Late Update from Con

 

It's a madhouse - Charlton Heston - Planet of the Apes

 

 

Funny thing about nerd mecca. The wifi and cell networks are seriously overloaded. You can send a text just fine. Getting a text is another matter. We've seen delays of up to a half hour in delivery. Not useful for 'Meet me by the Cthulhu Film Fest booth' messages. Getting solid wifi that isn't slower than Seattle drivers on the first sunny day in spring is also challenging. However. Here I am. Late and with nothing at all to offer on our topic this week, because I have exactly zero audiobooks.

 

Sole actor close encounter so far: Alan Tudyk. Don't look him up. Watch this clip for the project he and Nathan Fillion are doing. This was one of those 'out of context' close encounters. I was at lunch, sitting at a table right on the aisle. This means that my brain, slowed by the prospect of noms, failed to connect all the dots quickly enough. No photo. I was too slow on the draw. Also, the dude had suitcase and garment bag in tow. He was desperately trying to get to his hotel room. With a train of die-hard fan boys already on his butt.  His "Not now guys." was far kinder than a couple of hours on an airplane should have allowed. But there you go.

 

And now. The photos. And then I'm outta here. Have a great weekend!

 

Zombies in the elevators. The Marriott missed an opportunity. A few of my fellow con-goers and I agreed that they should have canned the usual insipid elevator music in favor of The Walking Dead theme.

This is a mockup of a quarantined LA - promoting the new Fear the Walking Dead series.

A World of Warcraft orc set up to promote the Warcraft movie

I met one of my personal heroes. The Tick. Any superhero who gets to say "Put the moon back, demon waif!" deserves my adoration. Bonus points if you can sing the theme song.

The Walking Dead booth inside the exhibition hall. Those are zombies. Get too close to the black barrier (lower left of photo) and you took your life into your hands.



Don't Know Marketing

Don't Know Marketing
Do you ever feel like you're only barely qualified to talk about something? Yeah. Me and marketing.  It is a gaping black hole in the speckled galaxy of 'stuff Marcella knows'.

Solution: learn.
My current 'favorite' paid marketing is actually a class on marketing I just started taking. Not that I intend to turn it into a business or anything - this is a base layer so I can understand how marketing works.

Marketing is about relationships.
If you are authentic, you build organic and lasting relationships with people who think like you do. See? My classes are paying off already. Before two weeks ago, marketing was just selling something. Maybe it's no surprise, then, that my favorites are about relationships.

Relationship the First and the Free
Feline-L. These are people I've known for years who are members of a Feline Fancier's Listserv. We may be techno-dinosaurs (those should totally be a thing), but we have members in Turkey, Israel, France, the UK, South America, Canada and the US, all of us bound by our appreciation for felines. Our members encompass people from all walks of life. Scientists. Veterinary professionals. Artists. Techies. You name it. Fellow sci-fi/fantasy author Noel-Anne Brennan is a member. She even coached me through a few things when I was first published.

Several of my friends of Feline-L have come over to Twitter. Several of us have a 10% pact - 10% of what we make goes to charity whether it be animal welfare, environmental causes, or any other charity. We Tweet that we're donating and to whom, but dollar amounts never go on social media. We're interested in being accountable. Not in boasting or being jerks.

These folks buy books, talk about books and they leave the best reviews. To this day, I have a file folder full of pictures of their cats with my books.

Relationship the Second and the Paid

World of Warcraft.

Laugh if you like. While you laugh, I will sing songs of raids conducted in imaginary, animated dungeons by groups of like-minded geeks talking to one another live in real-time via Ventrilo. Or Mumble. These are people from across the world, techies, mostly. Your main tank may be an IT tech for the US military in real life. The lead healer may be a cyber-security expert from Down Under. One of the hunters is a programmer who lives just down the street from you. Sure. A few of the raid members are still nerds living in Mom's basement. Most of them aren't, though, cause the ones who can't afford to move out can't afford the monthly pay to play. Almost all of them will bend over backwards to buy a book from that little gnomish fire mage with tragic fashion sense. One of my fellow raiders ended up joining the guild I belong to so I could talk him through working on his own book and getting it ready for submission. This is my other group of friends from all over the world. These people whisper me in game demanding to know when the next book is coming out. The guild leader posts my releases in the guild message of the day and leaves it up for a week. We host real life guild events that pull people from all over and my guildies bring their copies of my book for me to sign. When we hear a guildie is coming in from out of town (or from out of country) word goes out and we meet up. These people buy and consume books like they weren't addicted to an aging massive multiplayer online roleplaying game. They write awesome reviews and twist their friends' arms to read my stuff.

Getting to be friends with your readers, does it get any better?

Under Multiple Influences

TV, movies, books, computer games - it's always been about stories for me. I'm a sucker for narrative. It doesn't even have to be good, but it does have to intrigue me. Dark edging into creepy is always good for me. Sad stories need not apply. Being who and what I am, I really don't need any help with the whole depressive thing. I've got a lock on that all by myself.

