PAX Post-Mortem: Saturday

Friday's story is here.

Saturday

The one advantage of always being three hours ahead when I go to these all-day gaming things on the West coast is that I can sleep in and wake up early at the same time. This was fortunate for me, because when I set the alarm on my phone to wake me up I forgot to turn it off of “silent” mode. I woke up at 9:30AM (12:30PM for my body), a full half hour before I needed to be anywhere.

The expo hall opened at 10, but I’d seen everything in roughly 12 minutes on Friday. I would have looked for a real breakfast somewhere, but I’d spent too much on dinner and decided I’d wing it. I walked to a small market, roughly the equivalent of a gas station mini-mart minus the gas station, and bought a bottle of tea and a 99-cent bag of barbecue style potato chips – a flavor that I hate, but they weren’t for me.

During Wil’s keynote the day before, he mentioned, multiple times, buying barbecue style potato chips for his (possibly high) parents and then using the change left over to play arcade games at the store. Today I was supposed to find him and tossing him the chips would be a hilarious opener, for I am, above all things, a prop comic.

When I got into the main floor of the convention center, I was faced with another gigantic line for Wil. It seems that when he arrived there was already a line formed for him, so he had to forgo his plans of walking around aimlessly and deal with the lines. He had another bag of books from his hotel room, what he had yesterday (and ran out of) was just from a small box he’d shipped.

I pressed my way through the line to get into the expo hall and saw Greg Rucka setting up an autographs table at the Sony booth. Nobody was in line at that time, but the doors had just opened. I did a few laps around the floor and then came back when it looked like he was ready. I got in line behind another couple who were having a copy of Whiteout (one of Greg’s more popular graphic novels, soon to be a movie, never read by me) signed. To my right, somebody was demonstrating Sony’s Singstar karaoke game and a guy dressed up in a gigantic Parapa The Rappa costume was holding the other microphone up to his furry mouth and moving to a hip-hop beat, but sadly was not rapping about karate, driving, flea markets, cooking, bathrooms, or anything at all.

When I was up to Greg’s table, I wordlessly pulled from my bag (reaching around the potato chips) my first-edition hardcover copy of Keeper, his first novel from 1996 and set it down in front of him while he stared wordlessly at it like I’d pulled out the first puppy he ever owned.

“You.. have… a book,” he said mid-shock. Everybody else was just having promo material for the Siphon Filter game he wrote signed.
“I’m a big fan,” I said, “of the whole [Atticus Kodiak] series.”
“That’s great,” he said, then asked my name for the autograph, then waited for me to spell it.
“It was the first first-person narrative book I read that I didn’t hate. Though, I read it before Moby Dick. Kind of hated that one too.”
After signing my book, he said, “The new one, Patriot Acts, comes out on the 27th [hey, that was yesterday!].”
“Already pre-ordered,” I said with a dumb grin. He matched it.
“And I’m already writing the one after that, so it’ll be back-to-back Atticus.”
“Will it have as many delays as this one?” I asked, immediately feeling like a jerk for doing so. Patriot Acts was supposed to come in 2005, then fall 2006, then winter 2007. I think I said it non-jerkily enough.

Granted, those delays were because he was commissioned by Microsoft to write a novel in the Perfect Dark series of games, then another, then they started making a movie based on Whiteout, and so on. Plus he still writes for Batman and Wonder Woman (the comic books) occasionally.

I asked him if he had any problems with the timeline for the new book, since it’s supposed to take place 20 minutes after the last book, which took place in the 1990s, but features modern politics.

“Not really,” he said. “I felt it was easier to just ignore it. Atticus would be in his fourties now, and that’s not very interesting. It’s like Queen & Country a series of books and comics about a female British spy – my word this guy writes a lot of different licenses, where the politics have to keep moving to keep up with the times but the character has to stay the same. The timeline isn’t really set in stone, though. Keeper could really be set anytime.”
“Unless they outlawed abortion,” I said. Keeper hovers around the issue of abortion quite a bit.
He paused for a moment, and then nodded broadly, “Ok, that’s one thing.”

He then grabbed one of the Siphon Filter promo fliers and signed it as well, and handed it to me. I thanked him.

I never even mentioned my book.

Why? Because I’m a chicken, that’s why. A land fowl.

I’d read on his website in a FAQ that he can’t and won’t accept unsold material from other people “to look at,” citing legal and time ramifications. That was mostly just to stop wannabe writers from sending him garbage printed and stapled at Kinkos, hoping he’d pass it along to a publisher or something; this in the same way that wannabe screenwriters are always trying to pass their lousy romantic comedy scripts on to actors hoping they can sideline the complicated part of becoming successful (getting there). My book was printed and bound professionally, with a professionally designed cover and a neat font and a title page chapter headings in a font you have to pay hundreds of dollars to use. Plus, it was more as a gift or a sacrifice to the gods for me than a “please read this and make me famous” ploy. There was a difference, of course, but if I handed him a copy and he had to refuse it, it would have destroyed me and made him look like a huge jerk.

