Category: travel.

friends. travel. Uncategorized writing.

Worldconning in Kansas City.

It’s 5am in KC, which means it’s 6am in New Hampshire, which means I’m up already despite the two drinks at the hotel bar last night.

KC seems nice. I haven’t had a chance to wander much, but the area around the convention center is definitely 100% tailored for conventions. Four or five big hotels around one square, and the convention center on one side of that square, which means that my hotel is 100 yards from the front entrance of the Worldcon facility. This is much better than the arrangement in Spokane last year, where we had to drive or take a shuttle bus for a mile and a half because the con hotels were all over the place and not within easy walking distance. (Also, Missouri is not on fire, and it doesn’t smell like a badly stoked barbecue grill outside.)

Travel went super smooth yesterday. No delays, the usual short TSA line in Manchester, and a layover in Detroit that was just long enough to switch terminals in no hurry and grab a sandwich, but not so long as to be a boring pain in the ass. When I got to Kansas City, I tried an experiment and hailed my first Uber ever, and I must say that I was impressed. It took 5 minutes for the driver to get there, the fare was half of what a cab would have cost me, and I didn’t have to deal with cash or swiping cards. I think I’ll use them from now on instead of surly cabbies who drive like NASCAR hopefuls.

The only fly in the ointment yesterday was the hotel bar, which forgot my dinner order. I ended up waiting for my food for 45 minutes, but took the time to have the aforementioned two cocktails. On the plus side, the bartender was so mortified that she comped my whole dinner, drinks and all, and I tipped her $20 because it wasn’t her fault the kitchen was watching the ball game or whatever. And I ran into Ann Leckie again, who is one of the nicest people in the genre, so that was a lovely end to the evening. 

Today: more Worldconning. I’m meeting up with friends and walking the convention floor today, and then there’s a party tonight. (There are parties every night at Worldcon, which is What We Do when we get together at our annual nerd proms.) So if you’re there and see me around, stop and say hi!

And now I’ll see if I can get some fiction-wording done before breakfast…

friends. travel. writing.

my worldcon schedule.

MidAmericon II, the 74th Worldcon, seems to be almost upon us. I’ll be in Kansas City next week for the event, armed with a credit card and a light convention schedule.

There are two Wild Cards-related events I’ll be attending as a panelist/signing author. One is the big Wild Cards signing at Rainy Day Books on Friday, August 19th at 5pm. It’s a public event off the convention floor, so you won’t need a WorldCon membership to attend.

The other event is the Wild Cards cage match panel on Saturday, August 20, on the Tucker Stage (3501A) from 3-5pm. GRRM will be moderating as we (as our characters) will engage in a fictional battle until my awesome charact…uh, until the best character emerges as the victor.

Other than that, my schedule is wide open, and I intend to meet up with as many old and new friends as I can. If you are going to Worldcon and see me out and about on the convention floor, come say hello!

Worldcon will mark my second-to-last con attendance this year. The other con on my schedule is Honorcon in Raleigh (October 28-30 in Raleigh, NC), where I’m not officially on the roster as a guest, but I’ll be on a few panels nonetheless.

I was going to cut down a bit on travel in 2016, but in the end, it turned out almost as busy as 2015. It seems that my calendar fills up much more quickly these days.

 

art. books. friends. travel. wild cards.

new mexico.

I just got back from New Mexico, where I spent three days visiting friends and attending some fun Wild Cards events.

The first was an “in-character” interview done for the audience at the Jean Cocteau Cinema. Due to the fact that I got into Albuquerque a little late, I got to the theater halfway through the event and basically had to do a cold interview–from the car onto the stage (in front of an audience, jumping into a show already in progress), and getting handed a microphone before I had much of a chance to get nervous. It was good fun, though, and I find I’m definitely getting better at public speaking/performing because I’ve done it so much now that my pre-event anxiety is a great deal lower than before.

