I've decided that I want to go to next year's MoCCa Fest as an exhibitor.  I will need to get serious about reducing my credit card debt, so that I will not just increase it with another trip next year.  The only luxuries that I can really cut back on are restaurant meals and trips to the coffee shops.  So, I think I will try to do just that.

This means that I will try to cut off my contact with the twenty-two year old waitresses and baristas.  I concluded that the world is not running out of unavailable women anytime soon, and that even if I never set foot in these food service establishments until after I get back from next year's New York trip, if then, that there's plenty more unavailable women in this world I can look at and admire.  I can just go hand out flyers on Red River for my music gigs and/or my comic books and see the most beautiful college age women this town has to offer.  I'm not so inclined to do that just now, but I'm not ruling it out.

It was nice being in New York and being some place where what I do as an artist is taken seriously.  There doesn't seem to be much of a self-published indy comics scene in this town.  A guy named Zac said that because there aren't any publishers of those kinds of books here, that may be a reason.  It remains to be seen whether I will follow through with this commitment to save more of my budget for a trip to New York next year.  I hope that I don't jinx my efforts by brining it up here.

I told someone some weeks back that making changes such as the ones I've made in regards to my relationship with women was akin to turning an ocean liner around.  I'll go further, and say it's like a combination of turning the Titanic around as it's headed for the iceberg AND having to do it over and over again until I get it right, much like the Bill Murray character in Groundhog Day.  I hope that my success in the past few years of identifying potential bad scene situations with women means that I have totally learned the art of this maneuver.

It's not only the major ordeals that I have gone on at length about, such as the the two women at that business in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and the Invisible Woman from 2017, but the relatively minor skirmishes that dotted these past several years as well.  An example would be the woman who inspired the song, "My Girlfriend Is a Hate Song."  In that post from late 2016, I guessed that maybe a waitress at a restaurant that I used to patronize had it in for me.  Specifically, that she wanted to take a shot at the Kid and get her some kind of reputation.

In that post, I put out the idea that this waitress was in the process of switching out boyfriends, and that she marked me as the loser in her own personal drama.  Whether that was really true or not, I wrote "My Girlfriend...," posted it, posted my musings, and didn't go there for almost a year afterwards.  I figured that however much of a total asshole this woman might have been, she had a right to earn a living, just like anyone else.  By the time I went back there, she was probably long gone from that place, because I never saw her again. 

There were others, with the same old bullshit, that even I felt like I had to make a call on after the kinds of situations I would find myself in over the years.  One thing I learned how to do was identify those friends and family whom I could count on for support, and those friends and family I definitely could not count of for support.  The people I could not count on would typically tell me that all of that stuff I talked about was all in my head, and they would continue along in the vein of how they were right and I was wrong about whatever I wanted to talk to them about.

The friends and family I could count on for support didn't do that.  They might not have agreed one hundred percent with what I said, but they somehow had the skill set that would dictate that they didn't want to start arguments with me, and they somehow had the social skills to know to just keep their mouths shut and just listen.  There were a couple of these people who really came through when I was at the end my rope a couple of times.

Here's the thing: even though I might be wrong or mistaken about where some of these women are coming from, or whether these scenarios I talk about with people have any basis in reality, but I'm satisfied with the outcome of these crises, real or not, in spite of the fact that I have not consulted someone who just seems to blather on about how crazy I am and how that means that they are always right about everything.  The reason I believe that I am so satisfied with the outcomes, is that I play to the more paranoid sounding possibilities as if they were at least one of several possibilities.  Of one looks back at the posts from these past several years that put these musings out there, I don't think there might be even one that I would dismiss out of hand.  I'm pretty careful in what I say, for one thing, which means that I couch my statements in a lot of skepticism and try to provide a context within which I make these statements in the first place.   

I've been thinking about this stuff because I have just read a list of prominent men alleged and/or confirmed to have engaged in conduct that was, sometimes, not far enough from some of the stuff I've done.  This was in Jezebel.  These past ten or fifteen years or so haven't seen anything from me quite as bad as some of my escapades in eighties, but there's stuff from as recently as 2009 that I'm not exactly okay with.  I'm speaking of stuff that falls more along the lines of inappropriate remarks in a work setting than the high crimes I go on about in Richy Vegas Comics.  These kinds of articles cast a pretty wide net as to what kinds of behaviors make these lists, everything from suggestive comments in a work setting, to groping at an employee function, all the way to out and out coercion and assault.  This Jezebel article was pretty long, so there was a lot of myself to see in some of these listed behaviors.  Again, turning around an ocean liner.

I went to New York City for MoCCa Fest last weekend.  I had a table at the convention and sold twenty comics.   That might not sound like a lot, but it's the most I've ever sold at one of these things.  It's been several years since I've even done a two day event such as this, and it went as well as I could expect.

