Having just handed in the manuscript of "The Rhesus Chart", I'm taking some time over the next 3 months to make various public appearances at SF conventions.
I'm going to be appearing as one of the guests of honor at Immortal ConFusion from January 18-20th in Dearborn, MI. Also on the guest list are editor Scot Edelman, science writer Jennifer Ouellette, Usenet personality, RPG store owner, and spec fic reviewer James Nicoll, and author, puppeteer and voice actor Mary Robinette Kowal. Not to mention some secret guests of Subterranean Press who I can reveal (unsurprisingly) to be authors: Maria Dahvana Headley, Kat Howard, and, stealing the show, SF mega-star Alastair Reynolds!
More details on registration, in case you didn't know about it and want to go.
I'm also going to be appearing (albeit not as guest of honor) at Boskone 50 in Boston (February 15th-17th). (I will not be hanging around North America between these two conventions; these are two separate trips.) And I'm due to appear as guest of honor at DORTCon in Dortmund, Germany, from March 9th-10th, and as one of the guests at SwanCon 2013, in Perth, Western Australia (March 29th-April 1st), along with Lucy Sussex, Gail Simone, and John Birmingham. After which I will crawl home to nurse my jet lag by way of a short interstitial vacation before I start work on the project provisionally titled "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation".
Those of you with acute eyes or well-primed calendars will have noticed that this schedule leaves no time for me to get to the UK Eastercon this year, mostly because it coincides with SwanCon and we don't have sub-orbital passenger delivery or teleportation booths yet. This is a bit of a bummer: Bradford is an ace city, and the guest list for EightSquaredCon includes Walter Jon Williams, who I consider a national treasure of the SF firmament. If there's a repeat of the 2010 Icelandic volcano eruption and all flights are grounded before I make it to the antipodes, I'll be there drowning my sorrows. But the plan for Q1/2013 is to hit Detroit, Boston, Dortmund, and Perth in pretty much that order.
I'm old enough to remember - and have read WJWs "Hardwired" when it first came out in 1986 - much preferred it to William Gibson's stuff...
enjoy your travels Charlie - don't shake too many hands, and take plenty of diclofenac with you :-)
Furthermore, Dubjay apparently wrote "Hardwired" several years earlier but couldn't sell it! It took the breakthrough by "Neuromancer" to demonstrate that a market for cyberpunk novels existed, at which point everybody mistook "Hardwired" for a derivative work ...
Have fun at work. And you should collaborate with that nice Mr. Reynolds.
Let me be the first to say:- 1) I'll be quite happy to be left in Stina's tender hands whilst you're away. 2) I'll miss you at Eastercon.
Glad and surprised to see that James Nicoll is still with us.
Back in the 90's when I frequented rec.arts.sf.written James used to amuse us with funny but near fatal anecdotes from his daily life.
"Furthermore, Dubjay apparently wrote "Hardwired" several years earlier but couldn't sell it! It took the breakthrough by "Neuromancer" to demonstrate that a market for cyberpunk novels existed, at which point everybody mistook "Hardwired" for a derivative work .."
Somehow that does not surprise me - every wants to get on a bandwagon, but no wants to start one...
"1) I'll be quite happy to be left in Stina's tender hands whilst you're away."
me too - you always pick good stand-ins - she's the best so far...
ashamed to say I hadn't heard of Stina prior to her posts here...
After flying more miles in the last six months than I did in the previous six years I'm looking forward to spending the next six months in Edinburgh. (Just as KLM give me my Gold Card too).
See you around the end of the month for birthday drinks?
Tony
While I'm planning on going to Perth at some point (relatives down in Esperance), the timing tragically clashes with looking at aircraft much closer to home! http://www.classicfighters.co.nz/
It's the "near" bit of "near fatal" is the important bit of Nicoll-stories. Anyone else would need to be Captain Scarlet to be able to tell them.
Glad and surprised to see that James Nicoll is still with us.
Oh, come on; there haven't been that many Nicoll Events! ...um, okay, yes, there have. But he's still alive anyway.
I suggest checking in here and reading what he's been up to lately. Hardly any new Nicoll Events, any many of them are trivial cat or squirrel related experiences.
Interesting.
I have never heard of ConFusion, and it is happening in my area.
Will there be a book-signing opportunity?
Charlie, I'll look forward to getting eaten by the monster again at Boskone. What do you think of the new Martian meteorite?
Just read this. I gather it could apply to some SF/F Cons as well.
A Simple Suggestion to Help Phase Out All-Male Panels at Tech Conferences
Though I suppose sometimes you can't easily find a woman to speak on a particular topic. And suddenly "Binders Full Of Women" comes to mind. Oy.
Funnily enough I raised that very concern with the program committee at ConFusion a couple of days ago.
I felt I had to add 'could' and 'some', since my experience with SF cons is limited, and didn't want to imply anything about the ones mentioned. But from what I've read, there seems to be a problem in Geekdom generally, with regards to equality.
Presumably you will be attending the world con in 2014 in "that london"
No EasterCon? Sadness. I've heard wonderful things about it. Am hoping I'll be able to jump the pond this year for a convention. I'm thinking Brighton. Will you be around?
I hope you don't exhaust yourself again. Take it as easy as you can.
1) I'll be quite happy to be left in Stina's tender hands whilst you're away.
Awww. That's nice. (Although, I'm not sure how you'll feel once we lock horns over Sucker Punch. LOL.)
I plan to be at WFC in Brighton, yes. (Having bought a membership and booked a hotel room I'd better be!) I should note that the second-largest fannish SF convention of the British calendar, Novacon, falls the following weekend in Nottingham, which is worth a visit in its own right. (So my provisional plan is to make a road trip of it -- drive down to Brighton from Edinburgh, do WFC, slowly drive up to Nottingham, do Novacon, then drive home. Visiting relatives en route in both directions.)
Yes, I intend to be at worldcon in London in 2014.
Also worth noting is the Eurocon in Dublin the weekend after (a transparent ploy to get more American fans to visit a Eurocon).
We'll be doing conventions three weekends in a row:
(At least we won't have the fun of 2010, which involved leaving that DWCon a day earlier than we'd have liked in order to get to AussieCon.)
I discovered Mary Robinette Kowal when I saw her read at Writers with Drinks a few years ago. She read a haunting short that has stuck with me, and then took off one of her black knee-boots, put it on her hand and used it to give a puppetry demo. It was awesome. Catch her reading if at all possible.
So the moral is that we should pour alcohol into authors? I can live with that.
Well, I had a 20+ year gap in going to cons - finally made EasterCon last year, will be at WC Docklands in 2014 ......[MIGHT make NovaCon?] But all this travelling can't be cheap. I'm treading on delicate ground here ... but who pays for this - I assume some of it, Charlie pays for, & some of it comes out of publishers' promotional budgets? Where he isn't a GOH, of course! Please do tell ....
I'm a business; I pencil it in under marketing and sales. (When I'm a GoH, the convention pays. You will note that of the four up-coming conventions, I'm a GoH at three of them. The fourth just happens to be my usual annual recurring venue for doing lunch with my editors and agent, who all live relatively nearby, to discuss business.)
Offtopic to the post at hand, but:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121383-See-the-First-Image-of-a-Giant-Squid-2-000-Feet-Underwater
How do BLUE HADES feel about this invasion of privacy?