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On Saturday, April 21, and Sunday, April 22, I’ll be appearing, along with Brian Hurtt and Mike Oliveri, at the Cape Girardeau (Missouri) Comic Con. I’ll have plenty of copies of The Damned on hand. If you’re in the area, please stop by and say hello. Occasionally, I say something witty … or at least unintentionally amusing.
This afternoon, I’ll be joining fellow comic creators, Matt Kindt and Chris Samnee, at Lewis and Clark Community College in Godfrey, Illinois, for a guest lecture on comics as a storytelling medium. I’m hoping Chris and Matt keep me in check. Otherwise I’ll be ruining a bunch of impressionable minds, and the comic market will be flooded with books about demon gangsters, roller derby girls gone bad, circus freaks, and backwoods heroes with a penchant for professional rasslin’ and frog’s legs.
Ever see that episode of Perfect Strangers where Balki and Cousin Larry go to the gym to impress the ladies and then spend the next day whimpering, “ow ow ow ow ow,” every time they so much as walk across the room? Yeah, that’s how I feel after my second day of Tae Kwan Do. But it’s a good kind of pain … the kind that tells me I’m finally doing some of the things I should be doing. I think going to class the second time, after getting sick in the middle of the first one, was pretty tough. The trek from my car to the door felt a little like a walk of shame, but I made it. From here on out, the rest is gravy.
It’s probably a good thing I’m not further along in my training, though, or I might have used a board-breaking strike on my computer. I lost about 800 terrific (if I do say so myself) words of my new novel yesterday. Rewriting the section last night, I realized I couldn’t quite capture the same magic from the first time around.
Category : Distractions, General
“Sweep the leg … No mercy”
–John Kreese, The Karate Kid
So my pal (and amazingly talented writer) Mike Oliveri started taking martial arts a few weeks back. He’s posted about it on his site, tauting how much fun it is and what a great work out it provides. I’ve wanted to study martial arts for many years, but I’ve always put it off because I was too old or too out of shape but, Hey, I thought, if Mike can do it, so can I. How hard could it be, right? After all, I’d watched the fight scene at the end of Lethal Weapon a good three dozen times, and Bloodsport and Road House are both under-appreciated gems of martial arts mayhem that I’ve viewed over and over again.
I found a respectable Tae Kwan Do school near my house, enrolled, picked up my uniform, and stepped into a class the very next day. A typical class is about 40 minutes long–not too awful for a guy like me, right? Here’s how it went down:
10 minutes prior to class – A few people are doing stretches, but stretches are for babies. Did Bruce Lee do stretches? I doubt it. I stand still, poised for action.
5 minutes prior to class – I try in vain to tie my belt several times before my instructor saunters over and shows me how it’s done. I felt like a little kid whose mom has to help him get dressed in the morning.
Class begins – warm up exercises. No sweat … well, a little sweat when we get into crunches, fingertip push-ups, and leg lifts. When we get to the exercises that are done “on our own count,” I decide to show everyone I can keep up with the best of them. I don’t stop any of the exercises, no matter how much it hurts, until the guy next to me gives up. The guy next to me is apparently in really good shape.
5 minutes into class – kicks and punches. This is fun and much easier than I thought it would be. It’s not like I’m lifting weights or anything.
10 minutes into class – the kicking and punching continues, with some blocks thrown in for good measure. I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, but I’m trying to keep up. It must be the mental work I’m doing that’s causing me to grow so weary.
20 minutes into class – I’m learning some more blocking and punching techniques, as well as focusing my energy with my Ki-yas! Only, my ki-yas are growing a little weaker. And they’re punctuated by coughs and wheezes.
25 minutes into class – board breaking techniques, and I’m starting to wonder why I didn’t just pop a Jet Li movie into the DVD and watch that while enjoying some chips and a beer. I mean, how important is physical fitness, really?
