• “Snowflake’s Chance in Hell,” the tale of a sentient panda versus evil tstchotchkes appeared in Cobalt City Dark Carnival.
• “A Necessity of the Present,” my tale of high fantasy noir was republished in Future Imperfict: Best of Wily Writers, Volume 2.
• “Kiss of Death,” the incredible story of two necromancers in love came out in Arcane. 
• I’ve handed off the first draft of my book, Kensei, to the folks at Timid Pirate Publishing. This is a young adult piece set in the superhero shared universe created by Nathan Crowder. It’s part of the series of YA books that they are producing called “Cobalt City Rookies.”
• I’ve opened up to submissions for my experimental e-zine, Mad Scientist  Journal. Here’s to hoping I get enough people to get it off the ground.

• Don’t drive vehicles when you don’t have the driving skill.
• Don’t go back in time and kill the main antagonist when they were a baby. Breaks the universe.
• Don’t kill everything in sight. It’s not GTA.

And, in reference to a completely different game:

• Don’t let Jeremy make up your backstory for you.

I feel like I’ve traumatized the last batch of kids. And I’m kind of proud of that.

I sat as a  panelist in four of the panels over the weekend. They varied pretty widely in quality. I think there were a few things I struggled with the most as a new panelist. The first was that I am not used to giving a bio for myself in front of people, so I fumbled it every time. I was also not as assertive as I needed to be, so stronger personalities dominating things more. And I found that I’m not used to having those sorts of dialogues, so I wouldn’t think of the best responses right away and I didn’t try to steer conversations where I wanted them to be. For the most part I tried to request panels where I figured I had some sort of input on the topic, but I found that my input was not always relevant to the discussion on hand as I’ll illustrate below.

The panels were often very small. Most of the panels I attended as a listener often turned into round-table discussions just because there were so few people that came to the panel. For the most part that seemed to work out, but the facilities were often much bigger than they needed to be for the crowd that showed up in the events.

Crossing Genre: My first panel I shared the table up front with Shoshana Glick. We had a third panelist, but they didn’t show up. Shoshana had been involved in the Genre Evolution Project at the University of Michigan. She had a lot of knowledge of theory involving what genre means, the tropes that are involved, and how many things that get filed as one genre often don’t fit the classic structure of the genre. Me? I tend to cross genres when I write, partly influenced by having published most of my early stuff through Crossed Genres magazine. I felt very out of my league as Shoshana blazed a trail of commentary on genre right off the bat. So, my debut as a panelist was pretty heavily fumbled by me. But I think Shoshana really injected a lot of insight into the topic.

How to Make the Most Out of Gaming: I shared the table with Dustin Gross of Dragondyne Publishing, which publishes a d20-based “omni-genre” roleplaying game. I figured this would make a good fit for me since I wrote for some roleplaying games, blogged about roleplaying game ideas and have experimented with a lot of things over the years (with many failures on my part). I came to this thinking about GM/player communication, player contributions, making a wiki, etc.

Not counting my wife, we had one person in the audience for most of it who was very vocal, mostly played D&D and hadn’t been happy with a game since Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. His biggest concerns were game balance and how D&D always gets broken. I had really very little to contribute to this conversation. This was really a place for Dustin to shine, so I tried to seed in some questions to establish some ideas about what makes a game fun. I also tried to interject indie game design ideas into this, since one thing that came up was how everyone has a different idea of what makes a good game. But that one got lost in the initial response pretty fast and I’m not entirely certain that they understood what I meant.

The Rise of Indie Publishing: This was my favorite panel of the weekend. There had been some trouble in keeping a writing track clear in the programming. So earlier in the day there had been a two hour panel about Workshops and Writing Groups that ran against Writing Battle Scenes in the first half and Agents: Are They More Necessary Than Ever in the second half. Similarly, the panel on indie publishing ran opposite a panel on Self-Publishing. K.C. Ball was with me on the Indie Publishing panel. Tod McCoy, who recently published K.C.’s short story collection Snapshots from a Black Hole & Other Oddities through Hydra House, was on the self-publishing panel with Jax Hix of Literary Underground.

