books. family. friends. travel. writing.

WorldCon recap.

I’m on the plane back from MidAmericon II, the 74th Worldcon, in Kansas City. Some cons are great, some are so-so, some are…not that good. But Worldcon is the main event of our genre, the big Annual Nerd Prom, where most everyone gathers regardless of what other regional cons they attend.

I went with a fairly light schedule. Being a new member of GRRM’s Wild Cards consortium, I got to attend a gathering thrown for the Wild Cards writers by Tor Publishing. (And let me tell you–when you’re a junior woodchuck novelist with a little more than three years of pro experience under his belt, having GRRM introduce you to Tom Doherty can be a slightly tongue-tying experience.) I love the Wild Cards gang–they are all amazingly accomplished and talented writers, most with decades in the business, and they all make me feel welcome and appreciated.

On Friday evening, we had the big Wild Cards mass signing for the new book, called HIGH STAKES. I figured I’d be sitting and watching GRRM’s signing line for three hours, but most people wanted signatures from all the rest of us in their books as well. (The event only allowed Wild Cards books to be purchased and/or brought into the ballroom, but one of my fans smuggled in a copy of LINES OF DEPARTURE for me to sign, which I happily did.)

There was also a Wild Cards panel that was an almost Pokemon-like death match between characters. GRRM put all our names into a bucket and pulled out two names at random to fictionally fight each other, and the audience got to decide the winner. My character Khan, a 300-pound underworld bodyguard whose left body half is that of an anthropomorphised Bengal tiger, is a straight-up bruiser suited for heavyweight physical fights, but he had to go up against the Amazing Bubbles, who was quite possibly the worst possible opponent for him in the entire lineup because his strength and reflexes were of very limited utility against someone who can ensconce him in a near-breakable bubble that limits his air supply. So I got eliminated in the first round and got to watch the rest of the fights from the bench. But it was all good fun, and the auditorium was filled with people who seemed to enjoy the format.

(I also had several people waiting for me after the event to get FRONTLINES books and posters signed, which was super weird and awesome at the same time.)

Other than the panels, I met up with friends both old and new. My long-time Internet pal and new IRL friend Ellie took me to the best barbecue joint I had ever been to, and there were a number of parties and the usual bar meet-ups and long nights chatting with friends. Whenever you go to a con like this one, it’s like a big family reunion, only you don’t have to put up with your weird uncle who thinks that the stickers on the back of traffic signs are secret markers for invading UN forces. You see people you haven’t seen in a year or more, but the conversations flow as naturally again as if you had seen each other last only a few days ago.

The crowning highlight of the weekend was GRRM’s Hugo Losers Party, which was held in a spectacular Gilded Age theater just two blocks from the hotels and the convention center. The party in Spokane last year was awesome, but this one easily topped it for setting and glitz, and I have no idea how he’s going to top that next year in Helsinki. Maybe there are castles for rent, or he can get the Queen Mary for the night.

I now have so many lovely, smart, generous, and funny friends in the business that I can’t go to a con without running into dozens of people I would gladly spend a whole weekend just drinking and chatting with. Our not-so-little SF and Fantasy tribe of writers and readers is for the most part a stellar group of folks that are welcoming to newcomers and just fun to hang out with, and I greatly value the friendships I’ve made in the genre since I started out at VP and then at my first official convention (which was Boskone in early 2009.) I can’t wait for Worldcon 75 in Helsinki.

In closing, here are a few shots from the trip I’d like to share:

That’s me chatting with Jo Walton. If I have a smug look on my face, it’s because she just told me that she read all the FRONTLINES books and really liked them.


My friend and fellow 47North author Melissa Olson, who was my tag-along for the Hugo Losers party. I roped her in by mentioning the free booze.


The venue for the party. Now that’s how you throw a shindig.


The convention plaza in KC.  Infinitely superior to the one in Spokane last year.


The Wild Cards cage match panel, moderated by George R.R. Martin.


That was breakfast on Saturday.


The Midland Theatre.


The other side of the convention plaza. 

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…

art. books. bullets & links. NACDC. writing.

on the NACDC, a frontlines fan group.

The official fan group of the Frontlines series, the North American Commonwealth Defense Corps, was founded at Manticon this year. There’ll be a fan group meeting at this year’s Honorcon, and a member who’s a very talented graphic designer made up a recruitment poster style ad for the convention program. It’s so well done that I wanted to share it with you.

(And if you’re in Raleigh and/or at Honorcon in October, swing by and check it out! There’s also a Facebook page for the fan group and an official web page.)

Color_NoBleed [273656]

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.

 

books. writing.

warming up the stove for frontlines #6.

Having turned in the edits on FIELDS OF FIRE, Frontlines #5, I spent exactly three days puttering around online and playing video games before it got old again. Seems like I get antsy when I don’t have a work in progress cooking on the stove.

Sooooo….work has commenced on Frontlines #6. I settled on a title, which is always a prerequisite because I don’t like starting a new Scrivener project without knowing what the story will be named. And Frontlines the Sixth will be called POINTS OF IMPACT.

I don’t have a release date, but if everything goes as planned and I turn in the manuscript when I intend to, you may see two Frontlines novels in 2017. (FIELDS OF FIRE will be out in February.) Let’s hope everything stays on track, and next year may be a good year for this here Space Kablooie factory.

