Did I even write up my Wonder-Con this year? It was dreadful enough that I’m not going to go check. I’ll write up a short review as a reminder: SDCC crowds, expense and hassle without SDCC sales or sunshine (or just clouds) or locale. Oh, and the Anaheim Convention Center might be big, but it’s showing its age. These are easy gripes to throw, given that the show was relocated on short-ish notice. That it came together at all was miraculous.

But still, having the sight-lines blown away by gigantic pillars and booths, effectively hiding the back half of Artist’s Alley, that’s zero fun. As well as the observation that people at a big show like Wonder-Con aren’t headed to Artist’s Alley in order to buy books. They want sketches, maybe pages, that sort of thing. Trouble is, I just sell books. And on-the-spot five-minute-stories, which still aren’t catching on. Though I did move a few, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

An empty convention center.

My single favorite part of the Stumptown Comics Fest, aside from the excuse to visit Portland? There is no Artist’s Alley. There is no small press area. There’s only comics in every aisle and at just about every booth. There’s publishers selling books and there’s creators selling books or minis or pages or sketches or whatever. I realize that this sort of arrangement is impossible for a big show, and kinda antithetical to the whole convention course we’re in. The big companies dominate and the little fish sorta dart around behind their tables, hoping that people come down the aisles. Of course, it’s tough to do tiered charging for tables if you just throw everyone in the mix like that, so like I said, understandable that it doesn’t happen at bigger shows.

Stumptown does away with all that. It’s all comics. Web comics, art comics, superhero comics, weird genre-mashup comics, what have you. Nobody lined up by publisher. Everyone just out to be browsed. Kurt Busiek and Benjamin Marra in the same show, which is a weird kind of ersatz Alpha to Omega for someone out there, I’m sure.

But, as usual, I’m ahead of myself. Let’s start with going on vacation.

Dylan's inky laptop.

That’s half the reason to go to an alien city crawling with cartoonists, right? Get out of the house, away from the family and dog for a couple days. I mean, how can I miss you guys if I don’t go away? That’s a crib, by the way. Or a bite, whatever. I used to joke about going to sell at conventions as being like running away to join the circus. You get to eat bad food, stay out late, drink too much, make a spectacle of yourself, populating someone’s tumblr stream with shaky low-lit shots of you dancing on tables and making that funny face just before you toss your cookies right onto the lovingly-waxed parquet flooring.

For the record, I was in bed before 9:30 on Friday and around midnight Saturday. That’s how I roll. Can’t keep up with me, right?

Yeah, for me going to the circus is hanging out at Periscope for an afternoon and watching Steve (Lieber—the hardest-working man in showbusiness, Maximum Leader and Duke of Portland) act as comics ambassador, either by fielding phone calls or escorting visitors, all the time keeping the drawing board in the corner of his eye, realizing that he should be sitting there but is too nice a guy to just run over there and get back to work. That and listening to Colleen Coover hold court over the majesty that is Freddie Mercury.

I still don’t know how anyone gets work done there. I mean, they must. Still, with my undiagnosed Asperger’s, my brain is running in too many directions at once most of the time. I can barely keep up with one cerebellum much less a room full of them. Still, that’s a novelty for me, as I spend most days staring at a magic box while the kids are at school and the dog is lying under my desk at home. Twitter might be the water cooler for the entire world, but it’s not the same as being in the room with people, y’know?

Should I blog lunch? Is that gauche? Just let it be known that fries with debris gravy (which is taken from the ends of roast beef and then left to stew for a bit) and cheese on top is good. Really good. Dangerously good. Like I could eat an order right now good. So, thanks Bunk sandwiches/bar. You were good lunch.

Mexicoke at Bunk.

More relaxing at the studio, getting with Ben Dewey, he of the Tragedy Series on Tumblr (which I may or may not be lazy enough to link to and you should read anyways) as he’s working on a STRANGEWAYS story for the upcoming THE LAND WILL KNOW. It’ll be good, well, just because. That and he’s one of the overlooked gems of cartooning right now.

Aside from that, I figured out a story problem that’s been bugging me seemingly for more than twenty years. No, that’s a joke. Nobody would possibly look to revisit a twenty-year-old work with an eye to fixing it, right? I mean, that’s some crazy talk right there.

I mean, totally crazy.

Ride back with Paul (ONION HEADED MONSTER) Friedrich and Jeff (BUCKO/Parkerspace) Parker, drop off at hotel, try and figure out the way back to the casa de Parker and wonder how the hell anyone gets around by car in this town. It’s not enough that there’s a river right in the middle of it but there’s enough one way streets and cantilevered intersections to make even old HPL scream for the comfort and sanity of R’leyh. Yeah, I don’t get Portland roads. Luckily, I don’t have to, between the Parkermobile and the Max (creatively reimagined as the Trimetrodon by Reid Psaltis over at his table this year.) You should check out his work, and you will if you read that next STRANGEWAYS book. Yes, I hit Portland pretty hard in recruiting artists for this next book. Reid and Ben Dewey and Tony Morgan all hail from here. Well, there, since I’m writing this back at home in Folsom.

Hey, there’s that party for HENRY AND GLENN FOREVER AND EVER over at Floating World Comics that I could head over to. I could just get on the Max and head back down and hang with folks and then I couldzzzzzzzzzz… Yeah, I punked out hard on Friday. I think I started reading a little something, but my 5AM wake-up call preceded by little-to-no sleep the night before did a number on the old brainpan.

Woke early, just sat in bed and read for awhile, which is a luxury I don’t get much of at home, what with the kids and the dog and all. I have to be responsible and stuff and make sure everyone gets to school. Yeah. Being grown-up is kind of a drag sometimes. But you get to go on vacation from time to time, so that kinda makes up for it.

