Back from ConQuest - whatta weekend!
Hope you had a good weekend. Mine was wonderful! Always great to see old friends and new acquaintances at ConQuest, the KC SF convention. I only wish I had more time during the days not serving on panels to hang out with people. The nights are full of great parties (especially RoomCon - thanks, Jimmy!), but not everyone attends, and it's not always easy to talk there. Oh, and I remembered to bring swim-trunks this year, so I finally got to swim in the rooftop, salt-water pool.
Last week, I wrote Jack and Stella into deep trouble, and finished the first few chapters just in time to read at the convention. I mean literally just in time: I finished the chapters just as Opening Ceremonies began. Whee!
Adventures of Jack and Stella progress:
Here's from the Saturday reading; what I'm holding up are the hand-scribbled original pages from 1983 or something when I first started working on what would later become the idea for this book:
Oh, and I should point out that I donated to the charity auction (which benefits AboutSF) a "Tuckerization" in the book. It saw some hot bidding and ended up raising a nice sum. The winner didn't just want her name but as much about her as a character as I would like to use. Bwahahahaha! This'll be fun.
On the Thursday evening before the con, a bunch of Hadley Rille authors got together at Prospero's Books in KC. I read a couple pages of my story, "The Empty Utopia," from the wonderful anthology, Ruins Extraterrestrial. It's a pretty cool place:
We also held a big chat at the con. Nice to meet so many interesting brothers-and-sisters-in-Hadley-Rille! Another large-group panel highlight for me was the "Taste of the Campbell Conference" with 8 authors onstage. We could have talked for hours about the publishing industry, ebooks, and so on.
While at the con, I also decided it's time to upgrade my portable communicator. That's right: I didn't say I'm replacing my beloved and long-abused Sanyo Katana, did I? I'm going to buy a 7" Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 tablet. All I really need a smart-phone for, a tablet can do better, right? Texting, email, GPS, video-calls, getting onto the internets while out and about, and so on. I can even save all my writing onto it, and work on stuff using apps or even MS Word - handy for cons. And as opposed to smart-phones, tablets don't come with $100/month fees unless you really want that. Viola! Plus, how geeky is it to walk around downtown, holding a 7" tablet up to one's ear, in a VOIP call? Aw, yeah. Puts a whole new spin on drunk-dialing.
Okay, I should get back to work. Just wanted to let y'all know I'm still alive and that the weekend was a BLAST.
Chris
Last week, I wrote Jack and Stella into deep trouble, and finished the first few chapters just in time to read at the convention. I mean literally just in time: I finished the chapters just as Opening Ceremonies began. Whee!
Adventures of Jack and Stella progress:
Here's from the Saturday reading; what I'm holding up are the hand-scribbled original pages from 1983 or something when I first started working on what would later become the idea for this book:
Oh, and I should point out that I donated to the charity auction (which benefits AboutSF) a "Tuckerization" in the book. It saw some hot bidding and ended up raising a nice sum. The winner didn't just want her name but as much about her as a character as I would like to use. Bwahahahaha! This'll be fun.
On the Thursday evening before the con, a bunch of Hadley Rille authors got together at Prospero's Books in KC. I read a couple pages of my story, "The Empty Utopia," from the wonderful anthology, Ruins Extraterrestrial. It's a pretty cool place:
We also held a big chat at the con. Nice to meet so many interesting brothers-and-sisters-in-Hadley-Rille! Another large-group panel highlight for me was the "Taste of the Campbell Conference" with 8 authors onstage. We could have talked for hours about the publishing industry, ebooks, and so on.
While at the con, I also decided it's time to upgrade my portable communicator. That's right: I didn't say I'm replacing my beloved and long-abused Sanyo Katana, did I? I'm going to buy a 7" Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 tablet. All I really need a smart-phone for, a tablet can do better, right? Texting, email, GPS, video-calls, getting onto the internets while out and about, and so on. I can even save all my writing onto it, and work on stuff using apps or even MS Word - handy for cons. And as opposed to smart-phones, tablets don't come with $100/month fees unless you really want that. Viola! Plus, how geeky is it to walk around downtown, holding a 7" tablet up to one's ear, in a VOIP call? Aw, yeah. Puts a whole new spin on drunk-dialing.
Okay, I should get back to work. Just wanted to let y'all know I'm still alive and that the weekend was a BLAST.
Chris