FC2017

 

I hadn’t intended to go to FC. I hadn’t gotten a table. Hadn’t negotiated for a room with anyone. But there I was, going down to the airport, with a con ticket and room share I’d set up maybe a month before on impulse. “What the hell am I gonna do without a table to give my con structure?”, I wondered.

The day before I’d been doodling some Parallax stuff, and had found a loose, storyboard-like look that I was considering doing it in as a comic while spending most of my energy on Absinthe and Drowning City. And somewhere on the way to the airport it hit me: one of my younger comics friends had been muttering about how she really missed working on her own comic, but did not have certain mental prerequisites for that at all right now, what with the political situation and her own situation. What if? What if I did quick Parallax page layouts and scripts with Nick, and had her finish them? What if I paid a few different people to do this, put them online for free, then set up a Patreon for the project?

I fired off a message to her, and started pondering who else I’d make this offer to.

On the plane, the Magic Sketchbook passed the “can I do comics in an airplane seat” test with flying colors. I’ve got one more panel of Absinthe drawn than I did last week, and I’m pretty happy about that.

Got to the con, hooked up with my roommates, dumped my stuff, had food, hit the Thursday evening dance, went to sleep. Somewhere in there I looked through the schedule and picked a few panels I’d maybe want to hit up. That’s what people do when they’re not at a table, right? Panels? Sounds okay, I guess?

Continue reading

some bird booty

Kalinda-blfc

I’ve had a lot of people ask if I’m going to BLFC this year, enough that I’m thinking of going.

Especially after I went to check this year’s theme and saw that it is “pop dystopia”, with suggested inspiration of Tank Girl, Jet Grind Radio, and Borderlands. I was all YES I’M GONNA DRAW MY WITCHY BIRD CHARACTER DOING MAJGICKAL TAGS. This’ll be my badge for the con if I go, and I’ll probably be doing similar stuff at the table for sixty bucks.

And if you’re wondering: yes that’s a sigil, no I won’t tell you what effect it’s intended to have, yes I will include one for whatever intent you desire in your badge if you want.

Some Sophisticated Lady

I will be at Further Confusion in a couple weeks, drawing stuff like this and turning it into 4×6″ badges. I might take a couple of pre-orders; I’m not sure. Probably about $40.

The theme I’m using for these is “cocktail/tiki party”, which I think meshes nicely with the con’s theme of “1950s diner”. I may or may not have an endless loop of bongos playing at the table to enhance this ambience.

stickers

Recently, I decided to try an experiment. I bought a bunch of stickers from Moo. Just simple rectangular ones, with an assortment of my art on them (and my URL of course) – nothing fancy. My plan was to put them on my table at cons and sell them; I’d also give one or two away with every purchase, or to fans who already have everything I have on offer.

I bought 200 for about $66 with shipping. I just counted: I sold or gave away 77 of them at SPX. Mostly gave them away; I made like $20 off of them according to Square. That’s pretty good for something I’d mostly gotten for promotional purposes. I think I’ll be getting another shipment of a wider selection soon. Probably after APE and Geek Girl Con. Unless I completely run out at one of those.

In the long run I may even replace my business cards with these things. One for free to everyone, pay for more.

(And while I was running numbers, I added everything up for SPX. I’m about $300 in the red – but am pretty sure I’d be in the black if I hadn’t run out of stuff to sell by the end of the first day. Definitely applying for next year.)

good morning

It's 7:30 AM and I'm wide awake. Am I jet lagged?

It is also possible that I'm just awake because I went to sleep pretty early last night; I forgot to have food most of the day, then kinda collapsed into bed when I came back from getting a sandwich. Plus I have something like a cold that I caught at SPX or on the way home from it. Probably on the way home; I hung out in the DC airport for like four hours, waiting for my flight in an environment that smelled like “I will probably get sick breathing this air” the instant I stepped in.