Down to the show in its second-year home of the Portland Convention Center, which is a decently-sized big concrete room that’s big and echo-y. I’d love to borrow it for a couple hours and put a big amplifier at one end and a microphone down at the other and take pictures of the air moving, but another time for that. And yeah, it’s not the friendliest room in the world, particularly when compared to the Lloyd Center Doubletree conference room that the show had been held at for the three or four years before 2011. But the plain fact was that the show was too big for that space and had been for a couple of years. There were still times that it felt like current room was too big for the show, but not many. And Saturday was legitimately busy, requiring con muscle memory to kick in and let me dodge between people loitering in aisles or moving like shoals of bluefin tuna as they roamed in search of that perfect whatever it was they were looking for.

Point is, as cold and unfriendly as the room itself was, physically, the show either needed to move or it needed to scale back. I may end up eating these words, but I think that the Stumptown folks made the right choice. Then again, I can remember going to the first Emerald City Comic Con that I’d attended some six years ago. And I don’t think it was in a venue that was too much bigger than the one that Stumptown was in right now. Not saying that Stumptown is destined to get that big. The shows are very different things for pretty different audiences. Still, you’ll note that comic conventions get bigger and bigger (by and large) even as the Direct Market itself only holds steady or dwindles slowly (depending on who you’re reading on any given day.)

Saturday started slowly, slowly enough that I was flashing back to Wonder-Con, not heavily enough to assume a fetal position underneath the table, but wasn’t having a good feeling about things either. I sure hope my whimpering didn’t disturb Tom (Neely, he of THE BLOT, THE WOLF and one of the mindermasts behind HENRY AND GLENN). But things picked up finally, as hipster and civilian alike began to filter into the convention center, dancing around the pods of pre-adolescent female dance teams that were occupying the other room at the convention center. Yeah, I forgot to mention them, and they were another reason why I was having flashbacks to Wonder-Con (the Anaheim Convention Center being taken over by girl’s sports teams at the same time as the comic convention in question.) Yeah, I thought it was weird too.

But Portland delivered. People came out to buy stuff to read. Sure, there were plenty who were buying things just to assert their lifestyle choices and validate them. I don’t do so much of that. Or maybe I’m just not running into enough people who dress up all old-timey and feel the need to hunt down supernatural menaces. In fact, things were probably too good. I know, there’s no such thing as “too good” but when you only have what’s in your suitcase because you forgot to drive across the river to the studio to get that box of books that you shipped up ahead of time and that stack of books is running down quicker than you thought. Yeah, that’s a good problem to have, I guess. But it’s still a problem.

And you’d think that if the same people were coming to this show over and over, that they’d have gotten their fill of my books. But the fact of the matter was that there were new people discovering the books for the first time. I wasn’t just selling THE THIRSTY (that being the new STRANGEWAYS, only having hit stores two weeks prior), but I was selling plenty of the first book (that being MURDER MOON) as well. This led me to figure that there were plenty of new attendees coming to the show, which is indeed a good sign. I mean, you can’t just recycle the same crowds over and over and expect to sustain things. Gotta bring new people in, don’t just service the ones that are already reading the funnybooks.

I know. That’s crazy talk.

Caught up with some friends, sold more books, passed out cards for the webcomic version for people who weren’t going to buy a darn thing anyways. Maybe they’d hit the digital version and decide that they wanted to drop some money on the books. Hey, it could happen.

And then I flat ran out of books to sell. Well, not quite true. I still had a few of volume one leftover, but zero copies of volume two. That whole didn’t-grab-the-box-from-the-studio thing. So I took the opportunity to walk around a bit and actually see the show, which doesn’t usually happen when I’m working a table and have no backup. Grabbed a copy of the new SHARKNIFE book and a copy of FORMING (looking forward to finding a quiet night to give that a read) and the GREEN RIVER KILLER and DEAR CREATURE books from Jonathan Case. That last one was great to finally see collected, after having read very early versions of some of that material years and years ago. The GREEN RIVER book is outstanding, by the way. Unsettling and never resorting to cheap tricks to tell the stories or make up pat villains. Real life is scarier than just about any fiction you care to come up with.

Biggest thing I bought.

Oh, and I bought a couple new comics from Benjamin Marra. This is what America’s education system needs. Exactly what it needs. That and the new HENRY AND GLENN. Hard to pick a favorite out of all the stories because they were all damn good. And outrageous. Best five bucks you’ll spend this year.

Finally got my re-up (yes, I’ve been re-watching THE WIRE, thanks for noticing) and started moving the books again. Steady business all afternoon, until about 5 or so. Really, the show doesn’t need to stay open until 6, but I’m not the guy in charge. Caught a great Thai dinner with friend Brandon Jerwa and a bunch of other folks, discussed the spiritual successors of arcade legend BERZERK (actual successor was FRENZY then to SMASH TV and TOTAL CARNAGE after that, but whoops, forgot all about ROBOTRON 2084). Then off to Ground Kontrol for a bit.

Ground Kontrol wants you to see the past.

Ground Kontrol was a very weird place for me. Granted, I’m not the usual clientele there. But to see all the old arcade machines and have people walking around with booze and food in hand just made the old arcade attendant in me cringe. Yes, I worked at an actual mall arcade, in 1988, long after the first bust and before the Nintendo Revolution had taken hold and made it so that the gap between console game and arcade game was so thin as to kill off arcade games altogether. So yeah, being transported to an alternate 1988 where arcades grew up into adult entertainment/singles/meatmarket threw me off. That and, let’s be real, most of the people there that Saturday hadn’t been old enough to go into an arcade in their American heyday. If you’re 21 in 2012, you were born in 1991. Yeah, roll those dice around and see what you come up with. Anways, happy birthday, Taki.

Bailed out when folks wanted to head over to the Stumptown after-party. There’s being in room full of loud music and people and videogames and then there’s just being in a roof full of loud music and people, and I’m more equipped for one than the other. Hopped the Max back home to unwind.

