Where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing – November Edition

Hey y’all –

I don’t know about you, but I’m just now getting back into my groove after Dragon*Con and NY Comic Con. That’s certainly one reason I don’t think I can do both of those cons in a year again – they’re just a little too close together for massive cons like that. I know there’s six weeks between them, but I need more. Anyway, nobody cares about all that.

Here’s where you can find me at upcoming events for the next couple weeks. When I’m not at these places, I plan to be nose-first in my keyboard because I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year and I really intend to blow it up. I think I should be able to easily hammer out 50,000 words in about two weeks, so this bitch better be done by Thanksgiving!

Tonight & Tomorrow Night (and Sunday @2:30, Nov. 1-3 @ 8PM, Nov. 4 @ 2:30PM, Nov. 7-10 @ 8PM, Nov. 11 @ 2:30PM)- 8PM – Theatre Charlotte, In the Heat of the Night. Great play, come check it out. The cast is going to Philosopher’s Stone tonight after the show, you’re welcome to join us and tell us how awesome we are.

Sunday – UNCC Cone Center – UNCC Guild Game Day – this is where the gamer geeks come hang out, play Magic or other games, and I set up my little display table and try to sell books. Worst case I’ll play cards and hang out.

November 14, 7-9PM – I’ll be signing the Black Knight Omnibus at Park Road Books. Faith Hunter and Kalayna Price will be joining me. Come by and say hello. Maybe we’ll grab a beer afterwards. Well, let’s put it this way – I’m going to get a beer afterwards. You’re invited.

November 15 – Time Warner Cable Arena – Madonna. Don’t judge, I’m a married man, and I owe her this. I will be intoxicated. That is all.

November 16-18 – Charleston Convention Center in North Charleston, SC – Magic Grand Prix Charleston. I’ll be playing Magic: The Addiction all weekend long, but if you want to come say hello, I’ll probably have books in my bag if you want to pick one up.

November 22 – Thanksgiving at Mom & Dad’s. There’s always plenty. If you can find the place by lunchtime, drop by. We have extra. Just say you’re Cousin Ralph. No one will notice, but you’re in charge of the cranberry sauce. And it better be that gelatinous crap with the ridges from the can left in it. None of this real cranberries bullshit for my family!

November 24 – New World Comics in High Point – 4PM – 6PM – I’ll be doing a signing in a comic shop. Sounds like I’ll be spending more than I sell again. But I’ll have a great time doing it!

Then December 16th, join me for the Charlotte Comicon at the new location. No I don’t remember where it is, go to the website. It’s the best one-day con in Charlotte. It’s awesome!

Yeah, except for the thirty-seven appearances I have this month, I’ll be writing. No friggin’ wonder I never get anything written. I got more done when I had a day job. At least then I had a lunch break. Whine, whine, whine, grumble, grumble, grumble. See ya in the funny papers!

 

It’s hot at night

Not really, but since I’m performing In the Heat of the Night at Theatre Charlotte starting Friday (get your tickets now!), and I’m nuts-deep in tech and dress rehearsals this week, I figured I’d at least try to knock out a blog post for y’all.

This show is a bag of awesome, and I’m having a hell of a good time working on it. It’s tough, and there’s one costume change in particular that I barely make each night, leaving me panting a little when I come back onstage, but the acting overall is very, very good, and I’ve enjoyed getting back onstage in a show that makes me stretch a bit.

I don’t act much. It’s not just a time thing, there are a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that I know I’m not the best actor in my age range in town. I’m pretty good, and I work hard, but I don’t have as much innate talent as some other folks. Which makes auditions a little tougher. Once directors work with me and understand that I work my ass off on a show, I can get cast. But auditioning for a new director is hard. It doesn’t help that I’m overweight and have long hair, both of which tend to narrow my “type.” I shaved for this show, though, which I hope shows a willingness to alter my appearance that people weren’t aware of.

But the fact of the matter is that I’m a very good lighting designer, and I can usually find plenty of work doing that to keep me busy. And it pays, while most folks in Charlotte are acting for free. So lighting gigs take precedence over auditions. But I love acting, and I love getting the chance to stretch myself as an actor, which this show does.So if you’re around Charlotte for the next three weeks, I hope you’ll come out and tell me how I’ve done. And feel free to mock my clean-shaven mug. I do.

