About three hours ago I left Emily’s Bed and Breakfast in Amherst, MA, where I stayed while on faculty at Rebecca Guay’s Illustration Masters Class, maybe the most gratifying experience of my adult life. Three hours, and I’m already writing about withdrawals … everyone who was there will know how I feel.

For a week we got to spend 16-20 hours a day down in the deep end, where the good stuff can be found, hanging out with some of my favorite kids-books author/artists, the guy who created Darth Maul, and someone whose art I wore on T shirts as a kid. I could go on and on about the generosity and intuitiveness you see in Julie Bell and Boris Vallejo, Iain McCaig’s energy, the beams of light that radiate out of Donato when he talks about the human form, Scott Fischer’s craft and insight … But any description would fall short. And the students were as impressive and as inspiring as the faculty. Thanks, Adam, Bree, Renae, Evan, Doug, Tran, Michelle, the Araujo twins, Marc, Sue, Alessandra, everyone … Most of all, of course, Becca.

In Fool for Love, Sam Shepard has this one line: Kim Basinger’s making fun of him for not being able to relate to anyone who’s not a cowboy. Sam’s response: “If you ain’t a cowboy, you ain’t shit,” sharply punching the last three words. Her criticism’s absurd. Why would he care about anyone who’s not a cowboy? That’s how I feel about painters right now. And I can’t paint …

It’s that feeling of being down in the deep end I’m gonna miss. I’ll work at keeping it. But for a week we’ve been doing nothing but swimming around inside the creative process. We’d wake up, head to the studio, pour over each others’ work, sit in lectures with talented, insightful, and eloquent instructors. And at three or four in the morning, we’d finally give in so we’d have some juice to get going again in the morning.

I have a more creative day job than a lot of people, and I have to remember not to take it for granted. But I’m sorely bummed about the prospect of returning to the office Thursday, facing budgets, personnel issues, the inevitable politics inside an office space. It takes you out of that good place where your brain and your hands are only there to plug craft into inspiration and cut something good out of nothing. I want to go to there … I want to live there. I don’t know many shortcuts—I can get there whenever I’m around Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon. I had a great time there with Joss Whedon when we were plotting the end of Buffy Season 8 for three days in his bungalow in Santa Monica. Mostly I get it only when I have time enough to get my brain miles away from the minutiae and the BS that clog up our thoughts most days. Give me three hours of uninterrupted writing time, and I can get there. This week was heaven, though, being able to live in it for days on end, never stepping out of it (well, except the one phone call I had to make to LA). (And even having to type “LA” just now shot a shiver of resentment up my back.)

Iain McCaig, who gets to spend a lot more of his time in the deep end than I do, told me that the way he gets by on four hours of sleep a night is to make sure that whatever he had to do during the day, he ends the day drawing. Iain’s a goddamn force of nature, the teenaged hero from a Victorian adventure story grown up, a creative powerhouse of a guy. I’ll try to take his advice, and end as many days as I can on the good stuff. Sometimes it doesn’t work for me, trying to access the good stuff in the dead of night when the day has had its way with me. I don’t have Iain’s energy, few people do, but maybe I can pull this off.

In my hometown there’s a forest up behind our colonial-era graveyard. When I was a kid I saw demons in there, felt a ghost touch my face, heard footsteps just outside my field of vision, where the shadows hid whatever was or wasn’t there. I was hooked on it, went up there whatever I could. I thought I was doing it in search of some kind of understanding, but I later realized it was simply about experiencing it, getting that far outside the boring stuff that keeps you anchored, whatever it was clogging up my brain as a teenager, the elements’ victory over spirit. I’m heading to Ipswich tomorrow. Maybe I’ll get up to those woods, check in with whatever part of my mind those woods were poking at, and see what it stirs up.

Yesterday confirmed that while I’ve gotten pretty good at scheduling this monstrosity of an event, I need some work, since I never got dinner and actually managed to triple-book the 6:00 hour.

Luck was with me, though, in that I got to say hi to a bunch of people I wanted to, mostly by coincidence. I was hardly ever in the Dark Horse booth, but I was standing in just the right spot when Felicia Day blew through for five minutes, and when Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon showed up. Debbie Olshan from Fox was having a meeting in our booth with a coworker, and I interrupted it with a big inappropriate greeting—Debbie’s been my Fox contact for years, all through the entire Buffy job. I got to meet with a writer who I’m interested in working with, and it turns out he’s a major Buffy fan specifically interested in a character I sort of need help with, so he (the writer) might become one of our guys for Season Nine. The gang from Buffyfest came through the booth, and moments later, as always happens, I was standing in the booth talking to a reader or an aspiring artist, and I see drifting through our booth, looking slightly lost, Joss Whedon—I have breakfast with him an hour from now, but almost without fail the first time I see him at the show he’s drifting through our booth looking like he doesn’t know anyone. The breakfast meeting with him and Sierra is largely to shore up plans for how we’re gonna finish work on Buffy Season Eight while he’s directing The Avengers, a fact he confirmed to the world at his panel yesterday with JJ Abrams. I didn’t get to attend the panel, because I was doing a Dark Horse horror panel with Mike Mignola, Steve Niles, Shawna Gore, and Marc Andreyko, where we plugged a lot of our books, and announced plans for new Cal McDonald comics with Steve and new artist Chris Mitten, including a Goon/Cal crossover. I did my usual over-the-top recommendation of The Orphanage, scariest movie I’ve seen in years, to which, of course, no one on that panel has any connection …