I saw Austin English at the festival.  Austin runs a small press and distributorship called Domino Books.  He gave me some money for the sale of some of the Richy Vegas Comics that I sent him last year on consignment.  He was really nice, and yesterday he emailed me a blurb that he wrote about my issue # 13 and the run in general.  The mini review appeared online in The Comics Journal in their Best Comics of 2017 issue.  Here it is:

​"I am a big fan of these Richie Vegas comics. They are (I believe) semi-autobiographical and unflinching. Alexander draws his comics in circular images on paper plates. They are a unique way of expressing a life on paper, and while the emotions and situations seen within these pages are strong and sometimes upsetting, they are a valuable example of cartooning's power to get ones self down on paper and patiently wait for a receptive reader to engage. Visually, they offer moments of unexpected and thrilling beauty, as a near perfect image appears among pages of mundane day to day struggle."

I hope he's okay with me pasting it here.  I'll write him and ask him, just to make sure.

As far as material success in this or any Arts and Entertainment field goes, I think about where I am now and where my work is most likely to be situated in the next several years, and I have to just redefine success with an emphasis on the more personal goals I've managed to achieve.  Namely, my ability to deal with the Unavailable Woman Deals that have consistently reared their ugly heads pretty much since late adolescence right up to the present time.

I've mentioned my struggles with obsession and fixation on unavailable women, and the crash and burn inevitable outcomes that used to be the bane of my existence, particularly in my twenties.  That tendency made it very hard to set longterm goals, such as how to pay off my student loans after graduate school, for example.  My family had to step in and pay those loans after my initial diagnosis of mental illness that occurred a little more than a year after my graduation from the School of Visual Arts.

So the ability to set long term goals such as the completion of the run of my Richy Vegas memoirs, and to have a reasonable expectation of finishing them at some time during the middle of the next decade, is a very big deal.  I just can't control too much whether the market will affirm the worth of what I'm doing in my lifetime, particularly while I'm still enjoying reasonably good health. Therefore, I'm compelled to define my personal ideas of what constitutes success more around my ability to manage and conquer personal demons, rather than what the larger society around me defines as success.  After all, ask Kurt Cobain or Marilyn Monroe what real world success did for them in their ability to manage things they probably struggled with every single day of their adult lives.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about how I've come up with a set of standards regarding what I look for in a woman I want to go on a date with.  I said the three things I'm looking for are: available, interested, act like they give a shit about taking care of themselves.  This standard allows me to consider women that, in the past, I wouldn't have given the time of day to.  Hopefully, with time, this standard will allow me to develop better taste in women, because I think that basing one's attraction to someone almost solely on how good they look is an indicator of bad taste in women.  I think it also indicates that such a person does not like women in general very much, because the only women that such a person tends to believe have anything to offer them are really attractive women.

Okay, so I have a more forgiving set of standards for what will get a woman at least one date with me.  Here's the flip side of that: as long as I consistently make intelligent decisions about the unavailable, often predatory women in my world, I can make whatever decisions I want to make about any other type of woman in my world.  This includes women who are available, interested, and act like they give a shit about taking care of  themselves.  If I don't want to ask such a woman out on even one date, I don't have to.  Think about it; just because I've freed myself from feeling as if I owed very attractive, ultimately unavailable women a profound level of devotion-women I hardly ever really knew in most cases- why then, am I obliged to turn around and make it all about any other type?  Yet another reason I've banished therapists from my life. 

I submitted a book to Image Comics and Fantagraphics Books yesterday.  My submissions consisted of a copy of ​Richy Vegas Comics issue # 14: "'The Legend of Richy Vegas, book 1," and a one page synopsis of the plot line of the first five or so books.  I've submitted to Fantagraphics before and they rejected me, but I've never submitted to Image Comics before.  I followed the synopsis guidelines from Image, but submitted a whole book, which Fantagraphics would be more okay with.  It's also the type of book that I think Fantagraphics would take more of an interest in than Image.  It's just that I talked to a guy who highly recommended Image as a publisher, because they give their talent such good deals, apparently. 

I was at a support group last night where I talked about how it's pointless to have resentment against publishers for rejecting my work, because the Indie Comics world has so many people vying for a deal that they can't possibly give one to everyone who "deserves" one.  A top selling book might top out at around 300,000 copies in it's run before petering out.  So, given that the field is top heavy with talent and the fact that the market is relatively small means that publishers are taking a big risk in giving a deal to anyone.

The two or three editions of Best American Comics (2015, 2016 and 2017) I've looked through had a lot of self-published creators in them.  The book for this year had a guest editor that went out of his way to showcase self-published work, but the one from the previous year featured something like one if four creators that were self-published, along with the usual suspects.  I'm sure some of the self-published creators had previous work that saw print somewhere, but I imagine a lot of others are mostly known through their self-published efforts.

I finished the inks on the lettering tonight.  I have to make a few corrections on some of the pages, but I can start the final inks of the illustrations right away, and I hope to finish in three and a half months.

I want to try to sell some books at my gig at the Pocket Fishrman Fish Fry on June 2nd.  It's the best gig I've landed by far in these past couple of years.   It's on June 2nd, and I go on at 9:30- right after the Fishrman! I want to try to work on the album until then.  I have three more tracks to record of the guitar and vocals.  I'm going to add bass and percussion, but I don't want that to be some big time-consuming project.  I hope to be ready for mixing and mastering by July, but I'll accept October or whatever, if it comes to that.