Blógünder Schlock

I’m in Toronto at Ad Astra, and you are probably not. But you’d LIKE to be, right? Here’s your chance to “meet” me and actually interact with me.

“Crazy Kyla” has a BlogTV.com channel at http://www.blogtv.com/People/Crazy_Kyla, and she’s interviewing Ad Astra guests. On Saturday at 12:00 noon Eastern time, I’ll be on camera live. If you log in, you can ask questions of the interviewers, and I can respond on camera.

Life in the 21st Century… so cool! We haven’t had a breakthrough like this since radio stations installed telephones and started prank-calling on the air.

Seriously, I have NO idea how well this is going to be pulled off. I suspect there may be an atmosphere of amateurism, but I’m going to give it a shot, and we’re going to have fun.

A little over three years ago my friend Richard Bliss saved my life, or at the very least saved Schlock Mercenary. He provided me with some contract cartooning for a deep-pocketed corporate client, and that was when “GWAVAMan” was born.

For GWAVA, Inc. this black-and-green muscleman stood for their flagship product, the GroupWise Anti-Virus Agent. For me he represented the finest in mercenary traditions — getting paid, and living to spend it. Today, three years after the final issues of GWAVAMan aired, there is a seven-foot-tall GWAVAMan mascot walking around at Novell Brainshare in Salt Lake City.

Naturally, I have to be there.

Richard is blogging the details over at gwbliss.blogspot.com, and I’m going up at around 5:00pm to shoot an interview and get my picture taken with my creation. I’m told the interview will air at 6:30pm Mountain Daylight Time on GWAVA TV.

I’ve been looking high and low for my GWAVAMan t-shirt, but can’t find it. This saddens me. What if, unauthenticated by attire, he false-postives me as spam and hucks me out of the convention?

Hopefully if it goes down that way the cameras will be rolling.

Much as I’d love to regale you with more Tales of a Ton of Books, it’s time to keep things interesting with a podcast. Tim Shea and Scott Gallatin of The Gigcast interviewed me just before Thanksgiving. Download and listen to Gigcast 118 (or click on the logo to the right, and use their handy player instead), where I don’t think I say much at all about having 4450 kilograms of books in my garage. Mostly I talk about how cool my job is, and how wonderful my readers are.

(For those who are curious regarding my progress on the books, I’ve now sketched over a thousand pounds of them, and the dent in the stack has gotten bigger.)

In conjunction with some of this week’s news (the Blank Label/Halfpixel fission) I was interviewed by the editor over at Comixtalk.

You can read the interview here.

I’m going to do the unthinkable. I’m going to take seven very busy days and compress them into one blog post.

I won’t trouble you with the first three days, save to say that I worked hard getting the booth in ship-shape, and demonstrated some real proficiency in using a drill to drive screws. Apparently David Willis was impressed.

(Note: I saw no ladies looking this impressed, but Willis assures me they were there.)

The resulting booth was so pretty we had a team of videographers come by and interview Brad Guigar. See how he drags an unwilling Kristofer Straub into the limelight? Brilliant work, Brad!

I met some really cool people, including Laurell K. Hamilton, who wrote the introduction to Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between. I had neat conversations with recent illustration graduate Kim Herbst, and got a “thank you” book from Templar Arizona’s Spike.

I was treated to lunch by my friend Allison — we did Drama Club stuff together in high school a couple of decades back — and in exchange I drew a caricature of her. And before you ask, the shirt she’s wearing is one that she made with my permission. I don’t have those for sale, but with this picture of her I bet they’d sell off the shelves.

By the way, if you’re ever at a convention with me, and want something like this done, the price-tag is around $50.00. Allison is a good friend, and bought me a VERY nice lunch. Note, however, that if you’re not this good-looking, the price may go up, or I may find myself just too busy to accept the commission.

Tom and Justin of Comics Coast-To-Coast interviewed me for a podcast. You can find the hour-long podcast here, and my segment begins at 14:55. If you like the sound of my voice as much as I appear to, you’ve got to get some of this. Rich Stevens of Diesel Sweeties sent them over to me for the “business angle” on things, and I’m afraid they got a real earful.

I didn’t do any panels, I didn’t do any shopping, and I didn’t see much of San Diego. I did, however, have a great time. And when it came time to take things apart, it went enough faster than I expected it to that I was able to leave for home a day early. For that whole day I lied to Sandra about how far from home I was, so that Monday evening I was able to walk through the door and surprise her.

As much as I love my job, and enjoy conventions, coming home is always the best part.

Back when I was neither attending, nor reporting on not attending Anime Banzai I was interviewed by Nz17 of ASO Radio.

Well, the interview is now online, proving once and for all that if I continue to deny having attended an Anime convention as a paying fan rather than an honored guest, I do so in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

I haven’t listened to the interview beyond noodling around to see where the bit with me in it begins (it begins almost exactly in the middle of that linked MP3 file). Somebody please console me with the news that I didn’t make an absolute sphincter of myself.

Speaking of news, I’m already hearing from people whose books have arrived. If you selected “Priority Mail,” you chose wisely. If you selected “Media Mail” you will likely be waiting another few days.

As always, if you have any problems at all with the shipment of your book, please let us know. We can’t hurry the postal service along any, but we will replace anything they manage to mangle.