C2E2 is this weekend!
One of the things I love about conventions is that I get to see so many friends and make new ones…people whom I usually interact with on twitter and Facebook and see only at the cons.

This year, there are so many people whose work I love and admire at C2E2 and I thought instead of making some gigantic run of tweets, I’d compile a master list of people whose tables at Artist’s Alley are definitely worth your taking a look. Because everyone needs a convention budget…or else you end up just buying everything that catches your fancy…and these individuals are the best people to acquire beautiful works from, whether books, little curios, or art ready to be framed and hung on the wall. I have bought much and given to kickstarters for many of the people on this list, and they are wonderful individuals.

I must give pride of place to Sara Woolley in T7 because she and I have been working together for over a year on a project which shall be discussed on this site all the more in the coming months. I met her in October 2013 at NYCC when I walked by her table and her art made me stop and look. Time for all of you to have the same sensation!

Then going down in alphabetical order

A4 – Chad Sell 

G4 – Four Star Studios, and I must single out Sean Dove

I11 – Ramon Perez 

K1 – The Sun Brothers

K2 – The Satrun Sisters

M17 – Drew Gaska

N2 – Dave Scheidt

N3 – Eric Roesner

N12 – Bill Willingham

O3 – Brent Schoonover

O12 – Ray Fawkes

P12 – James Tynion IV

Q9 – Janet Lee

S14 – Jeremy Bastian

U1 – David Petersen

U3 – Amy Mebberson 

U4 – James Silvani

V3 – Thom Zahler

Have a wonderful con, everybody! I’ll be reporting on it next week!

(Photo from Wired)

I’ve written in a lot of different places in my time.

– Dorm rooms at Emerson College

– The first apartment on Ardmore in Los Angeles, where as Paul Brindley honed his acting skills and figured out the best ways to kill zombies, I wrote the story and first drafts of An Elegy for Amelia Johnson

– A lonely studio apartment in Burbank

– Hunched over Mike Pintar’s computer after mine crashed on a hot spring week in Los Angeles, and in that one week I rewrote 75% of Amelia 

– More coffee shops and libraries (including Bates Hall, pictured above) than I could ever count

– The three-bedroom apartment over a gyro shop in Hyde Park, Chicago, where I sat facing a window and wrote my life story in prose, in order to translate it to Form of a Question

And for the past three years, I’ve been writing in an Ikea chair that rocks back and forth as needed under an Ikea lamp, balancing a MacBook Pro on my lap. I sit under artisan paper I got from a specialty store in Ann Arbor on the way back from Alex and Becky’s wedding. There’s a coaster at my feet for my water glass, or a glass of something stronger or weaker. To my left are Travis’s books, including a selected set of DC, Marvel, and the complete Sandman. To my right are my books, including two shelves of Anthony Trollope alone. There will be jazz, classical, songs from my grandfather’s record collection (thanks to the miracle of Spotify), or the Grateful Dead playing. Sometimes Travis will plop on the couch for some sports on the nearby television, or a watching of How I Met Your Mother, and these familiar comforts become my soundtrack. In this chair, I have written stories I never dreamed of writing. Better and larger stories. Stories I will soon, God willing, be sharing with you all.

This is my place. There will be more places to come which I know nothing about, and more people to share those places with me. But when the time comes to leave my Wrigleyville home, I will vacuum and swiffer out this nook now devoid of bookshelves and then look at the emptiness and know it was never empty before and never can be empty again, for universes were created within it.