Since it seemed weird to have those two panels at the same time, K.C. and Tod coordinated to combine the two panels. This turned out to be the best  attended panel of the ones I was on. The downside was that there was a lot more emphasis on self-publishing than indie publishers so I had less to say on the topic. But some great discussions were had and I learned a lot.

The Return of the Radio Shows: I requested to be on this believing that I’d be closer to writing for Cobalt City Adventures Unlimited, but work on Kensei overshadowed that. So I felt like I was going to be completely at a loss for this. But the other panelist was the same panelist missing from the Crossing Genre panel. This could have been very awkward for me, but no one else showed up for the panel either. A big empty room with just my wife. After fifteen minutes we gave up. I could have been extra responsible and went to one of the volunteers and seen what we could have done. But I’d heard from others that there had been other panels that day with no one attending. Since this was the last thing we planned on doing, we just bailed. If there’d been some sort of last minute room change, I didn’t hear about it. If I’m actually the person who was absent from where I needed to be: Sorry?

Beyond these panels and the excellent people that showed up, I had some really excellent experiences with other attendees at the convention. I ran into the lovely and talented Danika Dinsmore a couple times and may get to review an advance copy of The Ruins of Noe (FAIRIES!!!).

Also, one panel led by Ted Butler turned into a cozy roundtable discussion with me, my wife, Melina Gunnett, and Anna Sheehan. All of us were authors in varying stages of writing YA books. The panel started out as “Morality in Youth-Based Fantasy,” but turned into a general discussion of what is appropriate to include in YA fantasy in terms of moral lessons, violence, language, etc. And then we got into general talks of the writing industry, agents, publishers and other career oriented talk. It was really wonderful and I’m happy to have met them.

Overall it was a good time, even if the small size of the con sometimes defeated the intentions of the panels. But I look forward to attending this convention again next year!

For this year’s NaNoWriMo, I relied entirely on the crude outline I created in the one-day workshop I did with Mark Teppo through Clarion West‘s one-day workshop in early October. For a lot of reasons, mostly involving the build-up to November (including World Fantasy Con and AmberCon Northwest back to back), I didn’t get a blog post about my experience with his workshop. Since the novel came out of the work I did in his workshop, and it’s a great chance to see how that worked for me, I figured it was best to combine those two posts.

As I’ve continued writing over the last several years, I’ve increasingly found writing to be a very spiritual experience for me. I don’t mean spiritual in the sense of “developing a closer connection to an otherworldly being” but more in the sense of self exploration and understanding. In theory all moments in life are opportunities to learn something about yourself, but I feel it most acutely through writing (and being a writer as well, which is a little different). My best guess is that writing comes from and touches a deeper part of my psyche than, say making photocopies or feeding the cats. NaNoWriMo drills all of that down into a very intense month of beating my head against a creative work without room to give up or back out.

The one-day workshop I did with Mark Teppo was called “Jump Start Your Novel.” It was a day long exercise in taking whatever elements you have in mind for a novel and finding ways to expand it into a coherent and well crafted book. Some people came to the workshop with just vague ideas about what they wanted their books to be about. Others came after having written a good chunk of a novel and found it unworkable.

The first part of the class focused on us writing out answers to questions about our book. These questions asked about the protagonist, the theme of the book, as well as how the book would end. The second half of the class focused on how to translate these answers into an outline. Mark offered a lot of templates for plot structure for us to hang ideas on. He covered what he called the “Hardy Boys” chapter structure, the heroic journey, the three act structure and a variation on the Celtic Cross tarot spread.

Throughout all of these exercises, we had the opportunity to draw one tarot card per question to help us generate ideas. At first only a couple people did it, but as we got deeper and deeper into the exercise more and more people went looking for inspiration. In some parts I just flailed as I stared at the “white bull” of my lap top screen.

But, in the end, I had an outline for 25 chapters in pretty broad strokes with a lot more solid about my novel idea than I’d ever had besides some broad concepts. I felt pretty empowered.

What I should have done at this point was to flesh out narrative arcs for each of my chapters, apply the same questions I had written up to all of my primary characters and maybe written a little backstory for each of the characters.