On Sunday, the show didn’t open until 12, which is probably wise, when you get down to it. Nobody’s coming in before then anwyays. And honestly, if you were at the show on Saturday for any length of time, you probably got to see whatever you wanted. Sunday was a nice addition and all, and I did a fair bit of business, but seemed somehow superfluous. Spent the early morning writing up a bunch of story ideas for something I’d thrown at Ben Marra which will never happen because the license-holders would see Ben’s work and say NO WAY NO HOW AND THERE’S THE DOOR, but maybe something will come of it. It was fun to spitball stuff up, even if it’s all pie in the sky and “wouldn’t it be cool if?”

Who knows. Maybe it can get worked out.

Spent the downtime on Sunday chatting with folks when I could, trying to nail down editors (which I better go do once I finish this), and generally being relaxed about things. Now, put this up against Sunday of Wonder-Con where I’d basically given up on sales completely and just spent the day talking with Gabriel (Hardman) and Corinna (Bechko) because foot traffic just wasn’t happening. I won’t say that Stumptown on Sunday was gangbusters, but it was worth sticking around until I got down to the last couple copies of STRANGEWAYS books. Those went to Bridge City Comics, who’ve been strong supporters of the book since it came out. And since I can’t guarantee that Diamond will be stocking it for long (if they haven’t dropped it already), I figured it’s best to get those books to places where they’ll find readers.

For those of you keeping track at home, I sold in two days at Portland, about a third (or slightly more) in raw numbers than were ordered nationwide by Diamond. And that was just for THE THIRSTY. MURDER MOON, which Diamond has made clear they will not stock, sold just as much. And people wonder why exhibitor spaces and artist’s alley spaces at comic shows sell out months in advance. Wanna know why? Because that’s the new market. And people there are ready to buy more than Big Two comics. Granted, then all the risk/cost falls on the shoulders of the small publishers instead of the retailers, but them’s the breaks.

Even had time to fill out my Eisner ballot on Sunday between customers. Someday I want to get in on the ballots before the ballots, if you know what I mean.

Portland is the only place where five-minute-stories go over, too. People are actually willing to pay for a new piece of prose created right there on the spot. Not sure why that is. Maybe it’s all the radon in the air, dunno. Whatever the cause, I’m down with it.

Michael Meyers buys a copy of STRANGEWAYS.

Bottom line? Great show. Venue could be more friendly but since when is any convention center going to make you feel all warm and fuzzy, right? They’re basically big concrete boxes that are lit poorly. Kinda grim by institutional design. Sure, it’d be great to find a big ‘ol warehouse that’s available and not made of sealed concrete, but when you hit a certain size threshold, your options get limited, specially in the Northwest where you can’t guarantee anything but wind and drizzle most of the year.

But maybe one day someone will be able to pull off a comic show in a redwood grove or something. Maybe take over a big chunk of a swap meet. A comics swap meet. Now there’s something I could get behind. Someone get on that.

Don’t know how often I’ll do this, but I’m pulling a couple things out of the sketchbook that I’ve been carrying around for near on the last ten years. This one’s by Darwyn Cooke. You might recognize him from THE NEW FRONTIER. It’s John Henry, one of the few characters created new in the book, and that’s why I chose this character when Darwyn asked “Who d’you want me to draw?” as I stood, last place in the sketch line that day.

Hey, lookit that. You can see Fabio Moon’s sketch on the next page too. Next time I should do this with a slipsheet in-between.

Unlike my fiction itself.

/rimshot

Click here to get an overview of some of the sci-fi/horror/fantasy I’ve published recently.

I’m sorry if this doesn’t feed your ego or make you a unique snowflake. It will not guarantee you riches or fame or even the slightest recognition of your skills. If you want those, there are far better means to those ends and I suggest you undertake them. There is no other solution, no other path. All additional considerations/conditions are secondary, whether you have to have absolute stillness or need the silent admiration of the other writers at the local Starbucks or can write even in the din and clangor of your children’s playtime.

It does not matter what you write. It only matters that you write.

I do this somewhat lightly, mostly because my books haven’t sold particularly well and hey, it couldn’t hurt, right? Frankly, I’m not eager to participate in the race to the bottom pricing model that is being embraced by a lot of people right now, including large publishers who are dabbling in the Kindle marketplace. However, I’d rather have readers than piles of money.

You can stop laughing now.

I’ll note that at this rate, Amazon makes much, much more money on these sales than I do. Is that fair? Not particularly. Is that the way it is? Yes. Mostly because if they didn’t, they’d be DELUGED with people selling cheap books (hint, they already are) and this is supposed to serve as a deterrent from spamming titles out there. But it’s still a better royalty rate than you’d be getting in print. Of course in print you’re supposed to get an advance.

Yeah, funny.

Gonna take a little while to propagate the change through the system, I’m sure. Don’t all hurry over there.

Here’s the link to my Amazon page, in case you’re inclined to head on over there.

Thanks for your kind attention.

Okay, now that we’ve finished splitting hairs, let’s talk about it a bit. The store in question was called Little Billy’s (and it might have had “Funny Books” or “Comics” in that title as well, but we’re talking 1982 so it’s amazing that I can remember even this much. It was in El Toro, which at the time was about a twenty minute car ride (or couple hours on bike; a trip that I made more than once with the help of my trusty Schwinn 10-speed) from my native Laguna Niguel, CA.

It was a small store in a strip-mall, the kind that was nigh-ubiquitous in southern California at the time, on, I want to say Muirlands drive (off of El Toro Road, at any rate), almost into Mission Viejo. You’d walk in and there was a low counter, which as I recall was *not* a display case for all manner of hidden treasures and valuable first appearances, but a place from which the titular Little Billy could hold court. And make no mistake, Little Billy made the rules. You wanted your funny books, you talked to him and did things his way.

And his way was to take the comics that came out that week and put them up on the wall, in a series of plastic bags. They were very neatly arranged, impervious and unreachable. Don’t even think of asking to take one out of its protective mylar armor. These were valuable collector’s items (even though you could go to the 7-11 next door and get…some of them). This was in the days before the One Distributor To In The Darkness Bind Them, where your local convenience store might get DEFENDERS this month and then again, it might not.