30 minutes into class – I’m not sure what happened during class at this point, because I’m outside taking in the brisk air and hoping I don’t upchuck all over the sidewalk in front of the Tokyo Steakhouse. My anger at Oliveri begins to grow. He’s tricked me, and he’s laughing at me right this very second.
35 minutes into class – self defense. I’m thinking the best defense for me would have been to bolt for my car while I was outside on the verge of puking. But then I would have had to leave my shoes behind. Next time, I’ll hide my shoes in the bushes out front. My classmates are asking me if I’m all right, leading me to believe I look as though I’m on the verge of death.
40 minutes into class – mercifully, it’s over. I stagger out to my car and await several days of intense muscle pain, during which I curse Oliveri over and over again … because in my heart of hearts I know it’s his fault I didn’t do those stretches at the beginning of class.
Tomorrow, it begins again. If I survive long enough to become a skilled combatant, I’m challenging Mike to a duel.
Category : Events & Appearances
So, I made it back from Canada in one piece. Just barely. Driving from 3:00 pm to 5:30 am straight is a younger man’s game. In the early hours of the morning I saw many strange things. I’m still not sure what that thing that loped across the road might have been, but it looked like a 50 pound, pitch-black ferret. Maybe a gigantic skunk? JimmyZ dressed in one of his black hoodies trying to sneak across the border?
As for World Horror Convention, I can’t say I had a fabulous time. I enjoyed seeing all my friends and meeting some awesome folks for the first time. If nothing else, that was worth the trip and will get me motivated to go to the next WHC, which is in Salt Lake City next year. I attended a few panels and readings, which were fun. While my own reading wasn’t standing room only, I still had a nice time sharing a little of Countless Haints. The atmosphere in the reading cafe was awesome. And the gross-out contest was terrific.
The organization of the convention was a little iffy, but that’s pretty much the case with every convention I’ve been to, especially the ones with revolving committees. And there were a few conversations between committee members and guests that really should have taken place in private rather than right out in the open where anyone who was passing by could hear. And maybe–just maybe–a few con staffers could have stood to take a few lessons from Roadhouse’s James Dalton (”Be nice … until it’s time to not be nice), but again, every convention I’ve ever attended has a few people who’d rather snarl than smile. I like to think they just got in over their heads with the whole con planning thing, and they’ll know better next time.
But here’s my serious question/comment for the week (with a bit of a preamble):
There were a couple of other (dare-I-say professional?) conferences going on at the same time as WHC. And a few times, attendees from those conferences wandered towards the WHC hall. If the con staff caught them, they quickly turned them away, sometimes with some harsh words. I know … I know … The whole badge-wearing fiasco brought a lot of raw nerves to surface levels. But really, what’s the point? What would it have hurt if “the general public” wandered in from time to time and actually bought a book? With all the talk about keeping the genre alive and drawing in new readers, shouldn’t we be encouraging the passing would-be fan? Heck, I saw a couple of people from the anesthesia conference commenting on the “cool stuff” on the freebie table (which didn’t require a badge) and one poor soul who managed to slip into the convention space was almost ready to buy a shirt before being escorted away. I seriously doubt any of them were planning on crashing a panel or a reading. They might have bought a spooky book to pass the time between their own boring panels, though. Just a thought, but why not allow the general public in the dealer’s room and the mass signing? I’m not trying to bash the 07 con planners here. What’s done is done. From what I learned at the Canadian border, that might have been a slight problem this time around due to work permits, anyhow. For future conventions, though, it might not be a bad idea. Heck, I love selling a copy or two of my comic to a fellow writer, but there’s a special kind of joy that comes from selling a copy of my comic to a random reader off the street.
But what do I know?
Oh, and I didn’t eat one really memorable meal the entire time I was in Canada. Doesn’t sound like such an awful plight, but it began to really wear on my nerves. After the last couple of WHCs (in New York and San Francisco) I was looking forward to some great eats. I was savagley dissapointed about that.
Also, a bug the size of a Yaris landed on the back of my bald head when we stopped for petrol.
I couldn’t have been more ready to cross the border back to the USA.