But I had this faint hope that I could finish my novella before November hit and was pushing to do that. And I didn’t. But in the weeks between the workshop and November, I didn’t do any further work on my pre-NaNo prep. So late Halloween night I realized I didn’t even have names for most of the characters in the book, nor anything more solid about the broad strokes I’d fleshed out. And I didn’t even remember what half my broad strokes were supposed to mean.

I stuck with the outline for maybe two or three chapters, getting the feel for the writing before veering off course. The consistent problem I have with outlines is that the map is not the territory. When I actually get in and start putting words down, I start to get a feel for the flow of the plot and the structure of the story. I guess some people don’t have that problem. I haven’t grown past that. Anyway, since this outline was so loosely sketched out, I realized fast just how little thought I’d put into it the story. I went away from planned territory in a way I haven’t done in several years. The entire narrative arc was coming out of the ether as I went. I still used many ideas generated by the workshop, but the plot only bore the most superficial resemblance to my outline.

There’s an important lesson to be learned here: Workshops of various stripes are excellent for improving your skills. But the benefit comes from doing the work that needs to be done, not just half-assing it. If you have a chance to take Mark Teppo’s workshop in some form, I encourage you to do so. He’s a great guy, an excellent teacher and I really learned a lot through his workshop. My failure to follow through on the awesome I got from him is all my own damn fault.

The convention is run at the McMenamin’s Edgefield, a beautiful resort just east of Portland, OR. Not only does the Edgefield have an on-site brewery, distillery and winery, but it also has a spa and salt-water soaking pool. The convention has no dealer room and almost never has panels. Instead from Thursday through Sunday the weekend is all about gaming.

The community of 120 some odd people is very open and welcoming. New people often speak of how friendly and helpful people are, and many of the people I’ve gotten to know over the last twelve years feel like family.

Coming right on the heels of World Fantasy Con, I was operating at a deficit in terms of energy. I was pretty wiped out most of Monday and Tuesday, on top of having some NaNoWriMo obligations, after WFC and only had Wednesday to work on my games for ACNW. Riding in the car on Thursday down to the convention, I worked on my NaNo novel for the most part and helped Dawn brainstorm about hers.

After arriving I spent a half hour in the soaking pool before my hour massage. In hindsight I will probably not get in the pool before my massage again. While relaxing, it left me overly warm and so it took me a while to cool off. Until then I was incredibly sweaty. Not sexy.

The convention proper opens with a meet and greet. The convention provides a light buffet meal where we all mingle and have a few drinks. This is the first chance many of us get to see the friends we’d made in years past and there’s a lot of catching up that occurs. It’s also where any relevant announcements are made.

Slot One – All That Glitters: From Chaos With Love (GM: Me)

Thursday night I ran my first game of the weekend. This is the sequel to a game I ran the year before. The premise is that it revolves around the mid-level movers and shakers of the Shadows that trade with Amber. My previous iteration had not been what I had hoped for. Instead of exploration and mystery solving it devolved into, essentially, a dungeon crawl. This year went much better and there were some very fun roleplaying moments. I’m looking forward to running this again next year.

Slot Two – Writer’s Brunch (Organizer: Kath Nyborg)

I don’t normally like to take slots off from gaming, but the last couple years I’ve been joining in on the formal “taking time off from the con to write” event. Last year it was in the bar and I really enjoyed the atmosphere while I plugged away at the writing. This year we were in one of the meeting rooms of the hotel, and it lost a lot of its charm for me. It probably doesn’t help that I was freaking exhausted and fading out towards the end. I bagged out early to take a nap before lunch.

Slot Three – Sandman: Broken Hearts (GM: Jen Edwards)

A sequel to last year’s game, this is a variation on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman using the game mechanics from Nobilis 3e.  It diverges from canon at the point where Morpheus transfers power to Daniel. In this universe, the emerald shattered and the bits of Dream’s soul scattered out to embed themselves with various people and entities throughout the universe. Last year the PCs only represented agents of Dream but this year we expanded it to include an agent of Desire. I’m hoping in future games we might see more Endless have emPowered agents available as PCs. I truly loved playing this game. It brought in all the things I liked about Sandman and Nobilis together very well and I look forward to playing it again next year.