So the list?
From childhood:
Star Trek - the original series

The Omega Man

The Andromeda Strain
Lost in Space
The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key (fantasy)
The Children of Morrow by H.M. Hoover (post apocalyptic fantasy)
The Time of Darkness by H.M. Hoover
The Dark is Rising Series by Susan Cooper (creepy Arthurian mythos goodness)

These gave way to everything Andre Norton ever wrote. I enjoyed Anne McCaffery's stories, but Andre Norton really is the one who gave me stories of women who drove their own destinies. Charles de Lint, Robin McKinley, Stephen R. Donaldson (anything that *wasn't* Thomas Covenant), Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asimov, Michael Crichton. The original Star Wars trilogy, naturally. Somewhere in there, I absorbed a few too many B-grade pirate movies. Props to The Guns of Navaronne, though. That movie still makes me happy. And Alien. Oooo. Loved that movie because I loved how the story was told so effectively without all the standard horror props.

I loved comic books - especially The New Mutants. I got in on the beginning of that book and the writing was pretty solid initially. (Yeah, the writers pissed me off one too many times and I abandoned the book. My loss. But it made me write my own stories.) Several graphic novels caught my fancy, telling stories as they did with stark, beautiful art and sparse prose. I confess to having been addicted to Sandman.

These days?

Music is a huge influence. We won't go into who, what, where. You don't have that kind of time. Really. Books - Linnea Sinclair, Meljean Brook, Nalini Singh, Laurel K. Hamilton (initially - then I just couldn't take it anymore and had to stop), J.K. Rowling (I know, I know, sue me. I really enjoyed those books), and everything my fellow Word-Whores have written. No really. It's a good time. And based on the books penned between the lot of us, some of us are twisted. Not naming any names, just saying. I also have a really big science hobby. Watching science shows on TV was a big treat for me until we axed the TV and moved aboard a boat. Now I read science. Don't care what it is. I just like learning things I didn't know...though admittedly, a few of them are over my head. By an order of magnitude. That's another list that's too long. It's also the reason you won't find a photo of my bookshelves in this post. Besides the fact I'm one place and they're another - no - the stacks are three books deep and untidy. The only organization is 'what I've read' and 'what I haven't yet read'.  Thank heavens for the Kindle. Between my library and the DH's, we'd sink the boat.

Then we come to the computer games. Resident Evil. Do you know, I can't actually watch the movie? I watch parts of it, but I'm such a wimp when it comes to onscreen death and maiming. Write it into my own books? Sure! Watch it? I'll have nightmares for weeks. It's something about hearing the screaming. Can't do it. But the game? Oh, yeah. I'm zombie bait, but it is a compelling little story. And, of course, you already know about my World of Warcraft addiction.

So there it is. This odd conglomeration of multiple influences poured into my head, shaken (not stirred) and transmographied into something that means 'story' to me. Is it telling that 'story' usually means 'explosions'?

Indulgences: Sowing Confusion and Chaos

Evil has a new, fiery nemesis. Granted, so do the vaguely annoying, the 'has-to-die-cause-he's-in-my-way', and the 'what?-he-looked-at-me-funny'. I wander Azeroth, purging wrongdoers from the land, one magically-induced fire at a time. If I throw in a couple of explosions for good measure, well, a girl has to take some pleasure in her work, right? I am Oopsifizbang, gnomish fire mage.

World of Warcraft is my preferred indulgence. Oh, sure, I could have gone with books. Or music. But those things seem to be necessities for me. Perhaps not entirely on par with food, water and shelter, but they're up there in the top twenty. World of Warcraft is - well - an addiction. If you look Oopsi up in the WoW Armory, you'll see she's still sporting an unimpressive item level (gear in WoW is rated with item level - the higher the level, the better the equipment and the better your chances of surviving certain quests within the game system - in some cases, you can't even attempt to defeat bad guys unless your item level meets a minimum standard.) Her progress through the raid instances is trivial. Writing books on deadline plays hell with raid schedules. But that's okay. Oopsi is first and foremost a character - an alter ego that spills over into this life. My husband calls me a fire mage - as if *I* could start channeling massive bursts of hellfire from my hands. Course, it could be he calls me that to get me to light the fire in the woodstove so he doesn't have to...

My husband and I play the game together on a role-playing server, meaning that when one logs into an RP server, it is with the intent of acting as and in the voice of one's chosen character. It's acting hour, after a fashion. We're in a medium-sized guild with a group of really terrific people, several of whom actually live within driving distance. We've met in person and a bunch of us are good friends in game and out of game. My guildies were some of the first people to celebrate the sale of my first book. When I have a block of time, word goes out and we log into game, group up and go beat down some of the most difficult dungeons in the game. No, I'm not one of the uber-l33t players. Oopsi is about personality. Presence. She is a diminuative, disarming bundle of cute, ambiguous morality who favors Sulferon Slammers - a drink so strong it lights the drinker on fire and does a few points of damage every second for several seconds. She's sweet. She smiles a lot. While she's lighting your socks on fire. 'Living Bomb' is her favorite spell. In a dungeon, when four or five bad guys attack at once, she casts Living Bomb on every single bad. When it goes off, the bomb blows up every bad guy within a certain radius. It tickles Oopsi (and me) to have the mobs blowing up their friends, although, the exploding sheep had some appeal, too...

Yeah. After a long day of flogging my brain for action! adventure! and romance! there's nothing quite like logging into game and reducing some poor critter to charcoal.  I leave you with a short my husband filmed for his film class: An Interview with Oopsifizbang. (Filmed pre-cata.)


An Interview with Oopsifizbang from Keith Burnard on Vimeo.