So yes, you couldn’t browse. You knew what you wanted or you didn’t stay around long. You ordered what you wanted based on the cover and you paid and then moved along. Mostly. There was the time that Little Billy suggested that I might want to look into CREEPSHOW, since this guy Berni Wrightson had done the art. But I wasn’t into that at the time. Gimme my X-MEN and my DAREDEVIL and the occasional offering from Epic or weirdo DC thing that looked good (BLUE DEVIL was a favorite and remains one of the few DC properties that I’d cross the street and put out a burning building in order to write).

Frankly, it’s a miracle that I kept reading comics. But back then, that wasn’t your only option. And I was pretty singleminded. I’d found something that I genuinely enjoyed and like a great white shark biting into a seal-laden chain, I wasn’t going anywhere for a good long time. But I will say that this. My experience there was about as unfriendly as I got in a DM-oriented store ever. It was Billy’s clubhouse and if you weren’t in the club, well, you were tolerated so long as your cash wasn’t too sweaty. Was he a comic nazi? Well, if he hated the books that you bought, he was polite enough to at least submerge his disgust, something that’s a bit of a lost art.

But clubhouse it was. Spare interior, white walls, with only a handful of promotional posters up on the walls, if any, second-hand bookshelves taken from what seemed like his mom’s basement to hold the actual book books, of which he had a couple. Pretty sure I saw the SMITHSONIAN BOOK OF COMICS there and maybe a couple others. CREEPSHOW, of course, which was something of an oddity as it was a perfect-bound book in an age when such things were unusual by their very nature.

Still, I put up with the faint and curling sneer of his moustache-darkened lip as he passed the comics over the counter. He knew I’d be back next week, assuming I’d collected enough allowance and had braved the suburban asphalt where auto speeds topped sixty miles per (I know, since I screamed around the curves at that speed more than once). He knew I’d be back for that next issue of THE FANTASTIC FOUR, even if I could tell that John Byrne wasn’t hitting it with the same heart that he once had.

I’d be back.

By no means an exhaustive list, but some things that I (and others) have observed. If you want attribution, I’ll re-attribute, but for now, I’ll take the heat.

Needless to say, the inclusion of one or any of these doesn’t necessarily make for a bad book, but it certainly doesn’t count in their favor.

–

THE UNIVERSAL BALANCE
For something with a limited perspective such as a human to whimper and worry about the universal balance is pretty darn funny.

PROPHECIES
‘Nuff said.

WIZARDS THROWING FIREBALLS WITH POINTY HATS
Yeesh.

ORCS
Yeah, I said it. Orcs.

ENDLESS LINEAGES AND HISTORIES
Dude, it’s a story, an adventure story. Just hit the ADVENTURE button and go.

THE CHOSEN ONE
There is no chosen one to save the world, unless they’re the one that’s decided to end it.
Corollary: The hero is really the son (typically) of a god/wizard/king in hiding and All Is Revealed over the course of the book.

NO SENSE OF REALITY
Yeah, crazy stuff happens in fantasies. But the streets still have to be swept, the king still has to collect taxes and people will still act badly and in their own interest. Granted, things can go too far in that direction and it becomes a litany of Life In Medieval Times.

BAD LANGUAGE
Verily, forsooth and all those other RP (that’s Role-Playing) shorthands. People can talk distinctively, but not in bad pseudo Shakespeare. Unless they’re Thor as dialogued by Stan Lee.

ONLY WHITES ALLOWED
Like it says. Humans come in all different skintones. And cultures.

THE ONE SWORD THAT WILL WIN THE GAME
Yeah, that one.

THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN FEUDALISM
Techno-anarchist dwarves.

ELVES
Just elves.

TRANSCRIPTS OF DND GAMES
Amusing over Twitter. Not in longform.

REMAKING LORD OF THE RINGS
It’s a good book, but it’s good for its prose as much (or more) than its story. Point is often missed.

DIRECT POLITICAL ANALOGY/ALLEGORY
I can read blogs if I want to hear how Political Scandal of the Day is Bad for Everyone.

THEY’RE NOT DWARVES BUT THEY’RE DWARVES
Often the same case for Orcs and Elves.

It’s still early into winter, but soon the season will open up, offering the promise of legions of thronging fans, steam-warmed hot dogs and room-temperature sodas. I’m not talking baseball. I’m talking convention season. The seeds planted last year in hastily dashed-off web forms or emails are now beginning to yield their abundant supply of alternate comics markets and hungry would-be-readers.

Kinda. Turned down by TCAF, which is kinda okay. As much as I’d like to go to Toronto and see the show and all my Canadian friends, it’s a very expensive proposition. I suspect that my material wasn’t up to their artistic standards. Unsurprising. I’m not really into this to make art, but to instead tell stories and entertain people. Or it could be that they were just slammed with potential exhibitors who are very eager to participate in comics markets that are not the Direct Market. So that opens up a hole in early May and loosens up the travel budget (or rather, un-tightens it since the money wasn’t actually spent.)

Looks like the first show I’ll be doing this year will be the transplanted-to-Anaheim Wonder-Con in mid-March. Oh, and if you’re interested, I don’t see Wonder-Con doing anything but staying in SoCal. Not that I’m particularly happy with that. I’m not. I dislike the venue and dislike the appalling lack of choice of things to do in the immediate vicinity of the convention center once the show closes. People who are used to having San Francisco at their fingertips after the doors close are going to be disappointed or taking a car to anywhere that isn’t Downtown Disney.

But honestly, you don’t move a show some four hundred miles just for a year or three. And SDCC, I’m sure, would love to have another show. SDCC itself can’t service the demand and hasn’t been able to for a couple years. This is not to say that the organization does a poor job. They don’t. It’s a task beyond imagining. The fact that the show is as big as it is and hasn’t imploded over the years of explosive growth (1998-2004 by my reckoning) is impressive. My suspicion is that Wonder-Con will stay in Anaheim and maybe someone will open up a SF-based show again, and maybe it’ll even be the SDCC organization. But not for awhile.