Slot Four – A Drink and a Tale (Organizer: Ryan Craig)

This was a session of Baron Munchausen, with us taking on the role of various nobility of the Amber universe and telling tales. It had been several years since I’d gotten to play in it so I was really looking forward to this. We barely played, though. We started an hour late, people didn’t seem to get into the spirit of the game (though I tried to push things along on my end) and we only played one round. After that we just drank and socialized late into the night. I had a generally good time, made some new friends and patched things up with old friends. (Alcohol can be great at smoothing things over.) But I would have really loved to tell more tales. At the very least, I got the most chips from players for telling the best tale. Huzzah!

Slot Five – Pulp Chaos 6: Put Your Lips Together and Blow [Take Two] (GM: Me)

Saturday morning I ran another installment of my game of commoners in the Courts of Chaos. This was the one I was supposed to run the year before, but didn’t because of explosive gall bladder issues. I was pretty hungover from the night before and didn’t feel particularly on top of my GMing. This was the most self-referential of the games I’ve run in this series. In years past I’ve tried to mostly have the plot revolve around elements of the Merlin series. But in the first run of this one of the players had left a story item that stuck around for a few games even though he didn’t come back. Since he had returned to the game this year, I decided it was time for some payback from an NPC. Overall people said they had fun, though energy was pretty low.

We ended a little early and a couple of us, so hadn’t seen much of each other in the last year, spent some time catching up.

Slot Six – Grindhouse 5 (GMs: Me and Thaddeus Rice)

Our latest installment of Grindhouse, we again ran two games in one slot. (It was a double feature you see.) I opened it up with Wulfgar und Olga, a lampoon of Conan. Sort of. It was born out of our fake movie trailers from a few years before. We used In a Wicked Age, using what I’ve heard called “the Conan variation.” Characters and plot elements are randomly generated using a deck of playing cards. There’s a whole system of determining which characters come back with each story that is told. In the Conan variation every story has to have Conan as a constant figure through all the stories, much like the Conan tales. In our game we substituted our two pseudo-Scandanavian titans, Wulfgar and Olga.

Then in the second half, Thaddeus ran Arkham Prep, using a simplified version of Monsters and Other Childish Things. We were all pre-teens in a Lovecraftian themed New England private school. Each of us had a monster only we could see. Weird things were going on. I didn’t really know what to expect. With Lovecraft involved I thought it would be sort of a creepy horror/mystery with little kids. It felt much more whimsical than that.

With each game we had a “missing reel” time jump so that we could wrap the game up in time, often with random plot elements thrown in that didn’t make sense based off of the opening of the game. In between the games we collaboratively made up shlocky trailers. My favorite was the rip off of Twilight that I called Watching You Sleep. It started off with me just trying to do a version of Twilight that didn’t glorify or sweep under the rug Edward’s creepy and controlling behavior. With other’s input Edward was replaced with Count Orlock from Nosferatu. Seriously: rewatch the trailer for Twilight but replace Edward with a yellow-skinned creature with snaggly teeth, over-long fingers and batwing ears, speaking in a raspy voice. I’m just sad they don’t have the whole “this is the skin of a predator” line in the trailer so you can imagine Count Orlock’s bare, sunken-chested torso while he says that.

Slot Seven – Even Death May Die

This was my first stab at doing a diceless version of Scion: Hero. You can see the character creation I used over here. Overall I think that in trying to recreate the mechanics more accurately, I made it more complicated. But aside from that hurdle I had fun running it and others said they did as well. I had a pretty rockin’ set of players for this. I’m looking forward to running this again next year with a revised ruleset.

After this we had a roaming after party, which included our tongue-in-cheek awards (“The Obies”), soaking in the pool, drinking and talking late into the night.

I’ve found in the past that my enjoyment of the con often boils down to how much I run versus how much I play. Because despite how much I like to run, I also love playing and don’t often get to. I usually limit myself to only running for half of the con, and I allow myself to run four out of seven slots because in one of the slots I’m only running half the game. Even with that, with one game replaced by writing and one game not really getting off the ground, I really felt like I had a deficit of play time. I will have to keep that in mind when making choices for next year.

