Although I am not listed on -- as far as I know -- any of the SDCC information, I will be attending the show.

Schedule is TBA at this point. I expect to be signing at Oni and DC, but dates and times are still being coordinated. I'm confirmed for a signing at the Bantam booth on Friday, where we'll be giving away copies of Patriot Acts. As for panels, I suspect I'll be at the Dark Castle one on Thursday, and perhaps the DC Nation panel, also on Thursday, as well as a handful of others. I am confirmed for the Gays in Comics panel on Saturday at 5:45.

I should add, at this point, that the lack of information confirming that I'll be at the show is my own damn fault and no one else's. I never got it together to actually register, so it's not like anyone had a reason to believe I'd be attending.

Oh the irony.


Now for some musing...

Andrew and Xtie departed this morning, beginning their long drive back to the Land of Sun and Smog. As ever, their departure leaves all of us here vaguely out of sorts. As jonlaw can well attest, it sucks when hearty and longstanding friendships are separated by distance.

nealbailey asked if I get postpartum after finishing a novel, and I hedged on the answer. It's a problematic analogy for me, to equate the act of giving birth to the act of writing a novel, though the romance of "the act of creation" makes it a logical enough comparison, I suppose. But to answer the question more honestly than I did the last time, yes, I do. It's a combination of emotions, I think, mostly underscored by fatigue. It may be the same for many authors, or for all of them, or for none, I don't know, but the process is a...consuming one, that may be the best way to put it. I'm always reminded of a Conan Doyle line -- which I am about to butcher, as I'm too tired to be bothered to actually look it up -- where Watson remarks that Holmes looks a little rough around the edges (yes, yes, cocaine will do that, as you were), and the Great Detective's reply is something along the lines of, "I confess I have been using myself rather too freely of late."

Holmesians out there should feel free to provide chapter and verse, as required.

Regardless, that line has always resonated for me, even if I can't quote it. It's how I feel every time I finish a novel.

The rush to vacation following completion, the company of good friends and good times, postponed but did not defeat the effect. And it's catching up with me, and tonight I'm finding myself listless and out of sorts, edging up to grumpy but not quite committing to the relationship as yet. In a few more days this will pass. It has nothing to do with anxiety about the work itself, at least, not this time; my editor read and returned comments via email on the ms within, I shit you not, 24 hours of receipt, which is a record for her, at least in the confines of our relationship. As always, her notes -- brief as they were -- were spot on; in fact, her notes were exactly the ones I'd made to myself to address in the revision. Well, except for one, but she never likes it when someone cries in my novels. She genuinely seems to like the book, which is always a good thing, and, more to the point, I believe her when she says she does; after nine novels with her, I can tell when she's struggling to find something kind to say to me.

Depression may be another word for it, I suppose. The desire to do nothing for a few days, to simply read a book, or play a video game, or sleep late, all things that, for one reason or another, I cannot do at this time. To indulge myself. But there are scripts that need writing (as of this moment, actually, there are five of them, with three so close to deadline they can look down its shirt), and many editors who have been both patient and understanding as I've told them that they would have to wait until the book was finished. Well, it's finished, and they're due their due.


An unrelated question: anyone I know from that Green and Pleasant planning on attending San Diego? And if so, would you be willing to act as courier for me? I promise, it's nothing that'll get you sent down to Gitmo. Honest.

...but the time off was much-needed and well-spent. Felt like I got to actually get to know my family again. Strange process, novel writing: it is, in many ways, like living two lives at once. I move through the necessities of my day, I do all I need to do, I answer promptly and properly to the questions that come my way. I do all the things I should normally be doing.

But at the same time, I'm perpetually living someplace else, in this world that doesn't exist, with people who don't exist except in my mind. It's a writer's cliche, it's been said a thousand times before, but it's true. The number of times Jen and I have been having a conversation where I will blurt out, "oh, you know what Atticus has to do next? He has to go back to Turkey, that's what he has to do!" and she'll blink at me and then ask if I've heard a thing that she's said. And I have, and I can tell her that, yes, I will take Elliot to gymnastics after I pick up Dashiell from art camp, or whatnot. Hopefully, this is the closest I'll ever come to having MPD.

Andrew and I drove back from the coast yesterday, and while normally we spend the most of these drives in an elaborate post-mortem of the holiday's gaming and toss around ideas for future stories-slash-complications-slash-rewards (the game of the moment is AEG's defunct 7th Sea, as opposed to its open-license d20 conversion Swashbuckling Adventures; the campaign is about a year old at this point, with perhaps a handful of actual sessions under its belt, and it's as fine and rewarding a game as we've played for many a year, now. Just finishing up a visit to Avalon, and everyone had a good moment or four.), this time we started talking about the state of baseball.

