s some small piles of things that HAD been on it that I haven’t decided exactly where their place is yet. And the rat’s nest of cables in the bottom of the studio closet is more neatly piled up in two baskets, one for USB cables, one for other kinds of cables.

I also finally ran the vacuum for the first time in… too damn long. I think it’s been a few months since I was really able to do it, what with all the Kickstarter stuff in the studio, then the piles of stuff that kinda accreted along with that and winter gloom.

Right now I have MORE packing material on the floor than I did this morning; this is because I finally got tired of not having a trash can this past weekend and ordered one off of Amazon. It got here today and is now lurking next to the kitchen counter; I’m hoping that this will make it a lot harder for me to end up with four big bags of trash hanging out around there. Hopefully it will be a lot easier to just take the damn bag out when it’s full and hump it to the dumpster out back, than when it’s a bag lying on the floor with a few things that never quite made it inside around it.

It has helped that the sun’s been out the past couple of days, but I’m really feeling like that sun lamp I bought has definitely been a change for the better in me. Even when the sun doesn’t come out I feel like I have more energy than I did a couple of weeks ago.

Also I got a tiny amount of work on the next page of Rita done. The bottom tier is finished, and I’m still going back and forth over how much of the top tier needs to be thrown out and redone from scratch, if any – it’s been in progress too damn long and it’s hard to tell any more. I still haven’t really gotten my work habits back yet; those went downhill in the middle of summer, not winter – though winter depression certainly made things worse. I would love to resume regular work on Rita soon, as well as other stuff that’s been hanging!

I’m debating if I want to break down the boxes the sunlamp and the trash can came in when I finish writing this. If I do, then my studio will feel sooooo much closer to being CLEAN again. Modulo the pile of Miscellaneous beneath the drawing table and upon it, but honestly I can deal with having that around and still feel like the place is usably neat.

Also, here are a couple pages from an old notebook that was hiding in the closet amongst the cables.

I’m looking at the change in my handwriting from the first scan to the second one and just going, what the fuck? What happened to “spaces”? And then I looked at the dates. 1982. Yeah. Um. A year after those first pages, my father was dead. There’s another trip after the second one I excerpted, in 1985, which means the trip to Florida was probably in ’84. I didn’t know depression could do that to your handwriting. (It’s also worth noting that the earlier pages were written with a wooden pencil clearly in need of sharpening, while the later one was in mechanical pencil. But still. Nospacesbetweenanyofthewords.Whatthefuckyoupoorkidlosingyourdadsurefuckedyouupbutgood,huh?)

I think yesterday may have been one of my best Valentine’s days ever.

Nick came over in the evening. We went to a little Italian restaurant a couple blocks from my place; then I put on something less flamboyant than the glittery blue dress I’d worn to dinner, and we went to a coffee shop for a few hours to talk about a story idea he’s been wrestling with again lately. I was able to make a few suggestions and ask some good questions, which got him thinking in a few new directions and made us both pretty happy.

It was pretty low-key. We exchanged token gifts – he gave me a poster, I gave him some iTunes credit in a humorous card reading “i have no human emotions” that passed through Tumblr the other day. The utter lack of excitement was pretty nice, given our mutual lack of energy.

When he left in the morning, I realized the sun was actually out! So I went for a walk in Ravenna Park for a while. For some reason I found myself walking as silently as possible on the return leg; I’ve never realized just how noisy people are before that.

And now I am downtown after a face zapping appointment. After a sandwich I’m probably going to go chill at Top Pot with my computer for a while and hopefully get some stuff drawn.