So it’ll be interesting, Wonder-Con in Anaheim. Hopefully this will put to rest the annual flurry of “SDCC really has to move” rumors. Probably not, though. At least I’ll be able to do the show fairly cheap by staying with friends. Worst part will be getting around in Orange County while I’m there. That can get expensive. Wonder what the crowds will look like? Or the physical setup. Remember, I’ve had the best show of my life at a Wonder-Con and the worst show of my life (in terms of outlay versus return) at Wonder-Con the following year. It’s all about the location.

After that is ECCC, though I signed up an hour after they had to switch over to a waiting list. I’d say it might be 50-50. ECCC has become a big stop on the west coast part of the circuit. Might get lucky, but that’s not something you want to depend on. So if anyone reading has an alley space at ECCC, I’m more than happy to cough up half the cost to sub-let some space from you. Hit me on the Twitter @highway_62

Tough choice between Monsterpalooza and C2E2 on the same weekends in March. One is a relatively cheap show (that being Monsterpalooza in LA) and the other expensive, but I’ve only had okay shows at Monsterpalooza and C2E2 is totally unknown, though should be on the order of ECCC if not bigger. Better nail that down, if the world hasn’t done it for me already.

Then Stumptown, where I’ll be showing for the first time since 2010 (and about the time THE THIRSTY should be out in stores). I always like this show, like to hang with friends, like to see the Periscope crew, grab a schnitzelwich and visit Floating World and Cosmic Monkey. Usually my most eagerly-anticipated show of the year. And since I’m confirmed with Stumptown, I’ll actually, y’know, plan for it. Should get a chance to see a lot of the artists who are working on THE LAND WILL KNOW as well. Good times.

Don’t ask me about Heroes. I think I’m going to be in Alaska right before it and don’t think I can hack the back to back trips. Dunno. I might do something stupid.

I’d love to say I’m exhibiting at SDCC. I doubt it. I’ll register as a pro and might even go this year. Didn’t last year and didn’t really miss it too much.

Oh, and there’s a lovely conflict for the second weekend of October. APE which is a super cheap and decent show or NYCC which is incredibly spendy and an unknown in terms of return/sales. They’re both on the same weekend. Bleh.

I’m missing a few there. Phoenix, may go. Baltimore, may go. SPX is apparently filled up already, or else I just mis-heard. Somehow I get the feeling that I’d run into the whole “not artcomix” thing and get passed over. Baltimore is far more likely (and doing both would basically require a week-long stay back east.)

Bring on the airport food and perpetual fatigue…

Red. Her irises were the color of Chilean strawberries, face tinted ruby by sanguine neon light. Satori Optical’s byzantine logo hung in the wet sky meters above her body, humming. Call wanted to be sick as he looked at her body, lying face down on the alley, arms turned painfully away. She was the second in the last three days.

- From “The Sunyata Routine (Another Name for Heaven)”

BLINK AND OTHER STORIES is the second short fiction collection from Matt Maxwell (me, not that I like to talk about myself in the third person), available exclusively on the Kindle format for the next 90 days and then perhaps to a wider release after that. Honestly, I’ve only ever sold anything on the Kindle. I’ve sold exactly one copy of one other book from Smashwords, so I’m not fussed by exclusivity. Besides, you can run the Kindle app on anything form a smartphone to an iPad to a desktop machine. Not particularly limiting.

Here’s the url to hit: http://tinyurl.com/blinkkindle

I’ll be archiving excerpts from the three stories printed within: Blink, Third Sight and The Sunyata Routine (Another Name for Heaven). “Third Sight” was yesterday’s. Today’s excerpt is from “The Sunyata Routine,” where a cop tracks an inhuman killer through the (of course) rainy streets of a future Seattle.

THE SUNYATA ROUTINE
(ANOTHER NAME FOR HEAVEN)

Red. Her irises were the color of Chilean strawberries, face tinted ruby by sanguine neon light. Satori Optical’s byzantine logo hung in the wet sky meters above her body, humming. Call wanted to be sick as he looked at her body, lying face down on the alley, arms turned painfully away. She was the second in the last three days.

Black. The sign snapped off. Her eyes were empty black matched by the wet slick of the asphalt beneath her face, looking nowhere. Call tired to break her gaze, but found himself unable to, something familiar there that kept calling him. The pavement beneath her face was dark and glossy, like she had been crying before it happened. With insect precision, the swing arm of the recorder swept back and forth over the body, committing the scene to impervious digital memory.

Red. “Anybody know her?” Call asked, voice dry. He shook some sugared lozenges free from a metal case and put one in his mouth, filling it with a sudden warmth like liquor.

“Yeah,” said Marks. “Mary Li. Partygirl, free agent.”

Free? Call asked himself, skeptical. She didn’t have any identification or money or drugs. Nothing. She was a streetwalker, an anachronism. There were three houses within walking distance of Pike’s Place, all legal and clean. In addition to those were a few other unlicensed houses, every one accessible and looking for good talent. But a few women still worked the streets, God only knows why.

“Some girls still do that. They stick together down here,” Marks said. “You should have seen her friends, all that eyeliner and mascara bleeding down their cheeks. They cried on Ash’s shoulder all the way down to the station.”

“Was she seeing any regulars?”

“No, none of her johns ran the rough trade or crossed the street. Mary was a clean girl, her friends said.”

“Sure she was. Why else would she wait corners?”

Black. The recorder noiselessly pulled back to a ready position, apparently sated.

“Turn her over?” asked Marks.

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”  Call already had his rubbers on, not wanting to, but knowing it was necessary. The vultures would be here soon. He should take a look before they swaddled the corpse in their hydrocarbon sheets and hustled it away. Vultures weren’t paid enough to notice little things. He involuntarily held his breath as he turned her over, reaching beneath her armpits.

