I know some of you will be in
Denver this week and weekend for the 66
th World Science Fiction Convention.
If you feel like you need a shot of Carlson, here’s where to find me:
Friday, 10:00am – Kaffeeklatch. Ask me all of those tough, tricky questions you’ve been dying to ask!
Friday, 11:30am – Are Writers’ Workshops Right For You? I’m a survivor of last year’s Writers of the Future intensive lock-you-in-a-room-all-day-for-five-days workshops as well as the veteran of four writers’ groups in three states. And my co-panels are instructors from places like Clarion and Sycamore Hill. Be afraid!
Saturday, 10:00am – Reading. Hear my brain work! Get free prizes! I’m terrified of finding myself alone in this room after Friday night’s parties, of course, so there will indeed be some free autographed books and such to tempt you!
AND THE GREATEST DETOUR OF THEM ALL – On Saturday, at 3pm, I’ll be two hours west of the convention at a book release party in Leadville, Colorado, which becomes the new U.S. capital in my Plague Year series! Come with me if you want to live. Run for the hills!!!
Sunday, 1:00pm – The Possibilities Of Time Travel: Physics, Not Fiction. Yes, it’s true. I’m actually from an alternate universe and I’m here to tell you how and why! As will Todd Brun, the moderator, a quantum physicist and currently a professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Southern California, who works on quantum computers and related things. Wow!
Aside from a few business meetings and another wildly off-the-charts “I’m at the convention but I’m not” side trip for a VIP tour of the NORAD Strategic Air Command base in nearby Colorado Springs, I expect I’ll be meandering around the convention center from one interesting panel to another, not to mention hunting down some of my favorite writers for autographs.
Please feel free to say hi.
I don’t really hit people with shovels and eat them.
Unless there’s no other choice.
But I think I’ll probably be getting a sandwich every day, so it’s all right… isn’t it?
Labels: book signing, WorldCon schedule
Running late as usual.
It was one extra crazy week.
There were a bazillion distractions with the release of the book trailer, plus we’re gearing up for a book release party at my local Borders.
If you live in the east Bay Area, come and stop by!
It’s Tuesday night, 7/29, starting at
7pm at the
Pleasant Hill store
One of those distractions was an email from a producer of a radio station who’d seen the trailer and wanted a live interview on their morning show… on Kiwi FM in New Zealand. That was a first! Naturally I said yes, and I think it went well, except that I forgot until afterwards that it would have been polie to translate my measurements into metric. 10,000 feet is 3,024 meters, I believe.
The DJ had an outrageous accent, which was hilarious, and he’d watched the trailer, too. He thought it was obvious that the Plague books would make an excellent movie and an excellent video game, and I can’t argue with enthusiasm like that.
In the meantime, I did manage to have a solid if not spectacular week writing. That’s proving to be the biggest challenge for me – getting enough sleep, keeping my head straight, and minimizing distractions. It’s a lot of fun to hype your work and get hundreds of excited, exciting emails and exotic interview requests, but the main thing is to keep producing. I’m on a deadline! And I have a lot of other projects I’d like to get to next.
That’s sort of an interesting feeling. I’m very much enjoying Ruth and Cam’s next adventure (man, do those guys get into a lot of trouble!), and yet at the same time, there are other people and scenarios waiting to come to life in my brain.
I didn’t quite finish the chapter I was working on, which was frustrating. Those damn New Zealanders! Interrupting my Thursday! But (again) it turned out that this particular chapter is running over thirty-five pages, so I found a nice high point in the middle of it and lopped that baby into two. Shazam. So this week, suddenly, it turns out that I finished an entire chapter and nearly completed a second besides.
If I could just write four-page chapters, I would have written five of ‘em just this week! Ha ha.
Labels: book signing, Mind Plague, radio, the writing life