And here I am going to Rainfurrest today and tomorrow. To SPREAD MY DISEASE. And to dance. If I have the energy. Don't kiss me if you go too.

The only useful thing I did yesterday was to send off the brief addendum I had to my Nickelodeon pitch. They told me my show bible was pretty interesting, but they were explicitly looking for outlines/boards/etc for 2-3 min cartoons, and gave me until Friday to throw one together and send it to them. I thanked them, and did a first draft in the time between the pitch meeting and SPX's show floor opening up; it sat dormant while I travelled and spent the first day home with Nick hanging around, then did some minor edits and sent it off. I'd had some notions about loosely timing it to see if it actually fit into 3 minutes (probably not, it's probably more like 4-5 unless I time it super aggressively) and editing it until it did, but I didn't have anything like the energy to do that.

Guess I'll go shower. I haven't in a couple days due to general post-SPX lethargy. And next week I get to get on ANOTHER airplane and do ANOTHER con! But only a trip down to the Bay Area this time.

good morning

It's 7:30 AM and I'm wide awake. Am I jet lagged?

It is also possible that I'm just awake because I went to sleep pretty early last night; I forgot to have food most of the day, then kinda collapsed into bed when I came back from getting a sandwich. Plus I have something like a cold that I caught at SPX or on the way home from it. Probably on the way home; I hung out in the DC airport for like four hours, waiting for my flight in an environment that smelled like “I will probably get sick breathing this air” the instant I stepped in.

And here I am going to Rainfurrest today and tomorrow. To SPREAD MY DISEASE. And to dance. If I have the energy. Don't kiss me if you go too.

The only useful thing I did yesterday was to send off the brief addendum I had to my Nickelodeon pitch. They told me my show bible was pretty interesting, but they were explicitly looking for outlines/boards/etc for 2-3 min cartoons, and gave me until Friday to throw one together and send it to them. I thanked them, and did a first draft in the time between the pitch meeting and SPX's show floor opening up; it sat dormant while I travelled and spent the first day home with Nick hanging around, then did some minor edits and sent it off. I'd had some notions about loosely timing it to see if it actually fit into 3 minutes (probably not, it's probably more like 4-5 unless I time it super aggressively) and editing it until it did, but I didn't have anything like the energy to do that.

Guess I'll go shower. I haven't in a couple days due to general post-SPX lethargy. And next week I get to get on ANOTHER airplane and do ANOTHER con! But only a trip down to the Bay Area this time.

workin’

Screen Shot 2015-06-15 at 4.37.57 PM

Today I hung out in a cafe with Nick and revamped my table signs for “Decrypting Rita” and its fliers. I wanted to add some of the blurbs I’ve been getting from various famous folks. Then I had the brainstorm of putting a copy of the flier on the sign behind them, so that if I happen to run out, interested people can use their phones to take a photo. I then went on to make some signs for the Tarot deck and its fliers that pulled the same trick. Now that I look at these, I am tempted to put the covers for books 1 and 2 on the signs for them, as well – the covers are pretty eye-catching IMHO.

(All of these signs are a little bit taller than the thing they describe; I put them on my little wire stands, then put the item in question on top of them.)

The Elephant

Before that, I took this elephant down from the top of my bookcase and told him some good news. He belonged to my mother when she was a small child, and hung out in her library when she was an adult. Neither me nor my aunt has any idea what his name is. Now he’s on top of my bookshelf. I figured that since I could’t call Mom any more, I’d tell him instead: I’ve got a spot in the dealer’s room at this year’s Worldcon. And this morning, a major modern SF author wrote a blog post about cool online comics he likes that included Rita. Which he noted was totally not anything like Hugo suggestions. At all. Completely.

If I ever end up with any awards, I am going to show them to this elephant, and keep them next to him. It seems like the closest I’ll ever be able to come to telling Marie-Jeanne how far I end up going.

 

More on ECCC.

Some scattered thoughts about ECCC.