The recorder resumed its slow scans, centimeters over the body. From behind it hadn’t looked so bad; it might have been just another random death. The other side told a different story. Call read the cuts like a signature. It wasn’t  a slice-take. They were fanatically precise and always knew exactly what they were looking for, besides, they’d make sure that their leftovers were never found. These cuts were definite, but random and probing, as if whoever was cutting wasn’t exactly sure what they were looking for.

“Jesus on a stick,” Marks said, looking away from the body. “Real artist who did this one.”

“Number five,” Call breathed to himself. “Who else knows about her?”

“Nobody much. Not yet. Come morning, it will be on all the channels. They like to see red.”

She had been cut from end to end, tight skin split and peeled back. The Stripper had done this four times before, victims apparently picked at random: two men, three women, none having any relation to the other. The only thing that linked them was someone’s razor. The first one they found was flayed nearly to the bone over most of the body. Somebody had called them ‘strippings’ and the name stuck.

“He got his hands real dirty this time,” Marks said absently as he kneeled down again and looked at her left hand. The intact nails all had porosil insets, each showing an animated abstract, colors and shapes flowing into one another in miniature. Some of the nails were smudged and chipped, fingertips bloodied in defense.

“So did she.”  Call’s pulse quickened. A break. The first one to come their way. The four strippings before Mary were seamless, airtight. There had been no physical evidence other than the incisions themselves, inflicted with a frozen titanium alloy blade, ultraclean surgical quality. No blood, semen or other fluids, skin, hair, nothing. It was as if the Stripper was just the scalpel alone, without a human presence to animate it.

But this might just prove different. If this was physical evidence, then they were halfway to finding the Stripper. Call watched as the vultures stalked in and began cocooning Mary Li’s body, lifting it from the slick of blood in the alley and swaddling it in aqua-green sheeting.

The recorder made one final sweep, centimeters over the asphalt, scene passing through its silicon eye. Call left just as all the grinners were coming on, igniting their white-hot lights and preparing to look caring and concerned for the home audience. Desperation and hope battled within Call again. He’d been suspended between those two poles ever since this assignment had been handed to him. That was four bodies ago.

Call couldn’t get Li’s eyes from his head. He had looked at them too long, until the ghostly afterimage had fused to his retina. He tried to sleep, but found himself unable to catch more than a few hours rest before giving up. Sitting down with all the files on the case, he drank from pot of Mexican coffee and smoked tobacco fresh from Confederation fields in Kentucky.

After a few moments, he realized that they were not Li’s eyes haunting him, but Carol’s. His wife of five years who, six months ago, was not home when Call got back from work. Neither were her clothes or things. It was as if she never had been. Mary Li and Carol might have been sisters, they were so close in looks. Call looked at the body and knew that it wasn’t Carol, but he kept seeing her dead in the alley, stripped bare.

–

“It’s a sure thing that He did it,” said Shapiro. They were standing in the chilly morgue, looking down on the body as it lay there on the stainless grey slab. “Same clean blade. Same patterns of incision, but this time focusing on thoracic and the cardiac regions. Getting to the heart of the matter,” she murmured humorlessly.

Shapiro was a short, round woman who always wore a dark red sash with fringe that tickled the noses of the cadavers she looked over. She had coarse features, dark eyes and an insistent, nasal accent that grated Call’s nerves.

“Look at this, though,” she said. She leaned in and grabbed Li’s left hand with her pudgy fingers. The insets were all turned off, now dull gray. Li’s fingers were stained an unmistakable dirty maroon underneath the edges of her nails. “No, the third finger, Call.”

He looked closely at the spot that Shaprio was pointing out. There was a ragged tear in the skin of Li’s ring finger. It wasn’t much at this scale.

“Injury sustained during the attack?” Call asked. “You have a blowup of that?”

Shapiro nodded as she brought a flatscreen over from another table. She flipped through a few possible views then decided on one before handing it to Call. Onscreen, the tiny wound seemed huge and deep, a canyon of flesh. “The cut was caused by her hand slipping over something during the attack.”

Call looked away from the monitor. “Do we know what?”

She reached back to another table and handed something to Call. “Uh-huh,” Shapiro chirped. “This.”  Inside a plastic sleeve was a tiny piece of something digital. The item couldn’t have been more than a half centimeter square, if that big at all.

“Silicon?” Call asked.

“Take a look here,” Shapiro said as she pointed to the screen and pressed a button. The finger wound was replaced by an extreme magnification shot of the chip. It was really a fragment of a larger unit, one of its perimeters sheared raggedly.

“Taash induction feed,” Shapiro commented. “Cadillac tech. Top of the line.

“Induction feed?  What the hell for?  Li wasn’t wired.”

Shapiro shook her head in the negative. “Not where that thing was jammed. Not at all.”  She circled around the room, chewing on the end of a stylus in puzzlement.

“So she got it off him…Why would he have an induction jack on him?” Call wondered aloud. “Maybe it wasn’t his in the first place. Could she have picked it up somewhere beforehand?”  This was beginning to look like a spurious clue, eating away at any hope of breaking the case through this avenue.

“Sure. Anything’s possible, Call.”

He was ready to leave, wanting to get out of the room with the dead girl. She was watching him, even through the sheet that was covering most of her. Even though her eyes were closed, Call saw black ringed with a fringe of red iris in his mind. “What about the blood?  Anything there?”

“Oh, you’ll like this,” she said with a   Not only was there blood, but the tiniest smidge of tissue attached to it. And it isn’t Li’s skin, either. I’m running a trace through LIsP on the sample to see if we can get an ID.”

“If he’s logged in their databases,” breathed Call with resignation. About eighty percent of the population had been tagged at birth and cataloged by the League IntelligenceS Program as standard procedure. Most if not all law-abiding and normal citizens dutifully entered themselves and their children on the rolls. Of course, Call wasn’t expecting anything, since he rarely ever dealt with the law-abiding or normal. “How long on their search, Shap?”

“Shouldn’t be long now. And if they got a name, then we got this bastard.”

