I just got back from the True Dungeon at SoCal Gencon.
Wow. What a great time! I played a Bard, and all that Improv training I’ve had over the years paid off . . . I got to make up a few songs, gave my party +3 in a battle, stopped us from letting something Very Bad happen . . . and got killed when the giant spider hit me for 6, and then for 14. Ah, the joys of being third level with no armor.
I’m going to write about the whole thing for my column in Dungeon, but I will say this now: if you ever get a chance to do a True Dungeon, go for it. It’s a blast. They’re in Anaheim through the weekend.

What’s My Line? — Live On Stage! continues to get better and better, and I’m running out of ways to blog about how much fun I had on the stage, and how much the audience enjoyed the show . . . so I’m not even going to try this week. I’ll just settle on: IT WAS AWESOME. If you’re anywhere near Hollywood on a night that we’re doing the show, you simply must come out and see us.
Tonight, my friend Drew Curtis (who is responsible for Fark) and I will be in studio together on The David Lawrence Show from 8pm until 10pm PST. We’ll take phone calls and instant messages, and I can’t wait to see what happens when the worlds of Fark and WWdN collide on the radio. It’s going to be supermegaawesome. There are several different listening options at the show’s website.

I had a wonderful time at my signing in Huntington Beach last night. There were about forty people seated when I started, and by the time I was finished, another fifteen or so had joined us.
Over the years, I’ve developed a pretty good sense of how the audience is relating to me, and I felt like I connected with this audience immediately, and maintained the connection all the way through. It was awesome. The last few readings I’ve done have been a hardcore geek conferences, you see, and there’s been a very palpable “Okay, prove to us that you deserve to be here, jerk.” feeling from at least part of the audience, but last night, I didn’t feel any challenge or hostility from the people there, so I was able to relax and just do my thing.
Usually, I just thank people for coming, and get right into reading, but last night I tried something now: I gave a little bit of a “talk” about the internets, and the power of blogs. I talked about how blogs are a powerful communication tool, and how blogs can be used for very positive things, like helping our friend Kris when she had cancer. I also talked about this awesome auction I’m a part of to raise money and awareness for the Alzheimer’s Association of Los Angeles (that is going to be so cool, it gets its own entry in the near future.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about how my life has changed, and I know that none of this would be happening without the examination of my life that happened because of my blog and my books. I talked a little bit about that examination, and how I discovered this thing called “the quarter life crisis,” where we hit our mid-to-late twenties and freak out because we don’t know what we’re doing (or going to do with) our lives as we near thirty. At that time in my life, I recalled, I was struggling not only to be a successful actor, husband, and stepfather, but also to figure out who I was. My mom always told me “just be yourself, and you’ll be happy.” That’s great advice, but it’s tough to heed when you don’t know who “yourself” is.
Anyway, I talked about all those things as a lead-in to the writing of Just A Geek, and to set up where I was in my life when I experienced the events I wrote about in Chapter Nine of Just A Geek (pdf file), which is what I read last night.
The actual “reading” portion of the . . . uhm . . . reading . . . was great. I felt comfortable with the material, and it is always entertaining (to me, anyway) to edit out the naughty words on the fly when I read. It was extra fun last night because people were following along in their own books, and they’d giggle when I replace “shit” with “crap,” or something similar.
When my reading was done, I took a few questions, which gave me another opportunity to talk about how empowering the internet is, and how I used the internet to reassert control over my creative life. Then, I sat down and signed books for everyone there. The people who came out were all friendly and enthusiastic, and the whole experience was just wonderful. I was done about 8:45, and through the power of quantum physics, I made it up to ACME by 9:30 without ever exceeding the posted speed limit.
Shut up. I did.