Sara Ryan

It is already Tuesday and Friday after work I will be on a train to Seattle for the Emerald City Con! All with the books and comics and buttons and whatnot!

I put those exclamation points in to help inspire myself, because right now this second I’m thinking dang, I am tired and it would be nice to have a weekend without Events, but that will not be until the weekend after this one, unless sometime between now and then Events spontaneously manifest, as they sometimes do.

Anyway, no offense to Seattle and its many excellent denizens, I am sure I will have a lovely time once I am there. And, excellent denizens, it would be nice to see you, especially those of you I have not seen in far too long.

In the meantime: so now I have a buttonmaker and I can make buttons, as I have mentioned previously.

If you have a button design idea, ideally related in some fashion to my books and/or comics, and you would like to have me make it exist, please to be letting me know.

I’ve been reading Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, the audiobook version, and just got to this passage:

It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. [...] Every time your sneakers met the street, the end of that summer, somebody was hurling it at your head, that song.

Forget what happens when you start haunting the green-tiled halls of Intermediate School 293.

September 7, 1976, the week Dylan Edbus began seventh grade in the main building on Court Street and Butler, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music, White Boy” was the top song on the rhythm and blues charts. Fourteen days later it topped Billboard’s pop charts. Your misery’s anthem, number-one song in the nation.

I didn’t have it quite as bad as Dylan. But mine was a number-one song, too, so cloying that even now I can’t bring myself to put in a link, but it’s easily You-Tubeable, and those of my readers who are around my age have probably already guessed which song it is, a song that made me writhe in embarrassment, even more because so many people seemed to think I should like it, and if I looked angry, they’d say, “Uh-oh, I think storms are brewing…” Yes, it was Jefferson Starship’s “Sara.”

Who else has a song that made their lives hell, however briefly?

Tonight we devoted ourselves to restoring the house to something like order.

Snag hid out while we swept, straightened, sorted paperwork, entered receipts into Quicken, and listened to the entirety of Heretic Pride three times in succession (so far).

While I’m on the subject of matters domestic, does anyone know of a source for a piece of storage furniture designed specifically for storing boots? Knee-high, lady-type boots? I am a big fan of big stompy boots, but dang, once you have more than a few pairs of same, they tend to overwhelm your entryway.

Hey didn’t we just do this? Yes we did. (Relatively speaking.) Here we go…

Cannot believe how many people managed to cram into Cosmic Monkey for the trophy awards & Comic Art Battle. I was happy to meet Matt Silady and Kirsten Baldock (comics writer, librarian, and bartender — I knew we’d get along) and Jason McNamara, and to get a few minutes to chat with Jemiah Jefferson and Katie Moody, whom I don’t see nearly often enough.

Credit to John Aegard for the observation that Stumptown attendees are so polite that when you accost someone passing your table with a pitch for your comics, books, & assorted ephemera, and they don’t quite catch what you’ve said because it’s a loud, busy room, they’ll actually lean in and say, “Pardon me?”

Several ladies’ Technicolor hair coordinated beautifully with their outfits.

On Saturday, I suggested that we resolve the Inevitable Con Dinner Dilemma by getting takeout and going back to the studio. Worked out nicely. The group sorted itself into artists in one room, writers and programmers in the other, in the dark. People kept asking if we wanted the lights on. No, we like it this way. Talk of using the Periscope model for programmers. Discussion of the digital nomads report in the Economist and what kinds of work are best suited to space-sharing collectives. Then I saw that Matt Maxwell, who’d been feeling increasingly under the weather, looked as though he might actually be on the point of expiring, so I excused myself to deliver him to the place he was staying.

Thank you, nice lady whose name I did not learn who had KATIE BEATON MAY I SHAKE YOUR HAND written on your shirt with a Sharpie. Your noble gesture meant that I was able to meet and enthuse at Kate Beaton! And then she gave me a Napoleon.

