Thought Bubble and posting frequency

I got back from Thought Bubble today. I thought I'd been to comic conventions before now. I was wrong: I had been to media events with a bit of comics. Their publicity calls it a "celebration of sequential art in all its forms", and I can't put it any better than that. That's not just a slogan: it's true. Something very special happened on that cold November weekend in Leeds.

I was very nervous about the whole thing, and got cold feet last week (partly about my health), and seriously considered cancelling. This would have been one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I was introduced to so many people there's no way I'm going to recall all their names. And people who'd met me before - from other conventions - remembered me! I'm still confused when this happens, as if I think I'm invisible or nondescript or something. I went to panels with proper advice about writing, I chatted, and I saw what people were doing. And I saw what people weren't doing. At the afterparty someone asked me directly: do I have something to say? And it came to me: I do, and my worries have largely been about technical proficiency. And that universal exhortation of "write!" indicates, isn't it better to say it badly than to leave it unsaid?

So, I'm going to see about writing comics rather than writing about comics. I was working on a storyline for the continuation of one idea in the bar (that's for an idea I'd already got an issue of written, and people - admittedly my friends - have laughed at it), and fixed the problems in another on the train home. There are others I haven't even got to yet. I still have no idea about how to find collaborators for the small detail of artwork †, but I can see that developing strong ideas and scripts will probably help with that. And having made a few contacts can't have hurt.

I don't think me continue to post daily here is sustainable. It was really good to get back into the habit of writing things that weren't code or documentation, but it look a large chunk of my free time, and I'm in any case worried that if I continue like at this rate then I'll running out of things to say about Claremont's run (although I've got some corkers lined up). I'm queued up to the Mutant Massacre at the moment (bar one post about New Mutants #44 which I'd been avoiding but am now greatly looking forward to writing, having had the benefit of reading Si Spurrier and Tan Eng Huat's X-Men Legacy in the interim). It'd be too much fiddling to change the post schedule for all of them, but after then I'm going to drop to weekly.

† By which I mean I have no idea how I am going to go get the nerve to go up to someone and say HI YOUR ART IS GOOD LET'S TALK ABOUT MY IDEAS, rather than that I don't understand the basic mechanics of it.