Who Wants To Be An Armadillionaire?

This is late, and that's largely because I got back home to an apartment with no A/C.  Did I mention it's 108 degrees all this week?

But that is not the point.  The point is: PEOPLE ARE AMAZING.  I will fast-forward through my hollering and squealing about how fantastic ArmadilloCon was in order to reiterate that.  The guy I choffed cheese-balls with in the con suite?  Yeah, he's an insanely good comic book artist.  The lady who chatted with me about community college courses?  Is the same supreme maven of horse how-tos who brought her stallion to DFWcon for a hands-on class experience.  I met black-belt seamstresses, master marksmen, confectioners, con-founders, costumers, historians, and musicians who play instruments I've never HEARD of.  And these were the ordinary con-going plebes!

What I mean to say is, it's easy to be cynical about People These Days - to watch Sex and the Sixth-Grade Reading Level fly off the shelves, to see the ratings for America's Shortest Attention Span, and to think "my God, we're doomed."  But it was nothing less than Neosporin for the soul to put myself in the company of so many people who take a profound delight in learning everything there is to know about something, no matter how strange or obscure or ridiculous it might seem to the muggles, and who know the real secret of superheroes everywhere: if you aren't born with amazing mutant powers, you'd goddamn well better grow some.

Anyway, so here in celebration of the joyful and learnedly strange are a select few of the self-made heroes in my life, who have graciously agreed to put a piece of themselves on public display:

• Cynthia McGean, with the one great truth for writers everywhere: You Can't Win if You Don't Play
• Tanya G (T!), with a top-notch photo essay on Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller's Frankenstein  (Two screenings, in which the gents switch roles between Victor and the Creature, with phenomenally different results.  Take heed, fellow scribblers: your plot is a given; it's your characters that sell it!)
• The lovely Lunaryss keeps her blogging cards close to her chest, but we will here mark February 29th, 2012 as the day she KO'd cancer.  FLAWLESS VICTORY.
• And Frank, the light of my dark, the Phoenix Wright to my Miles Edgeworth, who is much too modest to point to a blog entry, left me a comment which I would here immortalize as golden advice to middle-beginning creative types everywhere: Put Down the Doritos and Love Your Larval Stage.

And as soon as I kidnap somebody with blast-chilling superpowers, I will be off to do exactly that!

This story is about the Baudelaires. And they are the sort of people who know that there's always something. Something to invent, something to read, something to bite, and something to do, to make a sanctuary, no matter how small.