If you follow my Twitter, you saw some pics of the sad little Baptist hate mongering demonstration, three people with twice as many signs, as I recall, and the much larger, more vocal, anti-hate group, mocking them with signs like God Loves Gay Robin, which I’m pretty sure he does.

Elisabeth and I went to the Dexter party last night. Michael C. Hall’s hair has grown back in curly after treatment, which led to an in-depth conversation with a girl, Telly, who asked if I were half-black, then kept saying, “You’d never know it, but I’m half-black!” She was so focused on my hair that she didn’t realize that the other guy in the cowboy shirt was Michael himself. After the party, Elisabeth and I mellowed out on the Hilton patio, per tradition, with some Dark Horse coworkers.

Today, I’ve got the Dark Horse panel with Gerard Way and Eric Powell and a bunch of other folks at 11:30 in Rm 3; a long-overdue meeting with Mark Fernandez from Ecko; introducing Joss at his panel at 3:00 in room 20, where we’ll share a little of what’s going on in Season Eight and hopefully some of the horror stories from the hiatus; the Goon movie panel’s at 6:00 in room 24ABC, where I believe Eric is showing the promo reel, which is amazing; and … the Eisners. Patton Oswalt is doing a standup show somewhere in town tonight, so the Eisners are sure to be slightly less funny than they were last year, but hopefully the Reno 911 guys are presenting again. I think we’re nominated for a few things, I think Beasts of Burden and Dave Stewart—wish us luck.

It’s already really quiet in Milwaukie, Ore., with the Dark Horse offices emptied out and most of the marketing and editorial staff setting up in San Diego. We’ve got tumbleweed blowing down the hall, although there is still some of the usual drama—news from two different artists that torpedo schedules built specifically around them, and someone in Hollywood (no one you know…) mad about something we didn’t even know about. What else is new? Still, it seems like a good time to start this blog I’ve been meaning to do. Here’s my sound check.

A couple days ago my 5-year-old son told me that he’d dreamt he came to Comic Con with me. All his classmates were there, but none of the kids he ever talks about were among the group. I realized he’s probably having that dream experience in which  you see a group of people you know to have a relationship to you, but they’re no actual specific people, and I felt like I was back in “Inception,” which had my brains tangled all weekend.

I don’t get to San Diego until 10:30 tonight, the first Preview Night I’ve missed since Jason Pearson and a group of us skipped out for Tijuana >shudder< a number of years back, and first time in a long time I’ve missed setup—something I’m following on Twitter @darkhorsecomics . Looking forward to seeing some old friends, and to some announcements. Most of the ones pertaining to me are gonna be made off the cuff on some panels, including some writing news for yours truly. If you’re looking for me, here’s where I can be found …

THURSDAY

9-12 Dark Horse booth #2615

3-4 Dark Horse Horror panel Rm 9

6-6:30 BPRD Members Only Party

6:30-7 Robert E Howard group signing at the Dark Horse booth

FRIDAY

11:30-12:30 Dark Horse panel Rm 3

4-6 Dark Horse booth

SATURDAY

11:15-12:15 Gerard Way panel Rm 6DE

2-3 Guild panel at Bayfront Hilton

5-6 Hellboy panel Rm 25ABC

SUNDAY

9-1 Dark Horse booth

I’m going to the show ready to hire artists for some upcoming Mignola projects, some Buffy-related things, cover gigs, and some writing jobs. It’s nice to treat the show like a shopping trip, with scripts figuratively in hand ready to give the right artist, rather than meeting an amazing talent and vaguely talking about the possibility of doing something together down the road. In fact, Mignola just called me from the show—which doesn’t start for a while, mind you—to say he saw a guy he wants to set up with a Hellboy oneshot. If you’re prepared to blow me away with your work, find me in the Dark Horse booth—please don’t try catching me before or after panels, that’s almost never the right time.

Peace,

Scott

PS My favorite things this week: New John Severin pages arrived yesterday for our Witchfinder series; advance copy of The Amazing Screw-On Head hardcover arrived, which we should have at Comic Con; new issue of Boom’s Incredibles out today; Dexter party tomorrow night; listening over and over to Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard’s “Brownsville Girl.”

PPS Check out my Dollhouse/Buffy interview at http://buffyfest.blogspot.com/ Sorry if I came off snarky about the Buffy motion comics—I have not seen them, and am generally not much into the idea of motion comics.

Stay tuned for announcements and updates from Comic-Con San Diego.