“One of my favorite blog authors is a lazy bum.”

Okay, guilty. I had plans to at least get something down the weekend before A-Kon, but didn't, obviously. I did some odd chores around the house, and then Claudia and I saw the new X-men movie with some friends that Saturday, which was fun. The verdict from the ladies is that it's worth seeing for the sight of Hugh Jackman's ass alone. This is coming from the same ladies who refer to '300' as 'Beefcake on parade.'

We drove up to Dallas on Wednesday, set up on Thursday, and started selling on Friday. All the rest of the days sort of blur into one long sales pitch with breaks for napping. There were a lot of fun costumes to see, including a Dalek, a battleaxe that was too big to fit in the back of a pickup truck, and the first time I've ever seen a person cosplaying Jigsaw. I was able to get into the Artist's Alley for a bit, too. My daughter had requested that I pick up some buttons for her, and I discovered that there is a small, niche market for art based on the TV series, 'Hannibal.' Curiouser and curiouser.

There were also rumored to be some 'odd' goings on, the sort that you're never able to find anyone willing to confirm or deny that they really happened, but that stick in your head and pop up like bad music from your teen years. Would kids really dig a grave-sized hole in a walkway area and try to spend their nights sleeping in it? Could a vandal desecrate a historic piece of art and expect his excuse of 'I didn't know there was paint in my can of spray paint' to be believed? Is someone warped enough to use a koi fish for a purpose that I'm not going to name in a blog that doesn't screen out minors? Maybe. True or not, they're going to get used at some point.

When my head is working on selling shiny things to pretty ladies, it doesn't wander well, so I've got some catching up to do. In the Dark is reaching that stage where I'm reading the dialogue, listening to the voices of each of the characters and finding uneven spots. These are where it sounds like some deranged brain surgeon attacked them while the other person was speaking and performed impromptu trepanning, because all of a sudden their entire attitude and pattern of speech changes. I know this is what has happened in some books that I've read, and that if I just re-read them enough times I’ll get all the subtle clues that point this out. Rest assured, if you ever notice this problem in one of my stories and you don't get to read about the hero catching the surgeon, it's all the book-printer's fault, because obviously they used an inferior glue and all the pages that would have had the story make perfect sense popped loose and fell out.

Oh, the title of this post? You can that Claudia for that. I can always rely on my wife for subtle hints. Maybe I should have her read all those stories and look for the mad surgeon.

Still writing.