Season of a Thousand Nice Moments

November 19th, 2022

For the last time this season, I get to thank the best community in the universe for being the best.

Out of all the exchanges I had today, a unique one stays with me.

A woman in her seventies walked by my table. I asked her if she read. She glanced quickly over my books and told me she didn’t think she’d like any of mine.

I lightly criticized her for judging my books by their covers.

So she stopped, and we talked about my work. I got to my non-fiction book, and I told her that I write about my life.

She asked:

“Well… do you have anything to say?”

I laughed, looked at the stories I’ve created over the past ten years, and said:

“I hope so.”

I mentioned sobriety, and she told me she was three-and-a-half months sober herself, at seventy-something years old.

We had a nice moment.

It was a nice moment in a season of a thousand nice moments.

Thank you once again. For being supportive, for showing up, for being my friend.

All my love.

To fill or burst, to break or bury, or wear as jewelry

November 18th, 2022

I’m reading a book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde and have a longer essay forthcoming, but I wanted to write a little on it before my last table gig of the year, tomorrow morning at Valley Creek Mall in Woodbury.

The Gift is about (spoiler alert, I am so sorry) gifts.

Gift-giving creates deep relationships; it forms and strengthens bonds, and maintains communities. Commerce does the opposite; it allows two parties to remain free of anything but the desired transaction. (It’s why capitalism breeds loneliness.)

Gift-giving is common in the artistic community. At cons and shows, people are constantly gifting and trading their work, and you see all these relationships grow before your eyes. It’s beautiful stuff, and it’s a practice I both strongly believe in and occasionally do a bad job, in regards to participating. Not always on purpose, and sometimes out of capitalistic necessity.

Being an artist who tries to sell their gifts puts you in a strange position.

I want people to think I have a gift, and to compensate me for it. Conversely, I wish I could freely give away everything I create and also have a career doing what I love to do.

I am not a great businessperson. My motto behind the table (and I know you’ve heard it if you’ve met me at a con) is that I am not here to sell you anything; I’m just here to talk. Because of that, I am regularly informed that I am almost always talking to someone at my table.

I also encourage people to barter with me. (I actually tell people to do so on my sign.) I don’t twist arms. I don’t beg, plead, or demand. I plant seeds.

And it’s because I want people to choose me. If someone has to spend money on my gift, I want it to feel like a gift as much as a transaction. I want my work to keep moving, to be shared, and to hopefully inspire, because that’s what gifts do.

“It is when someone’s gifts stir us that we are brought close, and what moves us, beyond the gift itself, is the promise (or the fact) of transformation, friendship, and love.”

I don’t know how to solve for art and commerce. (I’m also not quite done with the book so maybe the answer is at the end of it?)

But I do know what feels right for me, and I know that I have to remember that I am part of a community: a vibrant, inclusive, passionate pack of nerds.

I hope I see you tomorrow. All you need to bring is yourself.

Gratitude For Fall Tour ’22

November 15th, 2022

Encore? ENCORE!!

First, I want to thank everyone who came to any (or all!) of the dates on my Fall Tour 2022. I was able to do a full week’s worth of appearances this season, and I met (or reunited with) hundreds of you delightful people.

Every event was a success in so many ways, and that’s because you showed up and have been so supportive. Whether you just discovered my work or fully engaged with me in it, I have nothing but the best feelings from our time together.

That being said: should we do one more?

The Comic Exchange has one more show this weekend, and things fell into place just right for me to be there. You can get some early holiday shopping done, and I even have a few of the Winter 2022 prints left if you ask nice!

Thanks again to everyone who made it out!

FALL TOUR 2022

The Comic Show 09.17
NerdinOut Con 10.07 – 10.08 – 10.09
108 Alchemy 11.05
Twin Cities Con 11.11 – 11.12 – 11.13
The Comic Show 11.19

And more info on this weekend:

The Comic Show
9 am to 3 pm
Valley Creek Mall
Woodbury, MN
Free!

Kevin Conroy, Batman

November 14th, 2022

Kevin Conroy passed away on November 10th, 2022. For many people, he was known as the voice of Batman.