“No. All we’ll have is his name, Shap. Just his name.”  Call walked listlessly out of the morgue and up the stairs to the commissary. He ordered a bowl of noodles and shrimp and more coffee, which he consumed halfheartedly. He stopped eating for a few moments, trying to gather all the energy that he had somehow lost in the last few months. Marks sat down in the cubicle, across the plastic laminate table from Call.

It took Call a moment to respond to Marks’ greetings.

“Hellooo….Earth to Jimmy Call. Earth to Jimmy, come in, please.”  Marks smiled when Call finally snapped out of it and focused on his face. “You were really zoning out on me, there.”

“Sorry. Just thinking.”  Call took up his chopsticks and began to pick at the salty noodles and broth.

“You get yourself into trouble doing that.”

“Thinking about Carol.”  Call looked intently into his soup, almost ashamed.

Marks tried to look sympathetic, but failed to cover up the disgust in his voice. “Look, Jim. People get divorced all the time. Sure, it bites, but you have to realize that it just doesn’t work out sometimes.

“I know that. I know. Just that I wonder if there was anything else I could have done. Something I could have said.”  Call smiled idiotically.

“You would have to be someone else. Someone that you weren’t.”  Marks stabbed his plastic fork into a whitish slab of fish. “What’s eating you, Call?  All this happened months ago. You’ve been separated half a year for Christ’s sake.”  Marks sliced at the food on his plate angrily.

“Didn’t you look at that girl’s face last night?  Look real close?”

“I guess I must have missed something that you saw. Care to tell me?” Marks said around a forkful of meat.

“Mary Li and Carol, they looked alike, like sisters. Didn’t you pick that up?  I thought you did, and just didn’t want to say anything.”  Call got up and stood, ready to leave. “I gotta go. In a few, okay?”

Marks just nodded silently, feeling stupid for not seeing the obvious. The anger he had just a few moments ago seemed insubstantial now, like a shadow.

When he got up to his desk, Call found a few sheets of hardcopy in a plastiback folder sitting atop the spotless blotter. Scrawled on the presstone back of the folder was a note from records divsion. RE: SDP, Case 577292-43. The strippings. Call absently wiped the folder’s casing, blanking the surface. He sat down heavily and opened the folder.

Pawn, Jasper 32 years of age cyberneticist working with Wisdom systems Seattle, WA, no previous arrests, served in Land Forces with R&D, average physical attributes, address in the Towers, an upscale building with a view. Pawn was reduced to numbers on a record, abstracted. All he would ever be was right there in black and white.

The Stripper? thought Call. Not likely. He’s not even the type to consort with walkers. If at all, he goes to very clean houses and probably has unimaginative sex with white girls. But for some reason, his blood was all over Mary Li’s fingers. Or at least, LIsP thought so.

Click here to get the rest of the story, and two more, for half the price of your lunch.

“I think it will make a number of things clear,” Hensley said, a schoolboy’s insistence. “Maybe it can offer closure to some of those….families.”

And that was a rope that had hung more than one investigator. But there was a reason that the bait often worked.

BLINK AND OTHER STORIES is the second short fiction collection from Matt Maxwell (me, not that I like to talk about myself in the third person), available exclusively on the Kindle format for the next 90 days and then perhaps to a wider release after that. Honestly, I’ve only ever sold anything on the Kindle. I’ve sold exactly one copy of one other book from Smashwords, so I’m not fussed by exclusivity. Besides, you can run the Kindle app on anything form a smartphone to an iPad to a desktop machine. Not particularly limiting.

Here’s the url to hit: http://tinyurl.com/blinkkindle

I’ll be archiving excerpts from the three stories printed within: Blink, Third Sight and The Sunyata Routine (Another Name for Heaven). “Blink” was yesterday’s. Today’s excerpt is from “Third Sight,” where an FBI agent on the track of a serial killer finds something else entirely. Free fiction (but not the whole story) after the jump.

THIRD SIGHT

Dracula had been getting careless. Early in his career, Brian Cole might have welcomed such a development. Tracking lone wolf killers, there were nights that as he hunched over the monitor or sat in a dusty property room or sterile lab, there were nights that he would have given his left eye for a single clue to open things up. Something. A laundry ticket or a dormant stolen cell phone being fired up for one last gloating call to the authorities.

Early in his career, he thought that the killers growing bolder was a good sign, one that they’d screw up soon and they’d be behind bars or better yet, dead with a bullet between their eyes. It was difficult to work up sympathy for a psychopath, no matter how polite they were or how often they went to church. When a man (or woman, he reminded himself, remembering Two-Finger-Sally from Kansas City) spent his time tying up people and killing them by inches, it became a lot harder to focus on their kindnesses. Eventually the gravity of their crimes becomes a force unto itself, consuming any other qualities they might have pretended to, annihilating them as surely as rolling downhill or falling down a well.

But now he knew better. He understood that the carelessness and recklessness that he saw in late-stage killers wasn’t a prelude to capture, but was much more often a recognition that without luck, they would never be caught. Dracula would probably never be caught. He’d moved around too much, gone quiet too many times, outlasted supervisors and even presidential administrations. Didn’t really matter. Once the strings got long enough, the cases became not only a priority, but an urgent one. At least until enough resources were blown and you either drank yourself to death or ate a bullet in despair

Getting reckless worked both ways, Cole knew that. He’d seen his mentor transform from dogged pursuer patient like a wall of rock, to being worn down by a constant stream of bad news and fresh bodies. Eventually even the tallest wall crumbles to rubble. Dracula had driven him to a quiet death by garden hose to tailpipe.

And that was how Dracula had fallen into Cole’s lap. Not that he was a real Dracula. There wasn’t any such thing, no matter how many knuckleheads in California got prosthetic teeth and pancake makeup and eyeliner tattooed into their faces. Sure, there were people who played at it, mostly for kicks, mostly after having read about it on VampireHow dot com. They were all dilettantes, and the real bodies that had come out of all the vampires in LA County wouldn’t even get a rise out of the freshest newbie.