Bubba and the Future of Bubba

So the new Bubba the Monster Hunter story is out. You can check it out here. It’s the culmination of the storyline between Bubba and his psycho father, but at the end of the story I’m a bit of a dick.

I know, big surprise.

Remember, the only thing writers enjoy more than torturing characters is torturing readers. And I get to do both in one shot.

I leave you on a bit of a cliffhanger, but you won’t have to wait too long for a resolutions. I plan to pick back up with Bubba stories in January. So just a couple of months to wait.

But here’s the current plan for Bubba publications.

Shorts 1-4 are collected in Monsters Beware.

Shorts 5-8 are collected in Monsters Mashed.

The next collection will include Sixteen Tons, Family Tradition and Final CountdownIt will be called something like Monsters Everywhere, unless y’all give me a better two-word title starting with the word “monsters.” This will be a $3.99 ebook, a discount over buying all three books individually.

Then I’ll release a collection of all of the Bubba stories to date. It will be called Scattered, Smothered and Chunked: Bubba the Monster Hunter Season One. It’ll be on sale soon as a $9.99 ebook, which is cheaper than buying all eleven books individually.

Bump in the Night is the current Bubba print collection, collecting stories 1-8 for $15. It will go away, never to be seen again. I will soon (probably early next year) have a print edition for Scattered, Smothered and Chunked, so it’s easy for readers to get the whole story in one place. It’ll probably be about $20.

Then next year I’ll work on getting even more adventures of Bubba, Skeeter and Agent Amy. Assuming they all live through Final Countdown.

Just wanted to give y’all a publication update on everybody’s favorite redneck, so you know where we are with things. Lemme know if you’ve got title suggestions or any other feedback on the stories. They’re a lot of fun to write, so I’ll likely keep turning them out on the order of one about every month, with a little break now and then.

NY Comic Con, Part 2 – the whining

So here’s where I actually bitch and moan about NYCC, the Javits Center, New York City, and major metro areas that have no idea how to host a real convention.

In my other life I went to a lot of conventions. Some of them, like the NC Theatre Conference, were very small, maybe a couple hundred people some years. Those have certain challenges to organizers, but once you find a venue, the attendees pretty much have no idea that there are any issues. Some were large, like Lighting Dimensions International (I wave hello to my lighting industry friends who are gathering in Vegas this weekend). These conventions have their own issues, and it doesn’t take much to make them noticeable, because any glitch will affect thousands, or tens of thousands of people. Then there are the huge shows, like the National Association of Broadcasters show, which fills the entire Las Vegas Convention Center every year. These have no room for error, because they are on the biggest stage. NY Comic Con is that kind of size. The size that if there’s anything off or goofy, it could affect the population of a small city.

Like I said, I’ve been to a lot of conventions in a lot of places, and I’ve seen some towns that really understand how to host a convention. Las Vegas and Orlando really understand what it takes to host a convention.

New York City has no clue.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate New York. I wouldn’t want to live there for very long, I don’t like cold weather and I don’t like crowds that much. But I like New York. And going into this adventure I figured it would be no huge hassle to get everything loaded in, loaded out, make commerce happen, what have you.

That was when I assumed New York knows how to host a major convention.

I think I know why NYC doesn’t understand how to host a major con or trade show – population density. If there were 110,000 people at NYCC, probably 80,000 of them were from the greater NYC area. If there are 90,000 people attending NAB in Las Vegas, 80,000 of them were from outside the Las Vegas metro area.

This lack of outside guests means that New York doesn’t have one of the most important things any city must have for a convention center – a convention hotel. I’ve never been to a convention center anywhere in the US where there isn’t a hotel within a short walk. And I don’t mean a New York short walk, I mean a Kansas short walk. More than two blocks is not a short walk. And there’s no major hotel near the Javits Center. None.

There’s also no subway stop close by. The nearest subway station is right outside Penn Station, which is about 3/4 of a mile away. Not a huge deal under normal circumstances, unless you’ve been standing on concrete in boots all day, or are wearing an elaborate costume, or are just friggin’ tired, or want to start your day at a con looking fresh! Yeah, yeah, I know – there’s one under construction. But here’s the thing – the Javits Center ain’t exactly new! It’s been open almost 30 years!

