[It has not escaped my attention that in just a few short weeks I will be expected to fulfill some sort of regular blogging commitment over at tor.com. Last I checked, um, eighty-seven weeks ago, I was an atrocious blogger. I talked about this with Brian Slattery over brunch before his panel at New York Comic Con, and our consensus was that we were both ill-suited for blogging because the journalistic urge is in some ways the antithesis of the editorial urge: while a good blogger must be generative in the face of time constraints and fallowness, an editor is charged with making sure a piece of writing has the exact ingredients it needs to make its case, excising pointless additives and making sure none of the essentials are left out. And it is on these exact standards that I flounder, far too paranoid that I will bore my audience or, worse yet, leave out the precise detail that would win you over to my side.

But this is a balance I will have to figure out, and I'd much rather do it here than there. I think the best way to train myself is to start off in a sprint, trying my damnedest to post one small thing every day. To stave off my descent into the tragic verbosity that is inevitably my downfall, I'm limiting myself to no more than three sentences a day. I am allowing em-dashes, semicolons, links, parentheticals, ellipses, and maybe some artful run-ons, so they may be long sentences (I'm only human!). But I trust that you'll all chastise me appropriately if I stray from my basic goal?

Obviously, this bracketed section is included for administrative purposes only and does not count. Heh. Here we go for real:]

I remarked to thumbelinablues this morning that last Wednesday's KGB felt like it was weeks ago, presumably due to the massive time distortion field generated by NYCC, at which, within the space of about twenty-four hours, I moderated my second comics panel; took an anthropological stroll with one of my favorite writers; gave out several gazillion buttons featuring our rocketship mascot Stubby; acquired several hopeless crushes; attended two panels; ate sushi with an elite cadre of illustrators; had conversations with dozens of creators and publishers who have naught to do with SF, networking wildly in support of my new comics acquisition gig; made myself go to the afterparty by myself and stay there until I'd had a conversation with a stranger; and finally started to feel like my comics cred is slightly less of a sham than I sometimes fear. I also reproduced the absurd trajectory that seems to be my standard MO at conventions dominated by rows of tables, spending the first two days thinking I have all the time in the world, then suddenly realizing that I've actually got two hours left and 80% of the floor to cover, and consequently seeing a depressingly small subsection of the exciting new things everyone had on hand: in fact, the only things I managed to buy were A Journey to the End of Taste (so far, it's like a direct transcription of my internal conflict with mainstream culture, except several times cleverer) and the first two issues of Comic Foundry—which were both, now that I think about it, directly or indirectly Douglas' fault. It was excellent and exhilarating and exhausting, and has invoked the standard post-con bittersweetness at having to go back to my regular life, which currently consists of grapes, carrots, and peanut butter for dinner and a forced march to stay in the office until I've finished just a few more things and set this entry free.