On Monday, I went to a Wild Cards author party thrown by KayMcCauley at Meow Wolf, an art venue in Santa Fe that is pretty spectacular. I had a chance to meet Wild Cards writers and reconnect with those I’ve met before. I also got to meet Thomas Olde Heuvelt, who was whisked into the event by George R.R. Martin after his own signing in town the same evening. (He’s in the US on a book tour for the English version of HEX, his best-selling debut novel.) It was a fun event, and I had a good time, even though I still feel like the new kid in high school among so many well-known high-caliber writers.

I also had a chance to see a bit of New Mexico–at least the parts around Los Alamos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque (which I just now managed to type properly without autocorrect assistance for the first time in three days), and sample the local food. Man, folks in NM really take their chile seriously. It’s a very scenic state, and Los Alamos has a ton of interesting history.

It’s still slightly bizarre sometimes to be Regular Me most of the time, but then to fly off to distant locales and big events to be Writer Me, who can selectively switch off his introverted tendencies and do stuff like sign books or speak in front of audiences without breaking into a cold panic sweat. But I’m getting better at it the more I do it, even though I suspect I’ll never fully get rid of the feeling that I’m getting away with a con, and that they’ll find out any minute that I’m just some random dude pretending to be a writer. Maybe I’ll even get used to it when I am sitting at a signing table, and people walk up to me to tell me that a.) they know who I am, and b.) they’ve read all my books.

(By the way, if you’re in Santa Fe or nearby, and you’d like to grab signed Frontlines books, I signed the stock on hand at the Jean Cocteau.)

In closing, allow me to regale you with my amateur photography and share some shots from the trip. Like I said on Twitter–New Mexico is made for the panorama setting on the phone camera, or vice versa.

IMG_0015 IMG_0028 IMG_0029 IMG_0042 IMG_0043 IMG_0057 IMG_0058

 

shameless self-promotion. travel. wild cards. writing.

wild cards in santa fe. 

So there’s this thing at George R.R. Martin’s Cocteau Cinema next Sunday. There will be nineteen Wild Cards authors, old and new, for a fun little event with a signing session afterwards. You can read the details on GRRM’s not-a-blog here. 

I’ll be there as well to represent the Junior Woodchuck contingent of the Wild Cards consortium. Stop by and say hi if you’re in the area!

shameless self-promotion. travel. writing.

worldcon and wild cards.

I’ll be in Kansas City for MidAmericon II, the 2016 Worldcon, in a little over a month. I’m not on any official programming, but there are two events I’ll be joining: the Wild Cards signing on Friday, August 19th from 5-8pm, and a Wild Cards panel on Saturday, August 20, from 3-5. We’ll be doing a Wild Cards death match sort of thing, where the writers will introduce their characters and their abilities, and the audience will vote on who would win a hypothetical fight, elimination-style. Should be a lot of fun. (More details at George R.R. Martin’s Not A Blog.)

If you’re at Worldcon this year, come out and say hi. I’m new to the Wild Cards consortium, so there’s no volume out yet with a story of mine (emphasis on yet), but I’ll gladly sign anything else at the Wild Cards signing: Frontlines books, comics, Kindles, fresh produce, whatever you care to bring.

 

books. food and drink. travel. writing.

a wild blog update appears!

If I’m less active on social media at the moment, it’s because I am finishing up FIELDS OF FIRE, Frontlines #5, for delivery to my publisher.

(FIELDS OF FIRE already has a pre-order page if you want to put your order in early, but be aware that the delivery date is provisional and can change.)

Other than my typical “finish line sprint” stress, things are going swimmingly here in scenic Upper Cryogenica. The weather is lovely, the kids have two weeks of school left, and my calendar is pretty light for the rest of the year. I just attended Manticon in Minneapolis as Guest of Honor and had a great time. Manticon (and its sister con, Honorcon) are military science fiction conventions run by The Royal Manticoran Navy, the official fan organization for David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, and they’re all lovely and fun people with a shared enthusiasm for all things Military SF. They made me an honorary Sergeant Major in the Royal Manticoran Army, which was pretty cool:

IMG_3075 (Edited)

Manticon was also the first occasion where someone other than me mixed Shockfrost cocktails, which were a crowd-pleaser. They taste great, and watching the preparation is kind of fun. (Video is still uploading to YouTube at the speed of molasses in the freezer, so refresh in a little while if it’s not loading yet.)

