Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com
The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Not the greatest day of sales ever, but Friday never is. Check out the cosplay, though. Notably missing: the Shaggy cosplayer who I didn’t ask for a picture because no one around me could decide if he was cosplaying Shaggy or just looked like it, or the young woman who was definitely not cosplaying Domino but was nonetheless a dead ringer for a slightly younger Zazie Beetz.
It’s small but it’s mine. Come see me at IndyPopCon!
I’m going to be in Booth 1213 on the vendor floor at the Indianapolis Convention Center, sharing a booth with Michelle Wern, who may not be aware of just how much fun it is going to be to be crammed into an 8′ x 10′ booth with me and all of my con shit for three entire days. It is eight o’clock in the morning and I am halfway through my morning coffee. I have approximately six thousand and ten things to do (including mowing the goddamn yard and taking the dog to be boarded at the vet, which is eight thousand miles away) between now and my wife getting home from work at noon, so I probably ought to finish the coffee and stop mucking about on the Internet.
But mucking about on the Internet is fun, so here we are. I didn’t do IndyPopCon last year, but it was a hell of a lot of fun in 2016 and I’m really looking forward to this show. This will be the first con I’ve done twice, so we’ll see if anybody remembers me from last time.
Speaking of boarding the dog, I can see the toxic-ass fart she just dropped, so it’s definitely time to make her go away and I ought to start accomplishing things. Photos to come!
It was official before, but it’s officialer now: I’m going to be at IndyPopCon again in a few weeks, from June 8-10, in Booth 1213, right next to Artists’ Alley. I think I’m sharing a booth with someone– space sold out way faster than I anticipated this year, and I only got into the con at the last minute, but I don’t know who my booth buddy is going to be yet. (EDIT: Never mind! The email came through this afternoon!) At any rate, I’ve spent the morning ordering books and bookmarks for the con, including the new one to the right, based on the cover for Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3.
(That book could really use some more reviews. I know some of y’all read it. Please? Pretty please?)
I suspect I’m going to regret putting that Prostetnic logo at the bottom there– I think it’s gonna wash out– but we’ll see.
At any rate, this is the first of three conventions I’m doing this year– one in Indianapolis, one in Kokomo, and one in Elkhart, so I’m trying to mentally justify the ridiculous amount of money I just spent by reminding myself that it’s covering all three of the cons. We’ll see if that works or not; the money’s out of my bank account nonetheless. Popcon was a lot of fun the last time I went so I have high hopes for this one. Wil Wheaton and Levar Burton are both going to be there. I may try to see if I can use Twitter to get Wil to swing by my booth at some point. It probably won’t work– I imagine if the celebs go to the vendor floor at things like that they tend to get mobbed– but you never know, right? I sorta had Timothy Zahn at my booth once; this isn’t much different, is it?
There are movies we need to see coming out each of the next two weekends, so my wife took the afternoon off so we can go see Deadpool 2. So maybe you’ll get a bonus post tonight. I think it’s probably safe to say I’m gonna like the movie, right?
I spent a few minutes looking for a meme pic or a GIF or even a YouTube clip of Marlon Wayans doing the “Got me a G-O-B” bit from Don’t Be a Menace to Society while Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, but was both unsuccessful and powerfully reminded that that movie is even less funny than I remember. So: South Park reference.
At any rate, however you spell it, I’ve got me one. My first day was only notable in being almost entirely unworthy of discussion; there was some paperwork, some training videos, and that was about it. They actually even let me go a bit early, time I used to wander around the sales floor and try to get used to the vast amount of inventory I’m expected to know stuff about.
And then the skies exploded, and we had perhaps an hour of some of the hardest fucking rain I’ve ever seen– rain so hard that I was unwilling to cross the parking lot to get to my car, because I would have been completely soaked in the five seconds it would have taken to get across the lot. So I wandered the sales floor some more.
There is… uh… quite a lot to know.
IndyPopCon is officially the first convention that I came back from saying yes, I will definitely do that again next year. Miracle of miracles: I actually made a profit! Friday kind of sucked, but Saturday and Sunday were excellent. I ran out of bookmarks Sunday morning and resorted to putting a plate of Oreos on the table in front of me. The deal: you get a free Oreo, but only if you point at a book and say “Tell me about this one!”
More Oreos for greater enthusiasm. $12 worth of Oreos probably made me over $150 in sales. I’ll use that trick again. My only real complaint about the con was the parking situation; my car was obnoxiously far from the convention center, and I’m not certain that the small amount I saved on parking that far away was remotely worth it. I will investigate other options next time.
That said, my next convention has to be some sort of literary convention/book fair sort of thing. I made money at this one, yes, but not exactly a lot of money, and I want to go somewhere where people are explicitly looking for books. I know Gen Con does something like that, but Gen Con is expensive as hell and a pain in the ass to get into, and I’m not super interested in even trying with them. There’s got to be something else somewhere nearby, though.
I feel like I’m forgetting something I wanted to talk about. I’ll update if I remember what it was.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 