I arrived in San Diego Wednesday afternoon. I had some mixed experiences with the hotel, but had no other WFCs to compare it to. I think the coolest part of the hotel was that they had Fantasy Island style golf carts to shuttle guests around the campus as needed. It was invaluable at times when I had a bunch of crap to carry.

There had been some emails sent out to the convention attendees, mostly kinda spammy. But included was an invitation from Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore to an informal meet and greet with authors from the convention on Wednesday night. Feeling bold, I RSVP’ed and let them know I was an author interested in attending. They added me to the list. I wasn’t even sure I’d be included, especially once the program for the convention came out and I was on none of the panels or readings. But they did include me. They even obtained copies of Crossed Genres Year One, though I didn’t find them the night of the event. (Note to self: When you’re at a bookstore and you’re looking for copies of an anthology you’re in, it won’t be shelved under your last name.)

But there was also a pretty astounding list of authors that were going to be there. Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, David Brin, Stina Leicht, Tone Milazzo, Mary Robinette Kowal, J.A. Pitts, Brenda Cooper, Patrick Rothfuss, Connie Willis, John Hornor Jacobs, Kate Elliott… I felt ridiculously out of my league.

I shared the shuttle from the airport with Nina Kiriki Hoffman who I had never heard of, but a bit of googling on my iPhone turned up her Wikipedia page. So, apparently she’s a big deal. She was also kind enough to look after me a bit at the author event, as did Mary Robinette Kowal. Which was a good thing. Even if my anxiety about the event wasn’t enough, the San Diego heat combined with low blood sugar and body heat in a crowded book store left me pretty miserable. Apparently San Diego doesn’t agree with my definition of “air conditioning.” In the end, I had a relatively good time with excellent conversation, but starting out the event drenched in sweat was not my ideal.

I spent much of the convention latched on to one friend or another. Once panels started I loosened up a bit, but it was nice to have a buddy along for those times when I felt like I was at loose ends. And I met a bunch of people that I then later latched onto as well. Overall the convention was mostly about meeting people, and not just in the raw networking sense of things. A large chunk of the 500 some odd members of the conventions were writers and other industry professionals. I met published authors, authors pitching their first novels, fans who were just starting to try their hand at writing, editors, slush readers, publicity directors and more. And everyone wanted to introduce you to someone else you might like.

There were panels, and some were good. But it was not nearly as awesome as just sitting around with some beers with people who love the same stuff you do. I have never had this experience in either the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Conference, which was filled with writers of all different genres. Nor at Norwescon, which is much more of a fan convention.

So, here are some random highlights of the weekend:

• Michael Underwood and Rich Howard  were among the authors I met who were pitching manuscripts. They both had jaw-dropping ideas behind their books, the sort of thing that I just kick myself for not thinking of myself. I won’t tell you what they are, since I don’t know how much they want known yet, but I encourage you to check them out and look for their books.
• I got to see Elizabeth Bear for the first time in many years. She had once been heavily involved in the Amber Diceless gaming community and I had met her and her now ex-husband at AmberCon. I’m still friends with her ex-husband (he officiated my wedding this last July) but between the divorce and her writing career she hasn’t been back in some time. I was surprised by how excited I was to see her again.
• I got to attend some really wonderful readings. In addition to Michael Underwood, I also got to see readings by Neil Gaiman, Liz Argall, Siobhan Carroll and Steven Boyett. Steven’s was perhaps the best of the readings I attended. I had met him going out to dinner with my friend Nathan and we ended up with Steven, Cliff Winnig (another AmberCon alumni) and Nayad Monroe (who I also just met that night). I had no idea who I was going to dinner with, but came out of it feeling like I’d met a ton of awesome people. The next day at Steven’s reading, he didn’t just read. He had memorized his pieces, rehearsed them and presented them. The piece that he presented from his latest novel, Mortality Bridge, was especially amazing because his introduction to the piece blended right into the selection from the story. You can see a video of him reading it here.
• I brought home a bunch of books. The book bag they gave us had a dozen books plus some magazines and various shwag. Ever time I met a new author I thought was neat, I ran out to find their book. The convention anticipated that and had an on-site post office there to help people ship books home. I spent over $40 on shipping three boxes of books and still had a big pile of stuff to stuff into carry on. I’m not looking forward to seeing my credit card bill.
• With the high volume of professional authors at the event, I had several mini-geek out moments. But nothing quite topped Sunday night. The crowd of the convention had thinned out and it seemed like many of the people remaining were pros of one sort of another. At one point I had the rare honor of having Mary Robinette Kowall and Tim Powers giving me advice and reassurance on writing. Then, into the middle of this, Steven Erikson joined us and shared a story about nearly dying in Mongolia. I’d seen both Powers and Erikson throughout the conversation, but while I loved their writing I didn’t feel fanboyish enough to try and engage them earlier. But finding myself actually conversing with them and Mary as a fellow (if less successful) writer was rare and magical.

