This summer has been highlighted by two big conventions I attended, and the book I published in between.
July was AnthroCon, my tenth consecutive and my ninth as a dealer, and for the first time I had my dear, Wonderful Mother along to help keep me sane, fed, and productive. It was fantastic. AnthroCon is always a bit of a homecoming, and having WoMo along made it all a hundred times better. We did some things I’d done before like the Aviary and my annual run down and around the fountain and Confluence Point State Park, both in the boiling humidity, and visited Gaucho’s up on the Strip.
We also did some new things, like kettlebells in the Westin’s comprehensive fitness center. WoMo is very good with kettlebells and I am… well I can swing them and not hurt myself, which isn’t nothing. But the squat set had my quads out of commission for the rest of the weekend. Lesson learned.
All this, and the convention hadn’t even started yet!
This year was also notable in that my good friend Mary Capaldi really came into her own under the spotlight the con rightfully shone on her for literally working around the clock to save their bottoms by way of producing artwork for giant banners to decorate street poles and their iconic hotel mascot standees. I was rather cross (read: incandescently furious) with the con-com for what they put her through, but it was cool to see her art up on the streets of Pittsburgh and, though I’m the last person to advocate working for “exposure”, the con did everything in their power to give her the kind of exposure than translates into lots of money, so there is that.
Oh, and they also gave her a medal.
I am still furious, but only florescently so.
Thanks to WoMo I did manage to get away from my table from time to time, including giving a reading on Saturday, which was perhaps my best-attended reading yet. It has been so encouraging to see my friends who met me through my artwork continue to follow and support me on my writing adventure. You are all The Best.
The Art Show was not the best financially, but better not to dwell on that. I had too much fun introducing WoMo to all my AnthroCon friends, especially the Dorsai and the Pirates. And she was given a bonafide furry name by the end of the con (Elmom, a reference to my old handle, Elrond), which I think was the stone that weighted the scales in favor of a return visit next year so YAY!
The upshot of AnthroCon was that we left with the conviction that I needed to get the 12th Professor Odd single out in time for WorldCon, which was the next month. Working backwards from when we would need to order stock, this boiled down to me drawing thumbnails for the interior illustrations on my flight home in order to have them done by the end of the week, so we could build the book.
Spoilers: We succeeded, and I had all six singles of Season 2 for sale at WorldCon76.
This year WorldCon was held in my old stomping grounds of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, which I knew of old from FurCons past. It was funny coming back to it without the furries, but with genre fans instead. It’s not always easy to tell them apart—and sometimes impossible, as there is a significant overlap.
It was also a little odd going from AnthroCon, where a good portion of my table sales are in commissions, to WorldCon, where almost none of them were. In fact, the two brave souls who did commission me had an almost disbelieving manner about them, as if it had never occurred to them to commission an artist before. But they had fun projects and were happy when I had finished, so I shall keep offering commissions at genre cons.
But I had WoMo by my side again, and so I was kept nourished and encouraged for the whole show, which was five days so it was a very good thing she was there indeed.
Well, four days. We had to drive back to Oregon on Monday because I’d made a mistake with my time-off request from Lifeguarding, for which I am very grateful to Angela Jones-Parker our HEROIC dealer’s lead, who was so very understanding and let us stay late on Sunday to strike table.
But it was a good four days! I was even able to develop a nice little routine involving Pilates in the Hilton gym (nowhere near as comprehensive as the Westin DLCC, sadly), breakfast in the room and then an easy stroll over to Hall 3. I got to reconnect with Chronographia and Kelly Kutolak and Kyell Gold/Tim Sussman and Ursula and Kevin and TINA THE DAINTY FUCKING PRINCESS and got to talk Pratchett with a nice young lady who turned out to be the daughter of one of WoMo’s co-workers which was Very Embarrassing but she still got a copy of Professor Odd Season 1 so that was nice. I also got to escape to John Picacio’s Loteria demo and actually won a round, which was exciting!
(Aside, I was totally thrilled to see John’s art all over the con in the way of badges and t-shirts and program covers. It made the con extra special.)
Kevin also introduced me to Natalie Metzger who along with my table neighbor Maquel A Jacob are Portlanders and so we’ll get to reconnect at Rose City in a couple weeks and that’ll be nice. I also got to meet one of my longtime heroes Der-Shing Helmer, whom I’ve admired since my days as an awkward teen on deviantART, by dint of sitting across the aisle from her the whole (long) weekend. And like true dealers, we didn’t actually get a chance to chat until we were both striking our tables, at which point we discovered we had a mutual acquaintance in Kikidoodle—who has already introduced to me to some really cool folks. I am unreasonably proud of myself for managing to get ahead of her just this once.