Plus, my opinion regarding my book is constantly fluctuating between “this is complete dreck” and “this will revolutionize written word” on a daily/hourly basis, and it was unfortunately at the “dreck” side of the scale at that moment, so even if I was certain he would take it, I was too embarrassed for it. I took my autographed wares and walked away.

I parked myself at the table next to Wil’s, currently empty but reserved for a band called The Minibosses. Leaning against the table, I looked at my autographs. He spelled my name right. The book, autographed in red fine ink (not thick Sharpie as is customary), “Aaron – Keep the faith. Greg Rucka” and the promo sheet for the game was signed (in thick, black Sharpie), “Aaron – Shout duck and aim low! Greg Rucka” I decided that people who often sign autographs must have a different inscription for each thing they sign. “Keep the faith” must have been a “Keeper” reference. My signed copy of Just a Geek, a birthday present from my brother a few years back, was made out “Aaron, Get your geek on! Wil Wheaton” I realized that if I was going to get famous, I’d need to come up with some kind of title-relevant inscription for when I autograph Mind + Body.

“Sam,

Keep your mind out of the gutter!

Aaron Dunlap”

“Sally,

I don't MIND your BODY...

Aaron Dunlap”

“Silas,

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Milk does a body good. Milk comes up a lot around the tenth chapter.

Soon to be unemployed,

Aaron Dunlap”

I’d deal with that later.

Wil’s line was still dominating the room, and people were crowding around me (peripheral to the line) to take pictures or just look at him. I figured I probably wouldn’t be getting that chance to hang out with him today, so I slid the signed stuff into my messenger bag and pulled out the bag of K.C. Masterpiece Barbecue Style Lays potato chips from my bag and tossed it over the little cloth divider between his mini-booth and the one I’d requisitioned. It landed with a gentle rustle on his backpack, sitting on a chair next to him.

“Here,” I said, when he followed the noise to look over. “Barbecue style.”
“That is hilarious,” he said, though his face was mostly blank. Judging by his face, I’d have guessed he was just humoring me, but his voice wasn’t sarcastic at all. I realized that, like me, he probably reads and sees so many funny things on the internet and on tv all day that his sense of humor, like mine, has refined to a point where laughter is a waste of time and the humor of something is only marked by declaring it so.

He said thanks and put the chips into his backpack. Maybe I should have autographed the bag of Lays. I had a black, thick Sharpie in my bag.

“Wil,

Lay off the snacks!

Aaron Dunlap”

“Wil,

Keep the change, use it for video games.

Aaron Dunlap”

“Wil,

Something funny having to do with chips.

Aaron Dunlap”

But I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I’m sure they’re in a trophy case or mounted on a wall somewhere in his house now. I doubt he ate them, for barbecue style potato chips are gross.

Wil went back to signing autographs and selling books to the people in line as they recanted stories of how they used to watch him on Star Trek or how they loved the keynote. I went on to exploring the show, watching the people play LAN games on computers they brought from home (!!) or on one of the hundreds of identical tricked-out PCs (sponsored by Intel) that people could “rent” for free to play games on. That room always had a huge line to get in, and you had to register your seat and show registration every time you entered. I liked going in there just because I could. The guys blocking the door would hold out their arms to stop me and start to say, “Can I help you?” before they noticed that my entrance badge was yellow and said “media” and they’d say “Oh, media,” and move aside.

Another feature of the expo was a series of video game tournaments, where people could sign up to play multiplayer console games against each other in a large room in a standard tournament-style showdown that ended up with one winner. I’d heard that the Guitar Hero II (a rhythm game where you actually play a big, plastic guitar-shaped controller and deal with chords and strumming) tournament was going to be a big deal, so I made my way down there, skipped the big line, and sat in a room for the most boring 2 hours of my life. The game may be fun to play (I don’t know, I haven’t played it) but it’s certainly boring to watch. Wil cut off the line upstairs at his table, came down to see if he could get into the tournament and saw the size of the line, then went back upstairs and back to signing before the lineup could even dissipate.

The rest of the day I spent wandering or attending the panels that looked interesting to me. A few times I put on my journalist cap and tried to act like I was covering something, but I knew I wouldn’t be writing one word about the show in any official capacity. I’d come there for two autographs and to give two people two books. And to get out of my house.