And on the last day of the con, a bunch of TRMN folks kicked off the inaugural meeting of the official Frontlines fan club, if you can believe that. (There’s a Facebook group and everything.)

The weekend was fun, but now I have to put the pedal to the metal finishing up FIELDS, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see a whole lot of me on the FaceTwits until this thing is in the bag.

travel. writing.

the cost of going to a con.

I went to ConFusion in Detroit last weekend and a had a terrific time meeting old friends and making new ones. (It marked the first time a fan recognized my name in the elevator and got all excited. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.)

I tend to do the local cons regularly because I can drive to those and can be home quickly if needed. Boskone and Readercon are both in Boston, a 2-hour drive away, I can bring tax-free NH liquor in my own car, and if I had to, I could pack a cooler and a lot of sandwiches, so I can do those cons on the cheap if needed.

Out-of-town cons are a different story, fiscally speaking.

I just totaled up receipts for the ConFusion trip, so I thought I’d take a second to share the numbers. I spent a total of $1,888.00, which breaks down as follows:

Air fare: $319.20 (Manchester–Detroit, basic economy)

Hotels: $889.27

Rental car: $267.66

Food and drink: $284.01

Other expenses (gas, luggage fees, etc.): $127.86

Now, I did spend an extra $400 staying at the Clarion in the Detroit airport because I volunteered my seat on Sunday and had to stay an extra night, and the airline’s voucher was for a run-down shithole of a hotel that had dirty walls and smelled like cigarette smoke throughout. Subtract that as a non-essential expense, and chop $100 off the rental car price because I took their insurance coverage instead of just chancing it with my own. I also brought my own bow, which cost me $70 in luggage fees, and if I were a teetotaler, I could have saved roughly $200 in bar tabs I racked up buying drinks for myself and friends. But even when you subtract the frills, I still spent north of $1,000.

For a lot of fans and even new pro writers, that’s an expense they can’t swing for a long weekend of drinking and talking about books.

To be sure, it’s a tax write-off (which doesn’t mean it’s a freebie–it only reduces the tax burden a bit), but in order to even get that little financial break, you have to have writing income to write the con expenses off against. A lot of writers don’t have that, especially ones just breaking into the field or selling mostly short fiction. And fans don’t have it at all.

I came out slightly ahead because I volunteered my seat twice (the snow storm travel mess meant a lot of people were trying to get alternative flights east due to the closures of NYC and all DC area airports), and got to bag more than my expenditures in Delta travel vouchers. But every other con I’ve been to has been a loss leader for me, financially speaking. It’s great to see old friends (and truth be told, that’s why most writers primarily go to cons), and it’s fun to meet fans and sign books, but it’s not nearly enough of a career helper to justify the expense. You pay for the fun and the mini-vacation among like-minded people, not for the networking and the career benefits (although those can be an ancillary bonus if and when the networking does happen.) But the expense involved in attending even a small regional con is why a lot of writers and fans only do cons that are in reasonable driving range, or strictly local stuff. Our field simply doesn’t have a lot of people who can afford to lay out the cash to go to half a dozen or more cons every year.

 

books. shameless self-promotion. travel. writing.

ConFusion schedule.

I’ll be at ConFusion in Detroit next weekend. If you’re going to be there, here’s where you can find me:

 

Friday 9:00:00 PM Who Threw Away My Monster Compendium

When was the last time a zeitgeist novel had a bugbear or a cockatrice? How long is it since someone fought a giant, flesh-eating beast instead of pikeman? Where did all the monsters go? With quest plots out of fashion, deus ex machina ditched, treasure-hunting too economically dull, and stories about ethics, is the monster still relevant in today’s fiction?

Saturday 4:00:00 PM Power Armor and Rail Guns: The Science of Future Wars

Military technology in science fiction settings: Who wore the powersuit better?

 

Saturday 6:00:00 PM The Fallacy of Commercial Fiction

Literary culture often derides the idea of commercial work, suggesting that marketability signals a lack of refinement. What exactly is commercial fiction and why is it snubbed? Furthermore, are science fiction, fantasy, and horror equally burdened by this dichotomy?