Kiki will also be at Rose City Comic Con next month, though as she’s in the Exhibit Hall and I’m in the Artist Alley there’s no knowing how much we’ll actually get to see of each other. But Maquel has agreed to come and give me bathroom breaks in exchange for a pass so hopefully I’ll be able to get out and about at least a little.
WoMo and I had a long, but ultimately smooth drive back to Oregon, and even got to make a pitstop in Davis for a quick lunch with my Partners, which was an unexpected bonus. We then filled the remaining seven hours with a lot of talking about future projects and game planning for the months ahead. It has already been decided that we will not be attending Dublin next year, and instead taking the time to focus on publishing whatever projects I have current at that time.
At this time my focus is on the final Bouragner Felpz novella, which will complete the final Apsis Fiction issue, after which we can ship Driving Arcana Rotation 4, and then dive headlong into Lucena. So I shall be doing more editing and refining and drawing (gotta get that cover done) than new writing. Which, I have to keep reminding myself, is okay.
At WorldCon I had eleven titles for sale (four novel-length books and seven Professor Odd singles), which constituted the entirety of my published work (without meaningful repeats).
Unpublished I have no less than eleven novel-lenth books already written (written, mind you, not edited), so I can afford to slow down the writing in exchange for moving the publishing forward a little more.
I’m not neglecting my artwork, either. I just finished reorganizing the Heliopause Online Store to include new stock—though some items will be scarce until I get my orders for RCCC in, and then RCCC will happen so… who knows? But what I have taken away from WorldCon is that, now that I stock all eight of my Planet Horses, it’s really time to knuckle down and finish Pluto (and Charon). I have promised myself to get it finished in time for the World Fantasy Art Show, which I’ll be mailing-in for.
What else? Oh yes, I am rejiggering my Patreon to be simpler and more inclusive, and hopefully more accessible.
There, I think that’s all the essentials covered. I’m going to close by typing out some thoughts I had about Diana Wynne Jones, whose birthday it was on the first day of WorldCon and who didn’t have any memoriam or tribute panels but whose presence I could feel all about the convention. This was hammered home to me when I got around to reading Patricia C Wrede’s introduction to a special edition of Everard’s Ride that WoMo got me as a birthday present that night.
I don’t have the book on hand in my studio (where I am writing this) but to paraphrase: Wrede wrote about how inspiring Jones was to her, a sentiment I’ve heard expressed by almost every writer who is a heartfelt storyteller. (And Wrede, I should mention, I read before I’d even heard of Jones, so her introduction was especially touching.) I think it would be interesting to go around specifically asking writers what they thought of DWJ, what her influence has been on them, and how she inspires them. I think it would be interesting to see how many have been consciously or unconsciously influenced by her writing.
Diana Wynne Jones is not a mainstream favorite. There is a sharpness to her work, a raw, unfettered, wild, unpredictability that is honed by the powerful trueness that drives them and which makes them just a little too scary for mainstream. Sometimes it scares me, even though I have grown up as a human and as a writer with Jamie and Helen and Vierran and Mordion and Scales and Blade and Cat and what Gwendolyn did to him never mind Howl. Sometimes I think that all my writing is just me processing the great eruption of inspiration I derived from reading her books as a teenager, and sometimes I still find hot spots.
Increasingly I think I am not alone in this, and that it may be even harder for writers who discovered her after they grew up as humans. Diana Wynne Jones does not reach the same stratosphere as Tolkien or Lewis or Rowling or Pratchett or Le Guin or Gaiman or even George R R Martin, but she is in the bedrock of the storyteller, like a sharp, shining vein of lava. Even if we don’t read her until adulthood, as storytellers and storylovers we recognize her. And we know that she is frightening and good.
Powerful and dangerous. A cozy dragon.
So there are my thoughts. Next time I do WorldCon, and though it may not be for some time, I am going to make a DWJ ribbon. “Player of the Old and Very Real Game” maybe, or “Guy Fawkes Blew Up the Houses of Parliament” or “Pollinating Horses Ask Me How.”
Of course the problem is that the magic of Diana Wynne Jones is too big and four dimensional to be squashed down into a glib little phrase. But if a funny ribbon can get more people reading her, all the better, I say.
For as long as an author’s books are read, they are not truly dead.
Happy Birthday, DWJ.
