Category: Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

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Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

GlitchCon diary

Sellin' stuffThe first weekend of August saw my first attempt at running a vendor table at anything other than a video game convention (next year marks ten years of OVGE and ten years of me having a table at OVGE). The convention in question was heavy on anime and steampunk, though there was also a healthy science fiction contingent there, including authors such as Kevin J. Anderson (of Star Wars and Dune spinoff novel fame). A few days before the show, while looking over the vendor room layout, a light bulb went off over my head and I started looking up the other vendors online. Nobody with general sci-fi swag. I pretty much leaped into my closet and started hauling stuff out that could be sold.

While I was sitting at my table, I had my trusty MobilePro plugged in and charged, and was writing one of two things: a hasty “GlitchCon diary” of my observation and in-the-moment impressions, or slices and pieces of WARP!1 and/or VWORP!2. … Read more

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Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

What is occurring?

Angel robot thingiesI haven’t been blogging very regularly, for which I apologize. Many things have been occurring.

Konsplosion was the weekend of August 17th/18th/19th in Fort Smith, and while I was there (in my first gig as a guest speaker) for all of two hours, it seemed pretty packed. In the weeks leading up to Konsplosion, I had a bit of difficulty getting the show’s organizers to respond to my multiple attempts to pitch myself as a guest speaker; I literally didn’t know until about 72 hours out if I was going or not. My presentations were outlined but not practiced in any way (every speech or drama teacher I’ve ever studied under will no doubt be revving up to about 3,000 RPM in their grave right about now), and then, to my horror, I got up in front of a crowded room and discovered that the outline I’d printed at home about 10 minutes before leaving the house… … Read more

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Gaming Television & Movies Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Achievement unlocked: GlitchCon 2012!

Thanks to friends and random strangers who have bought stuff from my recent rounds of eBay auctions, expenses have been met for theLogBook.com’s vendor booth at GlitchCon in Bentonville, August 3rd, 4th and 5th.

Glitchcon 2012
(Click here to learn more about GlitchCon)

The voices of Mario and Master Chief will be there (now there’s a mix for you), as well as Star Wars & Dune spinoff author Kevin J. Anderson, among many others. Judging by the photo gallery from last year’s event, the cosplaying at GlitchCon is near-legendary. The tagline for the show is “Sci-fi, anime, gaming, steampunk, and much more,” so just about any geek genes you have ought to be tickled here.

I’ll have copies of VWORP!1 and the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs at the show, and maybe a few goodies to show off too. See you there!

Another convention appearance closer to home after GlitchCon is also being discussed – stay tuned.… Read more

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Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

On this day in history…

…at least according to the “on this day in history” plugin installed on my blawg, I made the earliest announcement of VWORP!1 (at the time, rather naively known as a potentially-thousand-page book simply called VWORP!), four years ago today.

VWORP! VWORP!1

(That’s funny and fitting: the earliest draft cover used the credit font from the Hartnell era; the completed, released cover uses something quite a bit more current. No, I didn’t plan that.)

These days I do silly things like announce that I’ll have two books of roughly the same size out in the next 18 years months. What can I say? I like a challenge. 😆 … Read more

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Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Moving right along…

VWORP!2I spent much of today working on the next two books, VWORP!2 and WARP!1. Really did more work on VWORP!2 (which is perversely appropriate, as it’s not the one that comes out first), but some of that work helps WARP!1 too, since both books are in a very similar format.

One of the things I did today was whip up a nifty little graphic for the Short Hops in VWORP!2. For those who have gotten VWORP!1, you already know that there are plenty of asides and stories that didn’t fit comfortably under discussion of particular episodes or seasons. In many cases they’re first-person stories of odd, and often humorous, ways that my life has intersected with Doctor Who down through the years. I decided that, for VWORP!2 and VWORP!3, I wanted the Short Hops interludes to “pop” a bit more, and have a little bit of a graphic signature. … Read more

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Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Pulling rank

Couple of things of note today…

KickThe beloved Kick machine sold this morning on eBay for the opening bid. No sweat there – I was happy for it to go for that much, and to a fellow arcade collector no less. I will just say that the buyer is based nearby, and I’m hoping I might be able to persuade them to bring it to OVGE one of these days. I’ll be extremely bummed to see it go – even when it hasn’t been working 100%, there’s just something about that bright, happy side art on the machine that takes the edge off of things a bit. A really happy guy (with a spiked helmet) riding a unicycle, popping balloons. If that doesn’t make you crack a smile every time you see it, I can’t help you. I’ll miss the machine though.