I went back to my hotel once and laid down for a while after walking in a 4-block circle in downtown Seattle trying to find someplace I could get lunch but finding nothing. In the hotel room I ate a granola bar from my laptop bag (brought in case I got hungry on the plane) and moaned about my sore feet. Deciding it would be a genius way to save suitcase space (I only brought a carry-on size bag, a black roller-wheel number with a telescoping handle and the PlayStation logo embroidered onto it, something I’d gotten as a free gift at a Sony party at an E3 one year back when E3 was about parties and free stuff), I didn’t bring any shoes other than the thong-style sandals I wore during the flight. After a day and a half of walking around in them, my feet and ankles were killing me. I always thought shoes were just to make your feet look cool, but apparently they have some other purposes too.

Back at PAX, I stopped by Wil’s table (still with a line) and asked him why he didn’t do the Guitar Hero tournament. I’d overheard at the registration table that they would open up a spot for him by adding another round and re-printing the brackets.

“The line was just too long,” he said in a sad, somebody-cancelled-Christmas voice. “By the time I’d gotten in there and everything it would have been over already. So I decided not to keep the people here waiting.”
I nodded, then explained how slowly everything was moving down there and how I’d been bored to tears. “I’m sure they could have added you in as a final round, or let you play the winner,” I said.

He opened his mouth and held onto a breath.

“—or let you get beat by the winner,” I said, reading his hesitation.
He, and the person waiting for an autograph laughed. “That’s what it would have been,” Wil said.

The person in line moved in and indicated that she wanted a picture with Wil.

Realizing that the talk-time we’d informally arranged on Friday night was probably never going to happen, I asked Andrew, Wil’s editor that I’d met last night and who was sitting behind Wil inside his little table cubby, if he knew if Wil was doing interviews for media. He said he wasn’t sure, but Wil dropped out of his own conversation to tell me that he was doing them from 1:30 through 3PM on tomorrow, Sunday and I should go down to the media room and tell the girl there that I know him and I want to book an appointment.

“Tell her that you know me,” he’d said. That was weird.
No, seriously, I’m with the band!

Down in the media room, where there were free bagels that I never was brave enough to partake from, I asked about booking an interview during that window but the room attendant said that all of the half-hour time blocks were full, but at the end they were going to be doing “ a very small, informal Q&A with a few people at once, to save time.” Figuring it was that or nothing, I put my name down for that.

Between the books and the blog, I was pretty sure there wasn’t anything I didn’t know about Wil, so in an environment of media-related questions and answers I bet I could probably answer the questions myself. Oh well.

At the end of the day as the exhibit hall was closed off to the public and Wil’s line had been terminated at the end by show enforcers, I wandered over, tried to explain with my eyes to the enforcers that I wasn’t a fan and I actually had some business there. When he noticed me, Wil asked if I was able to book an interview time.

“I went down there but they said all the time slots were full so they put me in a multi-person Q&A thing at the end.”
“Yeah, there were a lot of requests and I just don’t have enough time,” he said.
“That’s what I figured, but you said to say that I know you, I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to rip open a hole in time and allow for more interviews, like a Speak Wil and enter [Lord of the Rings referece] kind of thing.”
“That’s funny,” he said in regards to my LOTR reference, and again not really registering the humor on his face. “So yeah, we decided to try that out, a roundtable kind of thing. It should be fine. Yeah, that should be fine,” he repeated, nodding.

Wil excused himself to go into the exhibit hall, now closed off to everybody who wasn’t an exhibitor or a keynote speaker named Wil, and play Rock Band, a.. well.. “band simulator” coming soon that was being demonstrated there. With all the autograph lines, he hadn’t even been on the actual show floor yet.

With him gone, I milled around and bought a bottle of Bawls energy drink from a vendor in the side of the foyer area. Back when Bawls was kind of underground, and not as mainstream as it is now (that you can buy it at Target stores blows my mind) I used to order it in cases and sell it at my High School out of my backpack like I was some kind of crack dealer.

As I stood around, Andrew Hackard came by where I was and I let him know where Wil was in case he was looking. Andrew had a general-acces, three day badge that anybody could get for about fifty bucks, so I doubted they’d let him in if I couldn’t even get in. He already knew, though, and he just stood around as well.

“So,” I said after a few minutes of internal arguments with myself about how I am a total loser and never talk to people, “are you just Wil’s editor or are you with an agency or something? Freelance?”
“Well, editing I do freelance but for my real job I mainly and for a long time have worked as an editor at Steve Jackson Games, but then I left for another company but they’re about to go under.” I’d never heard of Steve Jackson Games. I thought I knew every video game company, but he said it like I should recognize it.
“So how did you become Wil’s editor?” I asked.
“A long time ago I’d read on his blog that he was thinking about putting some of his entries into a book and he needed an editor but didn’t know how to find one, so I just emailed him when I was at Steve Jackson and said ‘If you want I can go over what you have and give you some feedback’ and he replied, ‘Great, but what about payment? I’m kind of working on a tight budget as it is here,’ and I said ‘Look, I can do this one for free and if you want and if you like it, you know, we can work something out afterwards or when the next one comes around.”

