Jim and I are traveling with our pal Ray Fawkes, who has a booth in artist alley, and with UDON artists Omar Dogan, Joe Vriens and Eric Vedder. All three are working on current UDON titles, so the booth should be pretty hopping!

Exciting as the work stuff is, though, it pales in comparison to the personal nerd factor: specifically, Leonard Nimoy! Kandrix’s made arrangements for Nimoy to visit Vulcan for the first time ever, and we’re flying in a day early to take in the madness! We’re also attending a 40th anniversary screening of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE on Friday evening with Malcolm McDowell in attendance, which ought to be pretty amazing. Given that Nimoy just announced his upcoming retirement from the con scene, I’m anticipating an even higher level of frenzy than usual around his appearance. And since Spock was my very first serious teen crush, the whole thing is making my inner 13-year-old unreasonably pleased.

Making friends in London Town!

Things continue at a hectic pace: I’ve taken on a new, as-yet-secret project with UDON that’s eating up loads of time (but is equally challenging and loads of fun), we’re prepping to launch comic con season early this year with Emerald City in Seattle in late March, and I’m plugging away on my current WIP, which I’m expecting to have completed (in early-draft form, of course!) before leaving for the Calgary Con at the end of April. There have been a couple of serious frustrations over the past few months, but I’m trying to stay focused on the road ahead – which is, admittedly, not always the easiest this time of year. Come on spring!

Still working on getting site changes up & running. Next post will likely be a warning for RSS feeds on where to change links, since I’m shifting the blog to a different URL.

In the meantime, I hope everyone is enjoying 2010 so far!

I’ve also been musing the fate of this blog. Frankly, blogging about writing is not really my thing. Like Colleen Lindsay on agent blogging, I feel that others do the writer’s blog thing much better and more enthusiastically than I ever will, and I’m better off leaving it to them for the most part. Most of what I’m dealing with right now – querying, revisions, the awkward dance of encouraging rejection letters – isn’t appropriate fodder for a blog, and what remains is just not that interesting.

So, over the next couple of weeks (well, hopefully days, but we’ll see how the WordPress wrestle goes), I’m going to revamp this site to be less “generic author blog” and more me. Ideally, I’ll be slicing the blog up into three main categories – writing/publishing, style, and alt culture – although I may add a fourth section for personal stuff, or as a catch-all category. Only the writing/publishing feed will push through to my livejournal, and the styles posts might wind up mirrored on a fashion/costume specific domain as well. It all depends on my mood, and ability to pummel WordPress into submission.

Apologies in advance for the service disruptions this is likely to cause!

Also breaking this week: the next “Street Fighter: Legends” miniseries is finally announced, with ninja schoolgirl Ibuki stepping into the ring. This one has me especially excited, since Jim is writing the book, with art from his good friend Omar Dogan. Omar’s really knocking it out of the park – these pages are some of the best art he’s ever done – and I’m so happy that Jim’s going to have another great-looking book under his writing belt. Comic Book Resources has an interview with Jim & Omar, including some exclusive preview art.

As for me, I’m juggling UDON work, wedding questions (no details yet!), holiday planning, and an all-too-full social calendar, plus plugging away at my WIP. This is the first time I’ve written something with multiple points of view, and it’s throwing some wrenches into my usual process. Typically, I write from start to finish, a method that helps me keep the whole book straight in my head as I go along, but the two narrative voices are quite different and switching back and forth is proving to be a challenge. I’ve tried writing all the scenes for one voice first, but it’s not very comfortable for me, so I think I’m stuck trying to find easier ways of shifting between narrative POVs. Any suggestions?

About a month ago, Jim let me know that he wanted to take me to New York City for the Dances of Vice festival. I’ve been drooling over the online photos from this event for years now, but the idea of traveling to NYC for a costume party has always seemed excessive, especially for my inclined-to-the-frugal self. I hesitated a bit, but he made a good argument, so I gave in and let him set things up.

Boy, am I glad I did that!

The festival itself was a lot of fun, although there were a couple of stumbling points. We got in mid-Friday and just chilled near our Brooklyn hotel for a while before the Friday night cruise around Manhattan. It was a bit harder to meet people on the cruise than I’d hoped – the deck was chilly and the interior was one large, noisy room with bands and bellydancers – but we had fun admiring the outfits and the skyline. Still, it was a bit of a soft note to start the weekend, and I think we were both a little worried about it.

Saturday made up for all that in spades. We did a whirlwind tour around Manhattan, hitting all the key spots (for us): Uniqlo shopping for Jim, a couple of fun stores around SoHo, a long wander through Central Park, lunch at a funky diner, watching a proposal at Rockerfeller Plaza, Grand Central and Times Square and a whole bunch more. We were pretty exhausted by the time we headed out for the Shipwreck Ball that night, but happy – especially once we reached the location and discovered that people were much friendlier at this event than they’d been at the cruise. We met some great folks and were having a pretty awesome time….