 

Outside of the panels, I’ll be hanging out with old friends and making new ones, so if you see me there, feel free to come up and say hi. I’ll also be at the Autograph Session on Saturday, and my awesome publisher is sending a box of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT paperbacks to the event hotel to give away as promo freebies. I am not above using bribes to make sure people show up for the signing, so if you want to snag a free signed coy, SHOW UP. I’ll hand out the freebie copies until they’re gone. (Of course, I’ll also sign stuff you bring with you.)

If you’re going to ConFusion: see you in Detroit next week!

books. travel. writing.

2016 already?

I’ve been an awful blogger in 2015.

I’m pretty active on Twitter and Facebook, but I use them mostly to stay in touch with friends and family (Facebook), and dash off one -liners and short thoughts as they pop into my head during the day (Twitter). But the long form requires one to actually sit down, open an editor, and think about content and structure and stuff, and that comes perilously close to work. Alas, there are readers out there who don’t do Twitter, and my private Facebook account is limited to real-life friends and family, so I suppose I should get more regular with the updates on the blog again.

2015 was great. I don’t have a thing to complain about—the curve of professional good fortune that bent sharply upward in early 2013 has been going on that trajectory ever since. Angles of Attack came out in April and earned out its advance on Day One on the strength of pre-orders alone, which is a feat I would love to repeat with Chains of Command when it comes out this April. I did more work-related travel than ever before: San Antonio in May, Europe in June, Readercon in July, Worldcon in August, NY ComicCon and Honorcon in October, World Fantasy Con in November. And it looks like this year will be just as busy, if not more so.

Right now the calendar has ConFusion in it later this month, so I’ll get to see more of Detroit than just the airport for once. I’ll be Guest of Honor at Manticon in Minneapolis in May, and I’ll be going to Europe again in June when the third Frontlines book comes out in German. I never miss Readercon in July, and I’d like to do Worldcon again this year, and then there’s NYCC again, and so on.

New fiction this year includes Chains of Command in April for sure, and very likely the first of a series of tie-in Frontlines graphic novels around the same time. If I get Frontlines #5 (Fields of Fire) finished reasonably on schedule, you’ll probably see that one this year as well, which would make 2016 the first year in which you’ll see two Frontlines novels.

2016: More fiction, more travel, mmmmmmmmaybe more blogging. We’ll see how things go.

books. friends. movies. shameless self-promotion. travel.

gooder reads.

Hey, look at that! ANGLES OF ATTACK made the semifinals in the science fiction category of the Goodreads Choice Awards. Thanks to all of you who voted for Space Kablooie #3. And feel free to vote for it some more!

I spent the weekend at World Fantasy Con in Saratoga Springs, NY. I didn’t bother with a con membership, and mostly spent time with old friends. I did walk the ballroom floor on Friday night when all the writers had their tables set up for signings, and got to say hello and introduce myself to Joe Haldeman, which was a thrill. (Another awesome thing was realizing just how many of the writers present were friends of mine.) The weekend was basically all drinking, eating, chatting, and watching movies. I brought my PS4 to the hotel suite to stream movies from it, and we got a little zapped and watched three movies in a row on Saturday night–and that was after I took the opportunity to see the new Bond movie at the theater in the afternoon.

Writing is a rather solitary pursuit, so it’s always fun to get out of the house and meet up with friends who do the same thing you’re doing, and who understand what it’s like. I’ve made the best of friends as a genre writer–we enjoy each others’ company, are happy for each others’ successes, and glad to commiserate over the bumpy stuff. Friendship: it truly IS magic!

Now I’m back to work on Frontlines #5 (FIELDS OF FIRE), which will keep me busy for the rest of the year and possibly a bit into the new one. If all goes well, it will be out in 2016 as well, which means you’ll get to spend your shekels on TWO Frontlines novels next year. (And you may want to keep some of your tooth fairy change back for some other Frontlines-related spending opportunities. But more of that later, when I am at liberty to…. divulge.)