Other big news of the evening: VWORP!1 has apparently been chronicled in Howe’s Transcendental Toybox. Howe as in David J. Howe, co-author of all of the seven Doctor Who “Handbooks” (now out of print and hard to find) which I used as primary research material while writing the book. … Read more

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Television & Movies Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Brain jumble

WASSUP!Hello blog, nice to see ya, it’s been a long time, you’re just as lovely as you used to be…

Well, okay, it’s been maybe all of three days, but that’s a three-day break in my effort to blog every day, which I’d been managing to do somewhat successfully since mid-April or so. Now, I’m not sure that every post could lay claim to being something substantive and worth tuning in for (good grief, did I just say “tuning in”?), but it was sort of a discipline thing: making damn sure I wrote something every day. And I did… for about two months.

Frankly, I’m still a little bit brain-lagged from OVGE, which sounds kind of improbable, but I haven’t been sitting idle. I took 15 copies of VWORP!1 to OVGE and came back with 11. Not too bad since it was anything but a sci-fi convention (though the gigantic display of Star Trek games and the table full of mouth-wateringly rare Firefly memorabilia helped to blur the line a bit). So I had a moment of crazy and thought: hey, what if Tulsa Trek Expo isn’t the only sci-fi convention I could hit with this book? A visit to a really handy site called the Southern Fandom Resource Guide revealed that there were two sci-fi conventions, in August, practically in my back yard.

As a result, I can safely announce that there’ll be a table for theLogBook.com at GlitchCon 2012 in Bentonville, Arkansas, August 3rd, 4th and 5th – the first showing at a sci-fi convention for the site or its owner. (I know that sounds terribly unlikely, but it’s true: I’ve never been to a sci-fi or general-geek-audience convention. You’d think I would’ve been all over this sort of thing, but I’ve never been to one. It’s almost a pity that I’ll be stuck behind the table for the whole thing.) Since it’s kind of an all-interests geek gathering – bliss! – I’ll have both VWORP!1 and the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs, since I’ll be dealing with a whole new audience. I’m just a little bit excited about it.

There’s another convention two weeks later in Fort Smith that I’m less sure about – the lack of response I’ve gotten from them is a little too eerily reminiscent of my experience with the Trek convention in Tulsa. It seems a bit silly to miss a convention in the town where I grew up, but much like Tulsa, I can’t procure a table if they won’t even talk to me.

Other things worth a mention…

HHGHitchhiker’s Guide: The Live Radio Show. I can’t figure out if this is an awesome idea or ghoulishly exploitative. Honestly, I’m coming down on the “awesome” side of the fence, simply because the returning original cast members all seem to have a long-standing love of the material, and I’ve never once heard any of them complain about how the Hitchhiker’s Guide association was going to lead to typecasting. If anything, Simon Jones has spent so much of his career in a bathrobe (sorry, Brits: dressing gown) that he seems to relish it almost too much. I also don’t begrudge the Adams estate for finding new ways to repurpose and cash in, not one bit. I have yet to see any of the posthumous projects damage the story or Adams’ legacy*, so… when’s the American leg of this tour?

Days of Thunder. It’s bad enough going up against Miami, but going up against Miami and the refs? Sorry, OKC. Give it another shot next year. Getting into the finals is nothing to sneeze at.

Slim notsogoodbody. Obi is going to the vet today. He’s recently been losing weight, muscle tone and hair – the doofus cat is many things, but he should not be going bald, that’s my job. Thyroid issue? Food allergy? Parasite? Finally became too stupid to remember to eat? Whatever it is, I hope the big dumb cat errs on the side of cheap maladies. We need him around, but I’m worried that an expensive vet bill could be the other shoe that tap dances on our heads.

I’ll try to get back to routine blogging, but as you can see, I’ve had my hands just a little bit full.

* any more than “Mostly Harmless” already did.… Read more