And then Jim conspired with Coco, the MC, to grab the mike and drag me up front before Hellblinki’s set in order to propose:

(click-through for a photo set from the weekend)

Obviously, I said YES.

The rest of the trip was a bit of a blur after that: Jim managed to catch me truly off-guard and it took a while for the reality of it all to sink it. We did have a great time, including a lovely brunch on Sunday at the Montauk Club and a hilarious adventure at the Brooklyn Superhero Supply company, but mostly I was busy boggling at my ridiculous good fortune.

Since everyone keeps asking: we don’t have any specific plans in mind yet, aside from trying to find a date outside the ongoing con schedule (which is challenging, considering that UDON’s con schedule currently runs mid-March through mid-Sept!). I’ll try to keep y’all updated, without babbling incessantly about the whole thing.

Things are going well: plugging away on UDON’s 2010 convention schedule, starting the (far too soon, eek!) preparations for the dread December holiday season, and keeping to a solid writing schedule. The last is probably most exciting to me (well, the con planning is pretty exciting too!). I’m doing a sort of UnNaNoWriMo: taking the concept of just write, dammit and tweaking it for my own needs. The goal right now is to hit the NaNo 50K mark by end of the month, and carry on at the same pace to wrap up the full draft by Dec 15. So far I’m on track, which means – in superstitious writer fashion – I’m unwilling to talk about it much more than that, lest I jinx myself!

…. and I’m out of time.

And then mid-week got even more busy and I didn’t have time to post and now it’s Friday and I still don’t have time, darnit, because I spent most of today trying to find out why other people haven’t gotten their work done and now I’m seriously behind on my daily word-count, argh!

So this isn’t a real post either. This is the blog equivalent of wiping off the sink with a rag and shoving the dirty socks under the sofa, lest your guests think you have no sense of cleanliness and decorum at all.

Ahem. In the meantime, here’s a picture of the thing that made me laugh the hardest today:

Sweater shorts.

No, really.
SWEATER SHORTS.
A steal at just 15,000 yen! (about $150 US)

Treadwell’s is top of my personal list, if only for the delightfully tempting list of titles and events listed on their webpage. They’re the newest of the lot, open less than six years now, but the owner has an academic background in medieval history and their selection seems both interesting and reasonably-priced (well, as far as antiquarian book collecting goes). Their lectures series is absolutely fascinating to me, and I’m likely to make Jim batty when we visit London by trying to plan our trip to accommodate some upcoming Treadwell’s speaker or event.

Next on the tour is Atlantis Bookshop, one of London’s oldest occult bookshops. It should probably be first, given it was founded in 1922 by a group of magicians that included Austin Osman Spare, Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley, and they do run another impressive series of events, lectures and pub nights. Chalk it up to nostalgia: Treadwell’s was the first bookstore I fell in love with online, and I’m still a bit sweet on them as a result.

Finally, there’s Watkins Books, who almost got the top billing when I spotted the A.O. Spare book on the top of their Antiquarian page. (Then I spotted the price, which may well be reasonable for Spare’s extraordinarily rare works, but still!) Watkins was actually founded before Atlantis Bookshop, issuing their first catalog in 1987 and opening doors on their current location in 1901. W.B. Yeats used to shop here, and the original owner was a friend (and printer) for H P. Blavatsky, a key figure in the Victorian occult revival. Like I said, pedigree!

Londonist.com has some lovely photos of all three shops in their Biblio-Text series: Treadwell’s, Watkins and Atlantis.

Ah me. In lieu of an overseas trip, I’ll have to make time this weekend for a stop-in at The Monkey’s Paw, one of my favorite browsing spots in Toronto. They may not have a specific focus in esoteric/occult texts, but there’s always one or two books in their little glass shelf to make my heart go pit-a-pat.

I’ve seen a few of Lotte Reiniger’s shorts, and outtakes from an unrestored version of ACHMED, but never the full film; hopefully, this new restoration will merit a DVD release (there’s one currently available, but I’ve been a bit hesitant about the transfer quality). Her life story is pretty interesting, and her influence resonates clearly among modern directors such as the Brothers Quay and Guy Maddin (in particular, the silhouette sequences in ARCHANGEL).

“I love working for children, because they are a very critical and very thankful public.” – Lotte Reiniger

(links via the Dangerous Minds blog)

* – oh, and it turns out HAXAN is public domain and thus available online; the quality won’t be as nice as a print, of course, but I’ll have to give it a try this weekend, just to see.