No, this Dracula was something else entirely. In an era where the only cases that got a lot of attention came from homegrown terrorists taking on Arabic names or cartel violence that had spread too far north, the Dracula case got whatever it wanted, so long as one man could do it. It was the Bureau’s way of preventing mission creep. Because, in his heart of hearts, when he was awake and smoking at three A.M. and couldn’t do anything but obsess on the case, Cole knew that he could have twenty men under him and never catch Dracula. The string of expertly-opened throats (two incisions: one to the right of the trachea, alongside the jugular and one perpendicular to that, always at least six inches in length but never more than eight) would not stop. They might go quiet for months at a stretch.

But they would not stop.

This carelessness, however, was a new thing. Dracula had left a fingerprint, or more accurately a thumbprint, on his latest victim. Darlene Anson had been a waitress at the Sunrise Diner in Tiburón, California ever since she had left high school. She was unremarkable in nearly every way, other than having retained some of her youthful good looks, even in the dusty traces of the San Joaquin Valley, where twenty looked like thirty and forty looked like sixty. The coroner had pointed out the very small nick on her jugular where Dracula had screwed things up. It wasn’t a big cut at all, but it was enough to spray a lot of blood and leave things very messy. Dracula was pretty clean as bloodletters went. Not crazy clean, but tidy.

This was not. The inside of Darlene Anson’s apartment looked like someone had started to paint it but lost interest after a half and hour or so. And in all that sticky, he had left a thumbprint and the traces of three fingers where he had paused to steady himself. Probably after the shock of the botched incisions.

Cole held out the smallest of hopes, almost lost in the swarming bleakness of his day-to-day searches, that Dracula was among the rarest of lone wolves: those who actually wanted to be caught. It was too much to ask for. Still, Cole was desperate enough to ask for it.

—

Tiburón lay at the middle north part of the San Joaquin Valley like a coyote that had crawled to the side of the road to die. The trailer park broiled in the midday sun and Cole had cooked right along with it. He sat in the silver Impala and watched the dirty and beaten Airstream trailer through the binoculars. It was hot enough and he was far enough away that it was almost useless, heat ripples distorting the view so that the thing looked like a lump of boiling mercury. The trailer in question belonged to Steven Hensely, alias Steven Parker, alias Parker Stevens, alias Henry Stefanovitch.

Hensley was the name that belonged to the thumbprint that had been left at the Anson apartment. Looking at that, Cole was ready to throw that lead away. Hiding in plain sight only worked in the movies, and there was a reason that so many lone wolves were drifters. It’s much harder to hide a crime like this than you’d think, unless you keep moving. And Tiburón was a place tailor made for that. The whole place had been made out of rolling stones that had simply lost momentum or given up and were left to eke out a life in agriculture or what little service work there was here.

Hensley had listed himself as a museum worker on his most recent arrest, that for being at the Frazier Park rest area for a day or two too long with his silver Airstream and beat to hell F-150 that was so old it was a miracle it even had seatbelts. The CHP made a basic search but didn’t turn up anything. Caught and released, probably hoping that he’d just wander east past Tehachapi and into the desert to be someone else’s problem. That was two weeks before the nicked jugular and the fingerprint.

That was careless was what it was.

The F-150 was nowhere to be seen, but the trailer was moored there pretty permanently, at least as rolling stones went. The sun gleamed off of it and Cole knew he was going to have to be going in. The warrant was good, though he’d had to get the judge to look up from his Lords of Warcraft game to get it signed. When Cole had told him who it was for, the judge had laughed and asked where Cole’s wooden leg was. To his credit, Cole didn’t tell him where he’d happily put that wooden leg.

The deputies drove up and Cole pointed out the trailer and told them who they were going after. The deputies didn’t find it funny at all. They went back to their cars and Cole followed them as they drove to the caretaker’s office to explain that a serial killer had taken up residence there. The caretaker, shrugged his shoulders, which seemed as if they’d fused to his neck and shook his flabby frame and made a noise like he knew it all along. Even though Hensley had rented this slot on-again, off-again for the better part of ten years.

Then they parked on the blind side of the Airstream and waited. Cole went in alone. They were supposed to call whenever Hensley or whoever he was today showed up.

This was the worst part of the job. Actually going into the den of a killer. Many of them only had temporary residences, transient homes that never had a chance to soak up their essence, their vibrations, their damage. But there were a few like Hensley who either worked an area for years or brought their work with them wherever they went. There were very few places that an field agent felt not only unwelcome but actively in danger. Maybe prisons were the worst, where the prisoners had nothing but time and rage to sublimate into the walls like the smell of sweat and urine.

But dens were something else entirely. Maybe bear hunters knew this feeling, coming across a marked cave. Maybe. Probably not like this, though. The den was where the killer could really be themselves, let slip the mask of sanity that they had to wear to get by, to get past toll takers and waitresses and gas station attendants, the minimal societal transactions that come to normal people like breathing, but for some are just too much to bear

The place smelled like bleach or ammonia and was stiflingly hot in the afternoon. Cole choked on the fumes and stood in the doorway to let them filter out. He wondered about the make on the prints. This wasn’t the den of a serial killer; it was the home of a mobile accountant. Everything was laid out neatly, as much as he could see from the sunlight streaming in through the west side windows. There was no dust, no grime. And the bleach smell led him to think that there wouldn’t be any blood traces here and maybe the CHP had let Hensley go not because they were incompetent, but because there wasn’t anything to find.

Though there was that oddly-placed table. Right in the middle of the floor. Cole’s feet rapped lightly on the linoleum, but went dead when he hit the carpet that the table sat on. More than that, the floor gave a little under his feet. He slid the low table from the carpet then pulled a corner back. There was a sheet of plywood there, bowed from years of laying across the unsupported shaft. The false floor covered a hole big enough to bury a family of five in. Cole almost fell into it when he got the call that the truck was coming up the road.

To purchase “Third Sight” and two other stories for the price of less than a cappuccino, click right here: http://tinyurl.com/blinkkindle.