Tomorrow morning, Anne and I are heading up to Portland to vist some family, eat some donuts, play some classic video games, buy some books, drink some beer, and do a show with Paul and Storm at the Alberta Rose Theatre. I got confirmation last night that our friends The Doubleclicks and John Roderick will be joining us for some happy funtimes, and I’m looking forward to the show.

When I was on JoCo Cruise Crazy 3, I forced myself to step way out of my comfort zone, and I did about 10 minutes of stand up comedy as part of my set. I haven’t seen video of it, so I don’t know if the audience liked it, but I recall feeling like it went pretty well, and besides, it was a lot of fun to write it and take the chance performing it. I think one of the best reasons for stepping outside of your comfort zone is to expand it, and by that measurement, it was a successful experiment.

So last night, my friend Chris Hardwick came over and helped me develop some material I’d been putting into my notebook in advance of the show, and we ended up putting together some stuff that I think is pretty goddamn funny. I’m terrified, but excited, to try it out in the show.

I know it’s cart before the horse (in the sense that there is no horse and the cart hasn’t been built, yet) but we even talked about maybe shooting a special with me doing jokes and telling stories and selling it on the Internets some day in the mysterious future. I think that could be really cool.

After Portland, I’m on my way to Seattle for the Emerald City Comicon. This is one of my favourite conventions of the whole year, and is the gold standard (with Phoenix Comicon) for how a con should be run, how fans should be treated, and what kind of value you should get for your money. Paul and Storm and I are doing a show (disguised as a panel) on Saturday morning, and I have a Tabletop panel on Sunday afternoon. The rest of the weekend, I’ll be signing pictures and books and boobs and action figures. Saturday night, the Kings are playing the Canucks, so Aaron Douglas and I are planning to find someplace where we can watch the game and talk all kinds of shit at each other. It should be fun.

I’ll have a limited number of books with me at the convention, as well as some pictures, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. I am still accepting dice for project How Many Dice Is Too Many Dice.

Now, as always, the thing I have to say before I go to a con:

I got the Swine Flu at PAX Prime, and it was the worst two weeks of my life. When we went to PAX East, all of us (Jerry, Mike, Kurtz, Straub, Paul and Storm, The Professor and Mary Ann) all agreed that we wouldn’t shake hands, give hugs, or engage in human contact with people, to limit the introduction of infection vectors. Most people understood, and we gave each other the old Iron Guard Salute (not the fascist thing, the gaming thing that looks like like “love” in ASL). The result: a few people were cheesed off, but none of us were too upset about that, because none of us got sick. It was the first con I’ve gone to in my whole life where I didn’t get some form of Con Crud, and I’d like to repeat that until we turn out the lights on Planet Earth. So, tl;dr: I’m not going to touch people at the con. I know it seems weird, but I hope you understand why. I’m not trying to be a dick, I’m trying not to get sick. 

 A non-zero number of readers seem to have a real problem with this, and people on the rest of the Internets are already giving me a hard time about it in very unkind terms. This makes me really sad; I hoped for a little more empathy and understanding. Not that it should matter, but I have Epstein-Barr, so my immune system isn’t as robust as a normal person’s; it is very easy for me to catch viruses and other nasty things. I’m not going to apologize for not wanting to get sick, especially after two weeks of Swine Flu. If you can’t understand that, it’s your problem, not mine.

People don’t like to hear this, and I hate that I have to say it. I’m not sorry, because I don’t particularly like getting sick.

Sorry that the big Tabletop announcement didn’t happen today. Something related to it wasn’t ready, so we have to delay it until tomorrow. Feel free to continue speculating.

I’m writing a new story. I’m aiming for 30,000 words, but it will be the length that it wants to be. I’ve been doing a little bit every day, and I’m up to about 4,000 words. I’m having a lot of fun writing it, and if it’s worth publishing when it’s done, that will happen.

In the last 18 hours, I’ve been overwhelmed with supportive messages from friends, people I’ve never met, and total strangers. Thank you. It means a lot to me to be embraced by so many when I feel like I took one on the chin, even though it was, in a lot of ways, delivered by my own fist.

Having a crisis of confidence really sucks, even though I know it’s temporary and will pass. Having depression and anxiety also makes things that really shouldn’t be a very big deal into Very Big Deals. I’ve felt like my meds aren’t working as well as they used to for about two weeks, and after feeling so profoundly awful yesterday, I made an appointment to see my brain doctor to figure out if I need something different or a higher dose, or whatever will help me.

So I guess the success I’m making out of this failure is a kick in the ass to get my brain back into shape, which is really much more important than any job will ever be.

I used to write a lot about Balance, how it was important to not take the peaks and valleys of life too seriously, how life was (for me) much better when I made an effort to take a long view of things, striving all the while to live as close to the midpoint of the waveform as I could. (Or is it the baseline? It’s been a long time since I did real science instead of the awesome imaginary kind I did on the spaceship or at Global Dynamics).

So today? A little Balance from yesterday: I had a voice over audition that I recorded in my house and sent to my agent, who sent it along to casting. The producers of that show liked my take on the character enough to bring me in for a reading in person. I also had a meeting today with some producers who pitched me a show that [REDACTED] and could be really awesome.

I think that, mostly, I felt like an idiot yesterday. I felt like an idiot for being so excited and confident that I’d done a great job that I talked about it in public before I knew if I got the job or not. I think it’s just my brain fucking with me, but that felt embarrassing and awkward to me.

But I’m going to make my brain better as soon as I can, and remember that Depression Lies until I can metaphorically stab it with a Q-Tip.