I'm not a huge sports fan. When I was younger, growing up, I liked football, as in the American game. I have always -- to this day -- loved football, as in the game the rest of the world follows. I was not, growing up, a fan of baseball, due in no small part to an altercation between myself and the game's namesake that resulted in my teeth punching their way through my lower lip (most people would call this "an accident" or "bad luck"; me, I called it aversion therapy (and no, I don't know what's up with all the psych references in this post). Andrew, with his love of the game, worked patiently on me for many years, beginning in college, and about the time we were both at USC, he succeeded in turning me into a fan. When Jen was at the U of O, I was a devoted fan of the Mariners, as well as of the Eugene Emeralds.

I have since soured considerably on baseball. And I see no signs of this changing, frankly. Talking about Barry Bonds a year back with a colleague of my father's, the point was hammered home. The gentleman said, "do you really think it's ever been any different than it is now? That this is new?" As if that explains, or justifies, or excuses the inexcusable. Try applying that attitude to, say, segregation, see if it holds water, asshole. Just because you can't see another way doesn't mean it's not 1) wrong, and 2) that a better way shouldn't be pursued.

Andrew put up a post on his and Christie's blog that, in many ways, expresses my frustrations and disgust with the sport better than I. When Andrew gets angry, he writes very well. Speaking from personal experience, when the man argues, he takes no prisoners. I'm glad he wrote the post, and while it is quite literally screaming into the intervoid, it's worth a read.

So...I utterly failed to update this here blog while the show was going on in Chicago this past weekend. There's a good reason for this. The reason is that, whenever I wasn't on the floor or on one panel or another or at a premiere, I was writing.

A lot.

And now the draft is done. The key words here are "draft" and "done." There will be rewriting. There will be revising. There may even be some structural modification. And there will certainly be polishing.

But Kodiak #7 is, for the moment, completed. A very different novel than the previous ones. Far more linear in plot, and, stylistically, probably the sparest prose I've ever written. I think it serves the novel -- both as a narrative, and with regard to its subject matter -- well.

And now I am going on vacation for a week or so.

Then I will attend to all the various projects that have been clamoring for my attention while the novel has dominated my life.

Nice to be done.

Quiet satisfaction.

A rare feeling.

There's an interview with me up at Newsarama right now about the next thing with my name on it that'll be coming out from DC, Final Crisis: Revelations. Look for a companion interview with the amazing Philip Tan, as well. If you've seen any of his art, then you'll understand why I'm willing to use the word "amazing" to describe it.

So we have an official announcement, now, of at least one of the things I'm working on, Final Crisis: Revelation, five issues of 30 pages each, Crispus Allen and Renee Montoya sharing pages again, though each of them in a much-altered form. The Spectre and The Question. Has to go down in history as one of the all-time oddest team-ups ever, which is probably one of the reasons why I'm enjoying writing it so much. First issue is out in August, I believe, so yes, it's a wait, but I think it'll be well-worth it.

( Here's a little taste of what Philip's doing. )

While we're on the topic, the ancillary material for the The Question: The Five Books of Blood hardcover that's coming out in June was finalized on Monday; we've included some six pages in the back about the Montoya Journal, including images of a couple of the props that didn't make the final cut for inclusion. I've written some commentary about the journal, the process, the ideas behind it, and the like. For those of you who were intrigued by that particular flight of fancy, it's definitely Value Added Content.

I promised a couple of posts back to explain the quiet that has descended here... and it's going to be relatively quiet for another month or so as I finish the draft of the tentatively-entitled new Kodiak novel, The Walking Dead. That's priority right now, and until I get out of the Very Dark Place that is this novel, I'm not going to have a whole lot I want to share, or even will feel like talking about, I suspect.

A week from today, on the 24th, mercuryeric and I will be doing a live chat at the ComicBloc Foum, starting at 9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific. I expect it'll last 90 minutes or so, but it may run longer. If you're not registered at the 'Bloc, I believe you'll have to be to participate, but I could be wrong, as I've yet to actually do a chat there.

And then there's The Blue Religion, a new short-story collection edited by the blazingly-talented Michael Connelly, including shorts by the man himself, Laurie R. King, Alafair Burke, and many others. I'm one of the others, and the short is entitled "Contact and Cover." Fans of A Fistful of Rain might want to check this out, as the story is told by Tracy Hoffman, and gives a little insight into what her life on the job was like before making detective.

( Here's the cover for the collection. )

Finally, an unsolicited endorsement. Find E. Benjamin Skinner's book A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face With Modern-Day Slavery.

Buy this book.

Read this book.

Read the parts that make your heart break. Read the parts that make your eyes burn. Read the parts that twist your stomach.

Read this book.

Then find someone else, and make them read this book.

And while they're reading it, get to work, and any way you can, in any of the ways that Skinner suggests, join this fight.

I just realized that, by 15K words in the new novel, I've already racked up a body-count of 8.

Not sure what to make of that, frankly.