Huh. That was kind of like how I offered to help him with his keynote, except there was never any talk of money.

“Do you just do nonfiction?” I asked.
He said he’s done some fiction.

“Huh,” said, then thought for a good, long moment. “’Cuz I just wrote a novel, and am currently trying to decide if I should self publish or keep waiting for an agent.”
“That’s a really tough question,” he said. “What genre is it?”
“It’s… a thriller. Kind of like, conspiracy-thriller sort of.”
“That’s cool,” he said, genuinely.
“I sent out 9 query letters two weeks ago and I’ve gotten 3 rejections back so far.”
“Well, the rejections are the easiest to write, so they come first,” he said.
“Easiest to write? They’re just form letters.”
“Exactly. Easy to print, I guess. Sometimes the good replies take a long time to come, and sometimes the rejections take just as long. Publishers usually don’t want to work with somebody who isn’t represented, and agents don’t want to represent anybody who doesn’t already have published work. It’s kind of self-defeating.”
“It is pretty tricky,” I said.
“If I was looking at it,” he said, “I’d just give you a real quick yes or no about whether to work on it or start over and tell you what I thought before really getting into it.”

He set his backpack on the floor and pulled out a business card bearing his name, email address, and a URL and handed it to me.

“If you want to send it to me or whatever, you know?” he said. I was kind of in shock. I wondered if my first one would be free, too.
“I brought a copy of it for Wil,” I said, more to remind myself than anything else; the book was still in my messenger bag, weighing my shoulder down. “If you’re on the same flight as him, maybe you could read it over his shoulder or something.”
“Mmm, that’ll be rough. He’s going south and I’m going east.”

Before I could say anything, I noticed Wil coming out of the expo hall with a euphoric look on his face. I thought about giving Andrew the copy of my book I was going to give Greg Rucka, but I’d already signed it and made it out to Greg with a note about how his writing inspired me. It’d be a little silly to give that to somebody else.

When Wil came over, he said, to Andrew “Rock Band. I am in love with a game.”
Two more people had joined the circle, people I didn’t know but seemed to know Wil.

“What did you play?” I asked. In Rock Band, one person plays the drums, another plays lead guitar, another plays bass guitar, and even still another person sings. All four people are following their own prompts on different parts of the screen. People without friends can even play with others over the internet.
“Just guitar,” he said, sadly. “I would have tried others but there was such a line behind me I didn’t want to hold anything up.”

He went on to explain to the others how it worked, and how people were cheering along and throwing goats and how it felt exactly like you’re part of a band when you play. Eventually the conversation turned to tabletop (RPG) games and card games. PAX, as well as being a video game expo, also has a lot of table-top content. Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, stuff like that.

As they talked about certain titles, I realized that Steve Jackson Games was a tabletop game company. That’s why I’d never heard of it.

Since I was beginning to drift out of the conversation, I chimed in, “I never played any of that stuff because my parents were Christians.”
They laughed, and one of them said apologetically, “I’m sorry.”
I nodded in acknowledgement. Actually, I never played tabletop games because I always thought they were too geeky even for me, and because nobody I ever knew played them, but I’m sure that I’d have been banned from it if it had ever come up. Dungeon and Dragons, just like reading Harry Potter, is exactly the same thing as worshiping Satan, ya’see?

Wil asked if I’d ever played a game called Zombies, then went on to try to explain it. I tried to explain how doing so would have commuted my soul straight to hell, and he eventually agreed.

Everything was wrapped up and nothing was happening until a concert starting in a few hours and lasting until 2AM, which would have been 5AM to my body. Wil and Andrew left to go get some dinner, and after abandoning hopes for trying to get myself invited along, I retreated to my own hotel after stopping at the mini-mart to buy some Fat Tire beer, which isn’t available in Michigan at all but has been suggested to me as the best thing ever. I brought it back to my hotel and ordered a pizza from a nearby place.

I ate some pizza, drank some Fat Tire (which wasn’t all that great), tried to calm my roaring feet, and watched a bit of a movie on my computer before deciding to check out the concert for a bit. I put on some fresh clothes, walked back to the convention center and into the main theater where the concert was, stood around for around half an hour, and left after I started to have ‘Nam flashbacks from the noise, the pain, and the tired. Back at the hotel, I tried again to set the alarm on my clock and tried again to find some sort of respite in the hard-as-rocks bed.

I’d met both Greg and Wil, and gotten autographs from one. I still had two copies of my book, and I hadn’t gotten a copy of Wil’s yet. Tomorrow was my last day there, and my mission was still incomplete.

Sunday here.