Since I’ve been doing cons, I’ve been increasingly aware of the need for a “close” indicator for the non-transactional conversations that happen across the table. You know, when you’re talking to other exhibitors and/or friends without the expectation of money changing hands. Lately, I’ve been giving folks a not-very-military-style salute. I don’t know when I started doing it, but it’s become automatic.
I sat next to Carla Speed McNeil and this led to any number of cool interactions. One of them: getting to flip through Marian Churchland’s sketchbook. Keen!

Most appropriate pairing of item purchased with purchaser: a copy of Einbahnstrasse Waltz to an Austrian-born illustrator who’s also a musician. She bought it for her friend the concert violinist.

I told Kevin Moore he should put his sketches of conventiongoers on Flickr and he did!

Talked to a girl who’d done a reconstruction of the Empress cover for a school project. (Yikes, that book’s been out a while.)

Awesome: people approaching your table all eager & excited because they’ve liked your stuff in the past. Less awesome: not having anything new on offer. note to self: get cracking on next Flytrap script, stat!

I did have one new thing: buttons. Yes, Empress has been out for seven years and I only just now made them.

End of show: we’ve got our stuff and Carla’s stuff and John’s stuff and Kevin is helping and gosh there are a lot of boxes (although we all sold a bunch, too) and the trunk is totally full and we drive off to have a decompressing dinner at Yuki, which is delicious, and after that we get back to the house and unload and…wait, what happened to the other box? You know, the old laptop box, with all the books in it? Back to the Doubletree. View the post-con carnage:

**

Box nowhere to be found. Back home. Make some phone calls. Box located! Stumptown founder Indigo Kelleigh has it, bringing us full circle. Whew.

…And Emerald City is in two weeks. Yikes.

** not actually the scene of the comics convention.

I couldn’t believe this when I saw it, so naturally I had to document.

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This weekend, as many of my readers doubtless know, is the Stumptown Comics Fest. I will totally be there. With comics. Because, comics. But also novels. Because, novels. You should come. And thanks, Steve Duin, for the kind words in Seven Reasons To Love Stumptown!

In other news, Comic Book Tattoo is now up for preorder on Amazon. The book description:

“Over 80 of the best creators from every style and genre have contributed over 50 stories to this anthology featuring tales inspired by the songs of multi-platinum recording artist, Tori Amos! Featuring an introduction by Neil Gaiman, with stories by creators such as Carla Speed McNeil, Mark Buckingham, C.B. Cebulski, Nikki Cook, Hope Larson, John Ney Reiber, Ryan Kelly, and many, many others, Comic Book Tattoo encapsulates the breadth, depth, and beauty of modern comics in this coffee table format book.”

I am one of the many, many others! As is the esteemed Mr. Jonathan Case, my collaborator on the project. I don’t think I’m allowed to say which song we did…yet.

Photos from TBF Live! 2008 a few weeks back, courtesy of the fabulous Sarah Hodges. Thanks, Sarah!

Anna and Emi, handlers extraordinaire! Note that Emi does not actually have someone else’s head growing out of her shoulder.

Me and Sarah, also a handler extraordinaire and official Adult!

Me and Anna.

At one of my sessions. It delights me that the vocabulary words adroit, intelligent, knowledgeable, and sagacious are floating next to me in this photo. My hosts were all of the above.

Conversation en route to the sale: “Well, it’s Sunday, so probably someone’s already bought the skull.” “Yeah. Oh well.”

My grandparents had this same thermometer/barometer. Theirs still had the man with the umbrella, though.

There was a plethora of anticommunist and Catholic ephemera. And one, lone, girlie picture. (But it was the last day of the sale. The proportions may have been different at the beginning.)

Why aren’t owner’s manuals this cool any more?

Creepy old baby doll with no eyes AND haunting, slightly drugged-looking lady amidst foliage. Aw yeah.

and found the Fraenkel Gallery. Fell in. So many gorgeous, haunting images. So many stories.

This is the one I was looking for –

doesn’t it look oddly like she has an iPod?

Yikes, I almost forgot!

Sometime before the end of today, I will release a copy of Empress into the wild. Not sure where yet. Perhaps a community center…