I want to go back next year. I don’t know how I can swing it, but I really want to attend in Toronto when it goes out that way. Especially since I probably won’t be able to attend in Brighton in 2013. This event was amazing and powerful for me as a writer, much as AmberCon Northwest nourishes me as a roleplayer. If you’re a writer of speculative fiction of any sort, I really encourage you to try and attend this at some point.

Today I’m catching a plan to San Diego for World Fantasy Con, with guest of honor Neil Gaiman. I didn’t make it onto any panels, but looking at the list of authors that did I’m not insulted. There’s a metric butt ton of awesome writers there. It’s so outside of my league it’s ridiculous. But I did manage to squeeze my way in as an author for tonights informal meet-and-greet at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore. I’m only a lot intimidated by the notion of being on the same docket of authors as Mary Robinette Kowal, Emma Bull, David Brin and Will Shetterly. I have this small secret fear that they’ll realize I don’t belong.

I’m delighted to see that they listed one of the anthologies I’m in on their site, though. Specifically Crossed Genres Year One. I’ll be stoked if they actually have it on sale at the store. I’ll be even more stoked if they have the Timid Pirate anthologies I’m in.

Speaking of Timid Pirate, Cobalt City Dark Carnival is out soon-ish. I channel my inner angry panda for my story, “Snowflake’s Chance in Hell.” Not sure what the exact release date is, but I know it is pretty damn soon.

Arcane Magazine, which purchased my short story “Kiss of Death,” has changed format to being a yearly anthology. Their Web site now points to Cold Fusion Media. I recall hearing that the anthology would come out January-ish, so hopefully that’s when my story will be there since my new contract gives them a year to publish the story before rights revert to me. Getting information about this has been tough.

But in the end, I feel obliged to grouse a bit about Nobilis 3rd Edition.

At Ambercon Northwest, I’m playing in the sequel to a very awesome Nobilis/Sandman mashup that I played in last year. It was everything I would have wanted from either a Nobilis game or a game about Sandman. This year the GM announced that she was running it using Nobilis 3rd edition instead of 2nd.

I love Nobilis. I bought both the 1st and 2nd editions of it, and it has long stood as the game I most want to play but have rarely had a chance to do so. I also really love Jenna K. Moran’s contributions to other roleplaying games, especially Exalted. When pre-orders for 3rd edition finally became available, I pounced on the opportunity to get it as soon as humanly possible.

I tried looking at it when I got the free PDF, but the anime-style art was so overwhelming and poorly done that I just couldn’t stand it. When I got the hardcopy of the book I tried starting at the first page and just reading it, but found that I just couldn’t get into it. While Nobilis 2e had a certain stark and non-human beauty to it, 3e seemed both cloyingly sweet and painfully bland. It was like eating far more cotton candy than you’d like.

In preparing for this game I’m playing in, I decided I should just skip ahead to character creation. That should expedite my ability to see the meatier changes Moran made to the rules. Instead what I found was everything I disliked about the beginning of the book only worse. Because I was trying to find the straight character creation rules, I managed to miss the one-page summary of them. So I found myself slogging through these twee, over-long explanations of very simple point distribution. Mixed into this was frankly horrible page layout.

