January 26, 2005

Wednesday January 26, 2005 • Howard Tayler

Last night I reserved my flights for Penguicon in April. I'll be flying out on Monday and staying for a few days with my friends at Aegis Consulting, a crowd of sword-brandishing adventurers with day-jobs in Information Technology. To say that I'm looking forward to it would be an egregious understatement.

Sandra is NOT looking forward to it. See, when I worked at Novell I'd end up traveling at least once a month, and sometimes was away from home for a week or more at a time. She coped, the kids coped, and as a family we coped. We did not THRIVE in these circumstances, however. Now the travel returns to my schedule, and Sandra needs to figure out how to cope again.

The good news is that I'm much less stressed-out over Schlock Mercenary travel, which should mean that it's easier on everyone. The bad news is that the old coping strategies involved, among other things, renting lots of movies and buying lots of take-out food. That stuff has to be curtailed on a cartoonist's budget, which means more hard work for Sandra while I'm gone.

We'll see how this goes. Someday I'll be able to haul family members along with me to these events, which will be wonderful. Of course, someday I hope to be able to charge "appearance fees," so this "someday" thing has a certain fantastic, "it'll-never-happen" air to it.

My 2005 schedule is below, and has been tweaked a bit. Dragon's Keep moved their Local Artists Day to a Saturday, and that's just 17 days away. LTUE has gotten their schedule nailed down pretty well, and there are some Wednesday events for the symposium staff and guests I'm excited to be involved in. I'm doing 18 hours worth of panels across Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, plus a "signing" (I'll be scribbling-for-free while the REAL professionals sign books) in the BYU Bookstore on Saturday.

Linucon is looking less and less tentative, and more and more certain. It'll take some finagling to get there, but I pretty much HAVE to go, if only so I can conduct some business with Steve Jackson Games (Steve is right there in Austin.) Fortunately, those suckers at Delta gifted me another 25,000 sky-miles, which means that even if Linucon won't pay my way (and why should they? They did that LAST year), I can get down there on the cheap.

Revoluticon has updated their website, and yes, that's me at the top of their "Guests of Honor" list. This one is the week just prior to Linucon, which means back-to-back travel. I'm hoping to have some fun RPG stuff ("GURPS: Schlock, anyone?") to show off or play-test by then, but it's far, FAR too early to put a schedule on that. Even if the mere MENTION of some of the things we want to include in it makes Steve and I giggle evilly... and Steve's got some giggle-cycles now that his e23 project is online.

It's time to stop writing. SOMEbody needs to go draw stuff, as the buffer suffers of late. I worked hard yesterday, so there's a full week of pencilled scripts awaiting the tender, hyper-accurate inks of some artist I can't afford to hire to draw my stuff for me. Oh well. Those pencils will just have to settle for me. It's a good thing I've stocked up on white-out.

Are you interested in having me come to your city? Your convention? Your HOUSE? Pay my way and pay my stay, and we can make it happen. The BEST way is to convince the convention organizers that I'm worthy of "GoH" status, but there are alternatives. Email me if you've got an event in mind.