For some of us, he simply was Batman.

It’s odd, because last month I started a series of essays about Halloween costumes I’d worn as a kid, and what those characters meant to me; I had started a piece about Batman, but I couldn’t finish it.

One of my most vivid memories of childhood is from September 5th, 1992. I was 7 years old and still living in our first house, on the west side of Minneapolis. I had taken every pillow in that house and laid them around the floor in the TV room to watch the much-advertised first episode of Batman: The Animated Series, leaping from pillow to pillow, emulating my hero.

I’ve written about this before, but Batman (and Spider-Man) taught me a major life lesson at that young age.

As a kid (and I think this is normal), I wanted every bad guy to die.

I could not understand why the Joker (or Green Goblin) were allowed to live.

But those heroes continued to believe in the power of being human; they were committed to the idea that every life is precious, and that ideology extended to their enemies.

Whether or not their foes actually wanted to change, they all deserved the opportunity to.

That lesson stays with me to this day.

And it is not a lesson I see shared among many fellow adults now, which is apparent if you’ve ever visited the internet.

Conroy isn’t just the voice of Batman; he’s the voice of reason and compassion in my head. As a man, he embodied all of the heroic attributes of his alter ego, a life that he beautifully shared in a DC comics story recently.

I found out the morning of opening day at the convention about his passing. It reminded me of the convention where I encountered him in real life, regularly walking down his aisle, just to hear my hero talk, the hero I never found the time, or courage, to speak to.

People die. They do. (I write about it a lot.)

But parts of them live on as long as we do, as long as we remember and live by them.

Good night, Batman.

Twin Cities Con 2022 Recap

November 13th, 2022

“It’s so nice to finally meet you in real life!”

There are a thousand thinkpieces out there about how to cure the internet and the problem of being very online; the solution has always been conventions.

Being at a convention is a special kind of feeling at home.

The amount of kindness and inclusivity you encounter is overwhelming at times, in the best possible way.

I can’t give enough thanks to Twin Cities Con for putting on such a magnificent second-year show; the only people I am more thankful for are the those who stopped by and wasted their time with me.

Before this weekend, I had never done a panel as a writer, and on Saturday, I did two panels with a cast of brilliant writers and audience members. It was an absolutely magical experience.

I could not even begin to tag the hundreds of folks who made this weekend so surreal. By the whirlwind nature of a con, I broke so many promises of connecting to people but I promise, again, to connect to you soon.

Just know I appreciate you all from the bottom of my heart.

All my love, and see you next year. (I already got a table with my name on it.)

Twin Cities Con ’22 Highlight

November 12th, 2022

I’ll do an entire Twin Cities Con weekend recap tomorrow night, but I am exhausted; I’m also exhilarated to be able to do it all over again, one more time, tomorrow.

I just wanted to share this photo from one of the two panels I got lucky enough to be a part of, and give my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved, on both sides of the table.

You made my day absolutely magical, y’all.

See you Sunday.

Twin Cities Con Panel News!

November 11th, 2022

So! Some exciting news!

First of all: how are you? Good, or sorry to hear that.

Secondly: I’ve been asked to participate in not one, but TWO panels at Twin Cities Con on Saturday!

The first is called Creating Believable Pseudo-Science. It’s @ 2 pm in Rm 202.

The second is called Chaos & Control: A Writing Process, and it’s @ 6:30 pm, also in Rm 202! Both are taking place on Saturday, November 12th.

I am thrilled! Both topics are deep wells and it might be fun to hear writers give you more than the quick pitch you generally hear on the con floor.

Day 1 was so much fun and it was a blast meeting (and reuniting) with you all!

See you tomorrow!

(P.S. I don’t have the bandwidth to process the death of Kevin Conroy right now but I do have an essay coming next week. We are all the night.)

Twin Cities Con 2022 This Weekend!!

November 9th, 2022

It’s only a little over 24 hours until Twin Cities Con 2022 begins!

I’ll be there ALL weekend to talk my work, your work, nerd stuff, geek things and, if none of that sounds good to you, the weather.