Then I got to the point where it gets to the more 2e like rules where it tells you to spend Character Points. But at that point it stopped telling me how many points you had to go with. So then I sort of flailed through the pretty unhelpful Index and Table of Contents. It was only through luck, I think, that I finally found the character creation summary.

In the long term I think I will just mine as much useful mechanics as I can from the book, summarize it for my players, and then just store my book next to my Amber Diceless books that I only use under duress. (I play a lot of Amber, but have little use for the rulebook at this point.)

From what I can tell, there’s a lot of really great rules in here. But the packaging, both visual and verbal, is just so eye-bleedingly bad that it pains me to even try and read the book. And yet it is pretty rare to find any negative reviews for the book. I’d really love to see a “good parts” version, where it strips out almost all the art and the side commentary that isn’t the microfiction. Because otherwise, this book just leaves me disappointed.

I was potentially bad last weekend, as I was at Foolscap and ate at restaurants nearby. I tried to make the best choices I could without having access to nutrition info. Plus I just spaced on it a few times. Tully’s Mocha Bellacino? Probably guilty. Bottom shelf margarita at a Mexican restaurant? Probably uses margarita mix, which probably has HFCS. But I did learn that my favorite breakfast sandwich at Diva Espresso was mislabeled and actually has no HFCS (Yay Thomas English Muffins!), so that made me feel happier.

I got in a little exercise this last week. Twice we did a leisurely walk down to our local lake, spending about half an hour doing so. This includes time to stand by the water and watch the ducks and geese for a few minutes. My wife got me hooked on the Yelp app, which allows you to check in places and earn titles for stores and neighborhoods. I’ve avoided this sort of thing for a while, but once my wife got involved then so did I. Though it lacks a fundamental knowledge of British peerage and puts a Baron above a Duke, it’s sort of fun going places and working to become the Duke of a store. I bring this up because you can check in at local parks. So our big motivation for going to the park has been grinding at the game to become the Duke or Duchess of Bitter Lake Park. We’ve also found other parks in the area that we can check into for this purpose.

I’ve also gotten some incidental “exercise” thanks to one of our cats. He’s been having some health issues which have resulted in trips to the vet and being fed in isolation. He’s very skittish and on most occasions I’ve only been able to corral him by herding him back and forth across the living room until he’s too exhausted to run, which means I walk back and forth across the living room for 10 minutes. Not the most intensive work out, but it at least helps me wake up when I’ve gotten out of bed at 4:30 AM to deal with feeding the cats.

If I’d only read the titles I normally followed, this might not be as discombobulating. But after four weeks of not checking my box, I arrived to find 30+ #1 comics waiting for me. (Yeah, I sort of thought they’d space them out better…) And reading through them, I felt like I was reading about completely different settings.

Some, like Green Arrow, Stormwatch, Superboy, and Justice League International, looked like pretty basic reboots. Familiar characters and groups re-imagined. Okay, sure. JLI admits that this is not the original Justice League and, with the inclusion of Guy Gardner, shows that there’s some sort of history with the Green Lanterns already.

Other titles seemed to have at least some of the old back story. In Batgirl, Barbara Gordon was still shot and and made a paraplegic by the Joker. But I don’t see any indicator of her background as Oracle still happening in her past, nor her work with the Birds of Prey or the most recent Batgirl (Stephanie Brown). Batman & Robin still has Damian Wayne (Bruce’s son) as Robin. Bruce is back in the cowl, but it is clear that Dick Grayson had been Batman recently. But I’m not sure if they changed the reasons. Batwoman is still the same, no apparent change.

All of the Green Lantern recent events still seem to be around. But since I didn’t read any of that mess, I’m left a little confused by Green Lantern and utterly baffled by Red Lanterns. At least with Green Lantern I could pick up what was going on since I was familiar with some of the characters. Sinestro has been recruited back by the Green Lantern Corp and Hal Jordan’s been fired? Sure. I can follow that much. But I have no idea who the Red Lanterns are and didn’t know what was going on. I had hoped #1 might be new-reader friendly, but it really wasn’t.