 

books. bullets & links. capitalism. shameless self-promotion.

terms of enlistment on storybundle.

TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, the first volume in the Frontlines series, is part of the current StoryBundle (called “Starward Bound”), along with novels by a whole bunch of other excellent writers. The price point to get the bonus novels (of which TERMS is one) is $15, which will get you eight new Skiffy novels on your e-reader.

Note: The copy of TERMS included in the Starward Bound bundle is the only legally available e-book version of this novel without DRM, so if you’ve wanted to load that baby up on a non-Amazon e-reader, this is the one to get. 

The Starward Bound StoryBundle will only be up for the month of August, so you must Act! Now! if you want a DRM-free copy of TERMS.

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

 

gadgetry. the munchkin wrangler gear whore labs.

honey, i shrunk the phone.

IMG_0090

Just before I went to Europe last year, I upgraded my phone from an iPhone 5 to a 6 Plus. Having read the reviews online (and having taken big swigs of the marketing Kool-Aid), I figured I could use the Plus to combine the jobs of both tablet and phone in one device.

After a year with Apple’s phablet, I have to conclude that rather than combining the best aspects of phone and tablet, it combines their drawbacks much more noticeably: it’s too big to make a convenient phone, and too small to make a decent tablet. I was constantly put off by the size when I used it as a phone–reaching icons on the other side of the screen was awkward, even with my big hands and Apple’s little home button double-tap sliding-of-the-screen trick. And when I tried to use it as a tablet substitute, the lack of screen real estate didn’t really let me use it efficiently. I also managed to bend it ever so slightly, enough that the phone would not sit level on a desk even face-down, and putting it into a protective case made a huge phone even larger and more cumbersome.

So I finally admitted defeat and traded the 6 Plus for an iPhone SE. My wife had the regular 6, so I was familiar with the size and handling, but it didn’t fit me all that well either. I think it’s Apple’s insistence on making the phones both very thin and round the corners at the same time, so the whole thing feels like a slick, skinny river stone. (Robin dropped hers on numerous occasions and had the screen replaced once.) And I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the smaller phone again. It’s much, much easier to use with one hand. And I find that I am now using the phone for phone jobs again, and don’t try to force it to be a tablet. If I need to dash out a text or a quick Tweet, I can do it on the phone. For anything else, I can get the iPad or laptop out, and get the job done more efficiently than trying to make it work on the not-quite-a-tablet iPhone 6 Plus.

Oh, and the Apple Watch really comes into its own when you use it with a smaller phone like the SE. With the Apple Watch’s ability to reply to texts or take quick hands-free calls, I can just about leave the phone in my pocket all day. If something pops up on the watch that requires a quick response, I use a canned reply or dictate one. And if it requires more than a sentence, I wait until I can get to the iPad or laptop, and no longer pry the phablet out of my pocket to peck out an email on it.

The phablet makes sense for some people, and I know that some of my friends dig theirs a lot. It didn’t work for me, because I generally use specialized devices for specific jobs and no longer try to do the technological Swiss Army Knife thing.

digital housekeeping. friends. this monkey house.

facebook, and why i’m tapping out.

I’ve been on Facebook for a long time, but today I’ll be pulling the plug on my account over there.

I’ve known for a while that it had become more distraction than useful or fun tool, but today things kind of tipped over for me when one of my real-world writer acquaintances got pissed off over a comment I left on their post. (It was, of course, about politics, and that always spells trouble on Facebook because most people who post about politics don’t look to argue or debate. This election in particular has cranked up everyone’s sensitivity up to eleventy-twelve, and 95% of political posts are just there to have one’s opinion reaffirmed by The Tribe, not to actually talk about the subject.) It was my mistake, of course, but it was the proverbial straw for me. I deleted the reply that prompted the response, and then I was in a bad mood for a while that required a drive along the lake in a zippy car for improvement. When Facebook becomes a distraction to the point where people who know you in real life get pissed off at you over their perception of your politics, and then that pissed-offness bleeds over into your real-world life, it may be high time to get rid of it. It really bothers me that the negative feelings I get from bad interactions on FB can so easily bleed into my regular life and make me cranky.

I’ve had to curate my posts on Facebook for years. Most of my publishing friends are on the left side the fence, and quite a few of my real-life non-publishing friends are libertarians or (GASP!) conservatives. When you have to make sure you have the right audience button selected before you post a picture or an opinion lest you offend half your friends list inadvertently, it stops being fun and starts becoming work–and hazardous work at that, like tap-dancing through a minefield.  The drawbacks have now outweighed the benefits of the platform, at least for me.

(And to be honest–it’s a massive time-waster designed to make you come click for your dopamine pellet a hundred times a day. If I had written fiction in all the times I’ve wasted time scrolling through Facebook over the last five years, Frontlines would now be a 20-book series.)

Anyway–time to let it go. Anyone who wants to get in touch with me can still do so (at marko.kloos@gmail.com), and I’ll still be on Instagram and Twitter because they are quick and don’t require the amount of attention commanded by Zuckerbook. I’ll just use this as an excuse to update the blog far more often, where people have to come and seek out what I have to say instead of my opinion popping up in their stream unbidden. Lesson learned, moving on.

 

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!