Then there are the cabs. Yeah, I know, take a taxi. Sure – if they’ll stop. There was no cab stand outside the main exit for the convention center, and none of the cabs we saw in the evenings outside the convention center were on duty. Contrast this with the Las Vegas Convention Center, where there are huge lines of cabs with cab attendants pairing people up to cab share so the lines move more quickly and people can save cash on cabs.

All of these things combined to make Comic Con just a less pleasant experience than it could be if it weren’t in one of the largest cities in the US. In almost any other city, the influx of 100,000 people for one event would get the entire city’s attention. Red carpets would be rolled out, cheap hotel rooms would be flowing like water, and every cabbie in the city would be salivating at all those tourist dollars. In New York, they call that Tuesday.

So until there’s a convention hotel near the Javits, or a subway stop right outside, or someone is willing to foot my bill for cab and car fare all weekend, I’ll be sticking to the smaller cons. Like Dragon*Con, which only has 50-60,000 people. 🙂

I am planning my convention schedule for 2013, so if you’ve got a great con in your area that you’d like to see me at, drop me a line and we’ll see what we can do.

NY Comic Con report, Part 1

NY Comic Con report, Part 1

Because when there’s over 100,000 frigging people at a convention, it gets more than one post! And yes, there will be photos. And yes, most of them will be of hot chicks in skimpy outfits.

Let’s start with a quick overview. If you’ve been to many fandom-based conventions, like MidSouth Con, ConCarolinas, even Dragon*Con, you ain’t seen nothing like Comic Con. It’s way more of a trade show than a con. What I mean by that is that people mostly buy their Comic Con tickets for the exhibit hall and the autographs, and the panels are kind of an afterthought. There were exhibits from Xbox, Marvel, DC, Legendary Pictures, Dark Horse, Chevrolet, Craftsman Tools.

Yeah, I said Chevy and Craftsman had booths at Comic Con. Now do you get what I mean by this was a trade show and not a normal con? Craftsman paid someone to write and draw and custom comic book with their superhero in it to promote their Bolt-On series of tools.

Take a minute and go there. The first time I saw “Bolt-On Tool” I went there. Couldn’t help it.

So it was a very different environment for me than most cons. I kinda knew what to expect, having done the Heroes Con for a couple of years. But this was way, WAY bigger. Like 4X bigger. And that meant that it was easy to miss stuff, like a small book booth. Or like Artists’ Alley, which I never set foot in all weekend. Or the panel rooms, which I never saw.

And missed out on a chance to meet Kim Harrison, which was a bummer. But there will be other cons, and hopefully she will attend some of them. But I did see Richard Kadrey and had a nice chat with him on Sunday, so that was nice.

But I sold almost everything I took with me. I had about a dozen books left when the show was over, so that was good. I was mostly pushing the Black Knight Omnibus, because it’s new and shiny. And looks amazing!

 

I took 50 copies of the omnibus with me, and sold 40 of them. I sold out of Genesis and The Chosen, and had 2 copies of Bump in the Night left at the end of the weekend. So it was a good weekend for sales. I even sold a couple of Read Recklessly t-shirts!

But I won’t be doing NY Comic Con again any time soon.

It’s a really expensive show, because everything in New York is expensive. And it’s not a wonderfully organized show, and there aren’t really very many opportunities for me to really connect with fans, other than pitching them a book. And while that’s fun, it’s not as much fun as sitting on a bunch of panels and talking about the craft.

And I’m trying to cut back (a little bit) on the number of shows I do. I’m already committed to nine cons next year, with a couple of other maybes, and that’s a bunch. It gets expensive, and while some of the cons I can split rooms with folks and ride share for gas, I can’t always count on that. The only way I was able to afford NYCC was because my awesome friend Tamsin let me sleep in her spare room for the weekend and shepherded me around the subway. Otherwise it would have cost half again as much as Dragon*Con!

But I had a good time. I met some awesome folks, a couple of whom have already dropped me a line on Facebook or email, so I hope I can get scheduled into some smaller con in the Northeast soon. Just not a con with 100,000 people. That’s way too big for this old country boy!

But check out some of the costumes!