And then there’s Superman. In Action Comics, he’s reimagined as being more like the early Golden Age version: He can’t fly, he can just jump over tall buildings with a single bound. Tank shells can take him down. People don’t know who he is, Lex Luthor is debuting his attempt to kill this invading alien species. Okay. Sure.

Then Supes appears in Swamp Thing, which seems to continue the story of Brightest Day Aftermath: The Search for Swamp Thing, and he can fly and has a different costume. In Justice League, we don’t even see the modern Justice League. We get a flash back to “Five Years Earlier,” with Hal Jordan as Green Lantern running into (I think) Bruce Wayne as Batman. At the end we see Superman, and in this flashback he’s flying and wearing the costume from Swamp Thing. So what the hell is up with Action Comics? I’m guessing it could just be a flashback and they don’t tell you. But I don’t know. It’s a little frustrating.

Beyond that, I had some titles I’ve really liked. Men of War has been a fun modern reboot of Sgt. Rock. I didn’t like the art for Animal Man at first, but for the creepier parts of the story it works very well. Batwing is a fun riff on a superhero in Africa. Batwoman is just as awesome as I recall. Several of the other titles I was lackluster about, mainly because there was no actual story. There was just a lot of “Let us find some cute way to tell you what this particular superhero group is about.”

I still have two more weeks of these to read through, and I’m going to stick it out for at least a few issues with these titles. I want to see what happens with this.

This year I only attended Saturday and Sunday. I couldn’t take time off to attend the all-day writing workshop on Friday, and remembered Friday evening from last year being a bust, so after considering options for panels this year, I decided I’d rather just stay home Friday night. I’m sorry if the con-com radically changed Friday night based off of my comments from last year, but I opted to err on the side of caution and just spend the evening with the wife.

My favorite panel that I attended, hands down, was the panel on “Monster Self Actualization,” a discussion of what makes monsters tick, how that affects stories, etc. The panelists were Jason Wodicka, Torrey Podmajersky and Matt Youngmark.  Torrey set the bar high when she brought in a whiteboard with a chart of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which was annotated for different monsters as they went along. And the awesome just escalated. The conversation was sharp and there were lots of really interesting ideas bandied back and forth about all sorts of monsters, human or otherwise, and the role that Maslow’s hierarchy can be used in fiction.

You’ll often get people making a token thank you after a panel, but for this one people stopped the panelists in the hall and gushed about how much they enjoyed it. It was just so much fun. Because of this panel, I also registered a domain name, madscientistjournal.org, with the vague idea of doing an online zine of fake essays by mad scientiests.

I won’t say what my worst panel was, nor who was behind it being my worst. I will just say that if you sign up to be on a panel on the basis of, “I like to argue,” it is against your best interests to let the rest of the people know that after you’ve been arguing with them for most of the slot. They basically shut him out after he revealed that, and I’m pretty grateful for that.

The main thing I was disappointed with overall was that there were no readings by writers this year. I really enjoyed that last year and got to encounter some really awesome writers that way. This  year the absence was a huge bummer. Nathan Crowder and I joked about doing guerilla readings in the lobby, but

Otherwise I got to meet a lot of really great people, many of whom do not have Web sites. Those who do have Web sites include Folly Blaine, Yasmine Galenorn, Eliza Hirsh, Manny Frishberg (who I’ve seen at many other cons, and I recently learned is a fellow Young Gunn) and Danika Dinsmore. I had previously encountered Yasmine at the PNWA Conference. I found that I vastly preferred seeing her talk in a more casual environment than from across a large room. I didn’t recognize Danika’s name until I realized I had pseudonymously reviewed her book several months ago. So I was delighted to say, “Hi! I’m Angela!”

I didn’t really take much in the way of notes, because this wasn’t that sort of convention. But I did jot down notes about things I wanted to look into getting. Here’s what I jotted down:

Books: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created; The Stepsister Scheme; Eighth Grade Bites ; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; Peeps

Movies: Blood & Donuts

Apps: Epic Win