I’m back from Jordan! While I was overseas, the printer delivered the second printing of the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath graphic novel, which arrived a week before the printer said it would, causing a considerable amount of havoc since I wasn’t there to move the 1000+ books into the house from the street. Luckily, my friend Jen Vaughn saved me by getting the books out of sight of vandals, getting a ton of heavy lifting workout in the process. I finally got all the books moved down to the basement and sent 200 of them to the post office where they’re headed to Diamond Comics and to people who’ve been back-ordering Dream-Quest over the last three months. Thanks for waiting, everybody!

It was a great trip (my first time visiting during Ramadan), but let’s talk about nerdy stuff. Firstly, I’m going to be at the launch party of Northwest Press’s LGBT/bisexual/borderless anthology “Anything That Loves” at Phoenix Comics & Games this Saturday, August 24, from 7-9 PM! Please stop on by and meet me and a bunch of other cool people! I have a 16-page story in this anthology, and you can see a 10-page segment of it here. Tumblr that stuff! Check it out! It was a lot of fun to work on. Zan, the editor/publisher of Northwest Press, is a great guy. The colors are by the super-awesome Vanessa Gillings and Jay Al Hashal.

The weekend after that, Labor Day Weekend, I’ll be a guest and exhibitor at Kumoricon, August 31-September 2, in Vancouver, Washington! (Right across the river from Portland!) Please come on by and say hello! I’ll have copies of “Anything That Loves” and all my other stuff, and I’ll be doing a ton of panels and gaming events. I’ll put up the exact details and times of these events over the next few days, so please keep checkin’ out The Stiff updates (and/or my twitter @mockman) for the details.

So getting back to Jordan… what did I do there? Well… my wife and I and my in-laws played a lot of cards. We attended a wedding. I drank a ton of Coke & coffee. I smoked a ton of argeeleh (hookah). I discussed politics. We bought a bootleg Arabic copy of “Scrabble.” We went to the greatest cafe/bookstore in Amman, Books@Cafe. And I read a ton of awful zombie novels on my Kindle when I wasn’t doing anything else. EXCITEMENT. But now back to work drawing. I’ll write more soon! Go to my events!

NEXT UPDATE: Friday!