Calgary Comic Expo

I’m in Calgary, Alberta this coming weekend for the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, my first real show of the 2010 season and always one of my favorites. Kandrix does an amazing job of organizing a top-notch show, with a stellar guest line-up designed to appeal to a broad range of fans. Plus, he has an eye for the little details that make an exhibitor’s life easier, from key contact info printed on the back of badges to a fleet of volunteers helping guests get around.

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.

Back from England

Jim and I had a grand time at the Animex Festival in Middlesbrough, England last month: lots of great people, fascinating conversations about the game and animation industries, good meetings with UDON’s UK distributors (who are awesome folks!), and lots of little side adventures to round out the whole experience. Things got a little muddled once we hit London, and we got stuck with an unexpected overnight in Holland on our way back, but those were pretty minor bumps in the grand scheme of things.

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!

Happy New Year

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!

Countdown to 2010

I’m currently caught in the end-of-the-year social whirlwind, whipping through parties and family dinners and all the rest at tornado speed. UDON’s shut down the studio until Jan 4, but I’m still keeping up on a few emails and pulling together materials for a Rather Exciting Project on the horizon. I’m also taking a few days away from the writing desk, the better to gain some perspective on my current WIP.

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!

Latest happenings

I’m super-excited to see two of the UDON Kids Manga titles, “The Big Adventures of Majoko” and “Ninja Baseball Kyuma,” on the School Library Journal’s Best Comics for Kids 2009 list! Majoko is a personal favorite of mine (next to “Swans in Space”, because, well, sci-fi for girls. How awesome is that?), so it was awesome to see it right at the top of the list – even though I know the list is alphabetical within categories. Read the rest of this entry »