That weather.

I’ll have all of my books available! I’ll have 20 limited edition Winter 2022 prints available! (FREE on a first-come, first-serve basis with a purchase from my table!) I’ll have life-sized versions of Bay & Elle from Brushfire to chat and take photos with!

We’ll be having a ball so come have a ball with us. You deserve it.

Find me at table G4.

Twin Cities Con days & hours:

Friday: 12 pm to 7 pm
Saturday: 10 pm to 7 pm
Sunday: 10 pm to 5 pm

I’ll be there all 3 days! See you soon!

I’m Becoming This

November 7th, 2022

“I don’t know if I’m strong; I think I’m just numb.”

– Khloe Kardashian

Today — and this week, and this year, and the past handful of years — I wonder how many of us have been embodying this Khloe Kardashian quote.

I don’t know the difference between strong and numb some days, and I often don’t know if there’s a difference from the outside.

The book Transitions by William Bridges talks about the three steps of change, and I have been overwhelmed by the second as of late.

The first stage is the Ending. Naturally, “every transition begins with one. Too often we misunderstand them, confuse them with finality — that’s it, all over, finished!”

The third stage of change is the New Beginning, which is exactly how it sounds, “…when we launch new activities.”

But I’ve been stuck in the middle, the Neutral Zone, the titular transition of Transitions, indefinitely.

It’s accurately described as “the second hurdle: a seemingly unproductive time-out when we feel disconnected from people and things in the past, and emotionally unconnected to the present.”

I am very emotionally unconnected to the present.

But because I’m doing it intentionally, I’m not sure if my position is one of strength, or one of numbness.

I don’t pray and I am bad at meditation, but I work daily on mindfulness, because my mind is a minefield and I need to know how to walk my way safely through it.

Disconnecting from my emotions allows me to see things as they are, and not how I feel they are.

I thought that relying on this mindfulness would bring tranquility but, in reality, it has absolutely burned me out.

I’m learning, once again, again and again, that balance is key.

I have to let myself feel things that don’t feel good — anger, sadness, fear — to remind myself who I am.

Because the Neutral Zone is “a time of reorientation.”

I have to transform back into a human being.

All Hail The Empire

November 6th, 2022

I love it when people put political signs in their yard.

If I lived in a galaxy where the Empire was in charge, seeing people put pictures of Darth Vader on their lawn would give me daily motivation to keep rebelling.

Can you imagine? “Emperor Palpatine ’24.”

Of course you can imagine. That’s reality.

People have more intimate relationships with politicians now than any time I can remember. It’s part of why “political discourse” is so tense; it’s a deeply personal relationship to some. To explain to them that it’s a one-sided relationship is like trying to talk a person out of their beliefs.

The discourse is tense for everyone, however, as it’s evolved towards ideas that aren’t political at all, and instead affect the rights of all human beings.

I just watched the Jordan Klepper Daily Show midterm special.

There is so much I don’t understand.

I don’t understand most of what election result deniers believe, but there’s something that keeps me up at night.

Back in 2016, the election was decided in favor of a cruel, narcissistic, pathetic man-baby. (He didn’t even win the popular vote, but I digress.)

And the rest of us just accepted it.

I remember thinking “We lost,” not “This isn’t what I wanted so I don’t accept it.”

Because that’s democracy.

I had to stay sober under the constant influence of Donald f***ing Trump, and only a few of you know that specific struggle.

So when the tide inevitably turns, and someone loses the game, a small group with a lot of guns (to compensate for little moral integrity) try to violently take the ball home with them?

The ironic part is that the older generation always says the younger generation is screwed up, but we teach them how to act, including how to lose.

This isn’t a post telling you to vote.

This is a post telling you to rebel.

Because that’s what a democracy can be, even within its rules. A rebellion. When ideas like fascism start to pull together in such an opaque shape as to create a shadow, it’s up to a majority handful of rebels to shine a light.

My dad always told me that life’s not fair, but that you also can’t complain about the unfairness of life unless you try to do something about it.

Try rebelling.

Or try loving the Empire.