What a difference a year makes

2013:



2014:



To celebrate, kind of, we went to Vegas! I was a special guest at the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival, which is a smallish but well put-together and generous one-day convention. The Clark County Library is very nice, and even has a theater for performances—the sort of thing a community college might have. I gave a brief workshop on adapting novels and other material into comics (as I did earlier this year), which mostly went well. We had a bit less than an hour, so after a brief talk about the power and flexibility of the comic panel, I told the class about George, who ran away to join the circus as a kid. He spent the next few decades following the elephants around with a shovel to scoop up their shit, to hose out their assholes when they were blocked up, and occasionally to jam suppositories up their butts. Finally, George is ninety years old and still at it, and the ringmaster comes to him and says, "George! You're ninety years old and have been shoveling elephant shit your whole life! Why don't you retire?"

And George says, "What, and quit show business?"

(This, not so incidentally, is my favorite joke of all time.)

And their assignment was to adapt that. One woman was "not inspired at all" and left, but most of the other people had fun—a father/daughter team turned their version into a sad little tragedy; another workshopper gave George a few friends and a spouse from the sideshow and made his shit-shoveling triumphant. Some used a few too many panels to get the story across, others had pretty good ideas about how to express time passing between panels. So it worked out, I think.

I was also a part of a "breaking into comics" panel and that was fun. My main contribution was to point out that if you want to break in with a comic of your own, make sure the idea is a comic idea and not a toy line idea or a motion picture idea. That and my first rule of freelancing: the first time someone who is legit solicits you to do something instead of the other way around, "Say yes!"

I stuck around for the Hello, The Future! set, which was fun, and bought a couple of things. O and O went to the Springs Preserve with a high school friend of hers with whom she reconnected via Facebook. They had us over for dinner and everything after the con, which was very nice.

Then there was Vegas. We got two free nights at Bally's, an old-school Vegas hotel that was very basic: a steakhouse, table games and slots (I doubled my money!...to ten dollars) and a mentalist sufficiently behind the times that one of his tricks is to stop an audience member's watch. Who the heck even wears a watch anymore? was my thought, though there was a semi-expensive watch store right in the lobby. What can be said about Vegas anyway, except that it's a city that obviously took JG Ballard's dark satires and warnings as blueprints for the future. The strip is just gross and seems premised on providing for sixty-year-olds what they thought was cool when they were sixteen. And there is a whole raft of "What, and quit show business?" types around, playing pianos, singing in doo-wop bands, shaking their asses, and telling jokes about Monica Lewinsky. Thank God she wandered back into the news last month, amirite?

Bally's is connected to Paris—see croissant, above—which was a bit more inventive, with a Disneyland flair and lingerie models dealing at the baby's first single-deck blackjack tables. I did get a very nice kobe beef burger at a bar there, which inspired the drunk next to me to point at my meal and say "I'll have what he got, but well-done!" which I think sums it all up. I actually went to bed at 9:30PM last night, that's how awesome Vegas was. Olivia, a vegetarian, had her best meal at the airport this afternoon as we went home. If you're in the international/Virgin America concourse at LAS, try the PGA Tour Grill, which features some "heart healthy" vegetarian items, which are marked on the menu with a leaf. If you're a normal person, just wait around with your mouth open—someone will put a steak in it and if you pay enough, will manipulate your jaw for you so you can chew and swallow. I, for one, am expert at saying "A gig's a gig!" with my mouth full.

Speaking of gigs, The Nickronomicon pre-sale is over. We pre-sold ninety hard copies via the publisher's website and got fifty-two pre-orders from Kindle, plus some unknown but likely fairly small number of NOOK and Kobo sales. Probably twenty or so between the two, but we won't get those numbers till mid-November. So I'll call it 160 pre-sales, a little short of the 200 I was wishing for, but a pretty good start for an Innsmouth Free Press title.

The online e-tailers are still taking pre-orders, of course, and on Nov 18 they'll all have hard copies as well. Check it out!