Hey all! I’m sure you noticed my announcement at the top of the page (or not if you’re subscribed to my feed I suppose….).

Yes, I do intend to temporarily move to thrice weekly. I hope this isn’t going to confuse everyone in the world… I just wanted to get the storyline moving because I realized it would take me until September to tell the whole story I want to tell, just because the pages will be released so slowly.

So! I’m going to give a MWF MTTh schedule a try. What I’m going to do is try MWF MTTh next week, and then back to TTh the week after. Please let me know how you feel about that alternating week format (I know it’s annoying), and I’ll see if I want to continue it in that manner. This way, pages get up faster and I’ll get my story arc done sometime this year. Haha…

Edit: I decided it might be easier to just to a Monday – Tuesday – Thursday update, for those of you that come to my page on those days anyway. I’ll see how it works with this schedule instead.

Gary from Fleen (the webcomic news authority, natch!) is so awesome. Yesterday he gave The Glass Urchin a nice shoutout, saying:

It’s always an uncertain thing when a strip changes its primary direction — say, when an autobio/journal type comic that centers on discrete, not-related events decides to tell a longer story. Even if I didn’t know creator Auilix slightly (and by “slightly” I mean “not remotely well enough to know where this story is heading”), I think that the teaser page for the just-started “Senior Year” arc would have grabbed me — there’s a lot of promise in those five panels, and they do a hell of a good job at setting the hook and making me want to see the story through. If you haven’t been reading The Glass Urchin, this might be a good time to start.

I hope those of you jumping into the comic now that I’ve started a continuing storyline will stick around, and as usual I thank my fan who’ve enjoyed the comic from the beginning for being patient with me while I try out new things. I’ve kind of always wanted to tell a more storyline-like version of my life, and here we begin. As usual, all the events that happen are true so it might be hard at times for me to get in all the information needed. As such, things might have to change around here and I’m trying to decide if i need to bump the schedule up temporarily to three times a week or not. Stick around and we’ll see what happens!

Continuing onto… the actual day of MOCCA! Dum dum DUM! My first con with The Glass Urchin, and it could be said it was my first “real” con anyway. I packed up my stuff (which all fit into this tiny Amazon box anyway), and headed on my way! The Armory was quite empty when I arrived and met up with Bree and her boyfriend Colin. One look at the sparse wooden table and we knew…. Problem number 1! Tablecloth! Luckily, the con-knowledgeable Darren was there to save the day with his preparedness. He’d brought not one but two lovely tablecloths for us to use! At around 11, the fest was supposed to open, but we mostly just sat around twiddling our thumbs and wondering where the real MOCCAians were.

Turns out, due to some odd error on MOCCA’s part, they didn’t have the registers and so were unable to open the floor until 12:30! As a result, they extended the con hours until 7, which gave us an extra hour to boil in our shoes sell hot merchandise!

We got to meet some great people throughout the day, like Gary of Fleen who gave Bree and myself some invaluable tips on table setup and pricing (and also covered MOCCA much better than I could here and here). I stopped by Charles Snowe’s booth, he’s a nice fellow who has always supported GU, and he also introduced me to the Boston Comics people (later I bought Charles’ first book of Sordid City Blues and am enjoying it a lot! I always felt continuing comic stories work best on paper). It’s always cool to meet other comickers who you’ve talked to online in real life. We also met some children who enjoyed Bree’s twisted tale of the Trix Rabbit, a bevy of sweaty-handed nerds, and of course the obligatory friends to the rescue who came to support us. I even met a former coworker who admitted to me she didn’t very much like my stuff, and would be willing to buy it out of pity, if only I had something cheaper to offer! =_=

We also met a bunch of cool others who we talked or traded with: Sophie and Jen (who do the very cute and charming webcomic Darwin Carmichael is Going to Hell); Dave (who does the very neat zombie story Dead Winter, not to be confused with our buddies from Baltimore who did the neat zombie story Dead of Summer); Alisa (who illustrates beautifully and has awesome business cards); Brian (who did a very cute mini book we traded for called Adamantly Amorous); L. (who traded for a very cool 24-hour comic book and does a webcomic called Jumbly Junkery); Miriam and Andrea (of the local (Yay!!) comic group Comics Queens); Branson (a very cool cat who has an awesome style; Meghan (who traded me a cute book, and who I bought Good Minnesotan from); Kate Beaton (who I bought the great Never Learn Anything From History from, and I got a cute Jane Austen pic too!); Shelli and Braden (who created/participated in the awesome Star Wars anthology I bought Don’t Forget the Droids); Spike (who does the great Templar Arizona and who is a very awesome person); and many others (let me know if I’ve forgotten to mention you here)!!

So let me begin by saying MOCCA was hella awesome. Also hellishly hot! I’m surprised so many artists came and hung in there, as the building MOCCA was in was just boiling and full of dead, recycled air. Yet we all hung in there and managed to enjoy ourselves to boot! Hah! Take that, 69th Regiment Armory!

Anyway, because the whole weekend was so full of craziness and excitement, I’m going to have to split it up a bit! I’ll post a follow-up to this soon.

To give you some background, Bree and myself had been wanting to go and present at MOCCA forever (well… basically since when we first heard about it last year). We signed up promptly on the day registration opened, but we somehow became 16th on the waiting list. Then, three weeks ago, the MOCCA people alerted Bree that we’d actually successfully gotten the table! OMG (due to my own personal qualms with getting anything ready in two weeks, I had to back out from the original plan of taking half the table… I’m a super super slow artist)!! However, Bree really pulled through and in addition to her snarky bag (which got a lot of laughs at the fest), she pulled together two fun mini books in two weeks.

Onezumi was to appear at our table too, but at the last second backed out due to crazy and unfortunate unforeseen circumstances, she couldn’t make it. And then, at the very last second, who pulled out of the blue for us? Why it was Darren of Hello with Cheese/Dear Pirate/Experts Guide!! What an amazing chap! So as you can tell, MOCCA was already pretty crazy and it hadn’t even started.

After working our asses off (I made mini-books of GU, a pin set, and a greeting card set, I’ll post pics later), we decided to unwind the Friday night before the show by going to Hope Larson’s very fun Drink and Draw Like a Lady! Although the space and permanent red room lighting didn’t really allow for too much drawing, we had a lot of fun meeting all the ladies. Bree and I met some cool cats, including Kate Beaton (omg! her first time in NYC! I hope she enjoyed it!), Jess Fink (who had awesome earrings and oh… NSFW), Meredith Gran, among others. We also chatted with Randall Munroe (who was decidedly NOT supposed to be there, but who did a sketch-off with Bree) and Rosemary Mosco who is very talented and cool (and she should get back into the comics stuff!!).

We drank, drew (a little), socialized and were merry! And then we went to have two spoons of Chinese food. And then went home to sleep for the big day… Stay tuned for the next MOCCA entry!

Bree and myself used to make up the entirety of all that was Nerdcomics, but no longer! We’re proud to introduce the third member of Nerd, Foley of Dingleberry. You might remember Foley from such comics as my own No Pandering, or Bree’s Substance Abusers (and more, just dig in those archives)! And now here he is with plenty of his inappropriate humor to share, in comic form!! And since Dingleberry updates on Wednesdays, you can now read a brand-spankin’ new NERD comic every day! Be sure to also check out Nerdcomics.com for more of our shared ramblings!