Best cosplay: the guy as Scarlet Witch. Headpiece, cape, tights, and very very filled bikini bottom. Nothing else. I think I lost a sale by pausing in the middle of my pitch to whoop my approval at him. Did not care. Was so worth it.

Weirdest question: someone passing my table asked “do you have any Final Fantasy fan art?”. The idea of going to a con and looking for fan art of a specific franchise just feels so alien to me.

I wish I was better at socializing.

 

ECCC 2015

That was a pretty damn good con.

At the end of ECCC2014, I impulsively got together a few friends to share two booths this year. I asked for a location either in the middle of the second hall, or in the first hall.

We got into the first hall. This meant that a huge percentage of the 80k people attending the show passed by our booths. Not all of them did, and only some of them stopped, and only some of them spent money. But I made back my portion of the booth on the first day, and did at least similarly well each of the next days. And I went through a little more than 300 business cards. I don’t expect more than a small percentage of the people who picked those up to come visit my site, let alone give me money in the future, but I’ve still definitely expanded my audience. Which is my primary reason to go to these things right now.

That said, the money I got at this con plus the money I’m making from Patreon this month is going to be able to pay my rent. And I’m pretty goddamn happy about that! I am finally a Pro Artist.

Things I need to do for next year:
– amend my signage to include the blurb Phil Foglio was gracious enough to give me – I was about one diagonal block away from his booth and saw a lot more people sporting Girl Genius shirts than I have before.
– add some Rita prints to the print book (at the suggestion of some fans who wanted to buy just that, and were kind enough to point out panels they thought would work well)
– have some stickers/buttons/some kind of cheap little purchase, both for returning fans who I can’t quite give a new book to yet, and for people who’re in the Just Curious stage. Probably stickers; they’re very flat. I like flat things. They’re compact.

Also I think I need to replace my sign with a taller one. I’ve been wanting to do that for a while.

Only half of the folks at my pair of booths made a profit, but everyone is down for doing this next year. So I signed up for two booths again. Here’s hoping I can still have the same awesome placement.

(Protip: When applying for a con, look at the map of last year and ask for a good location. You might not get it but you sure won’t get it if you don’t ask.)

And now I am going to sit in the living room and play Bloodborne for a couple of days. 

Wifi splitter?

This year at ECCC, phone reception was abysmal. And the Internet was usurious – $150 per device for the weekend, not too good when you have six people in one booth. Or $2400 for them to drop a wireless repeater in your booth. Or $3500 for them to run a dedicated line to a hotspot in your booth. Neither of these two options were attractive either.

But then again, neither is trying to use Square’s offline mode and discovering that it drops everything it’s cached when your phone runs out of juice. Which is more likely to happen when it’s trying to get signal in a crowded environment like a con. So that’s a hundred or two of card payments I’m out from today. The rest of the con is gonna be cash only, I think.

I’m probably going to do a group booth again next year. I’d like to have something in my bag to let me connect to the convention center internet and only pay once, then act as a hotspot so everyone in my booth can happily take credit cards all day. Is there a good way to do this? It’ll have to have some way of browsing the web, to log into the portal and pay their $$$. It’ll also need to run on batteries, ideally for about 8-10 hours without a recharge…

Any other suggestions for ways to get internet in the middle of ~80k people tweeting instagramming vining etc their con without spending more money than we can reliably expect to take in are welcome.

—-

edit. AHA, I did some digging and found MyWi which lets a jailbroken iPhone do what I am looking for. Now to get EVERYONE to bring spare USB batteries tomorrow, especially since I am a moron who left her emptied-out battery at the table…

Edit again, after the con: it turns out that Square’s offline mode DOES keep everything, it just takes a little while to show up in the recent transactions tab. And it also turned out that the convention center’s wifi is wise to my wifi-sharing tricks and refused to work, boooo. I’ll be doing ECCC2016 in Square’s offline mode unless I can hook up with like 8 other people besides my crew to split the $2400 cost of an official repeater down to almost sane levels.