I’ll post more from HeroesCon/ConCarolinas later, once I’ve had a little more sleep and time to process. Needless to say it was a great weekend, and I even sold enough books to make back my table fee! The coolest thing that happened all weekend is at the end of this post, so you’ll have to read the whole thing to get there.
We’re not going to discuss the pile of money I spent on comics, we’re going to call it a win and be done with it.
No really, that’s what we’re doing.
Regardless, I’ve got some great stuff coming up, and I hope some of you will be close enough to come out and join me for it!
This Saturday night, downtown (uptown) Charlotte, I’ll be reading poetry and maybe a selection or two from my novels (but mostly poetry) as part of the Festivities with Collaborative Arts. They invite local artists to participate in their Charlotte Shakespeare Festival as opening acts, and then we get a chance to hawk our wares at intermission. I had a great time doing this last year for their production of Othello, and I’m excited to be asked to return. I go on at 7:15 at The Green, and I’ll have copies of all my books with me for sale.
But I’ll only have two copies of Hard Day’s Knight, because that’s all I have left after HeroesCon.
You like how I snuck that in there? Yeah, it doesn’t get any more stealthy than this.
Then next month I’m participating in a killer mega-signing at Barnes & Noble in Columbia, SC with Kalayna Price, Faith Hunter, Rachel Aaron and Misty Massey. We’re working on a cool name for the event, and I’ll get you more info as we lock down the details, but we’ll have books to sign, a badass giveaway, and a couple of panel discussions as well, so that will be super-cool.
And in September I’ve used up a year’s worth of Marriott points to pay for my hotel room at Dragon*Con in downtown Atlanta. I don’t have a table or anything that cool, because I’m still the new kid, but I’ll be there hanging out, drinking and going to panels. I’ve only ever been to one Dragon*Con, and that was in the very early ’90s, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the show has grown in almost 20 years. I also have some hopes of meeting a few of my favorite writers, like Mercedes Lackey, and getting at least a little bit of useful information out of the panels.
I don’t have much booked for the fall, need to get my ass dialed in on the writing front. I had what I think was a cool idea for a YA series the other morning, so I’ll start playing with that once I finish up Knight Moves. It’s about a kid in a world where most everyone has magic, except for her, and what happens when she finds out that she really does have a gift of her own.
So the coolest thing that happened all weekend – I went to ConCarolinas to hang out with a few friends and sit in on a couple of panels. The first panel I went to was called “The Future of the Printed Word.” Obviously something I have a vested interest in. After all the panelists had their say, I raised my hand to comment, and Faith Hunter (NY Times bestselling author of the Jane Yellowrock series – totally badass shapeshifter series) told me to introduce myself before I got to my comment. So I did, and mentioned that I had three self-published novels, and she then told the room that Hard Day’s Knight was one of the best self-published novels she’d ever read. I blushed, and was touched, and flattered, and all those things. I didn’t even know I knew how to blush anymore! But it was super-cool to get that kind of vote of confidence from someone who I count as a friend, and someone I respect a hell of a lot as a writer, too. That kind of affirmation doesn’t come along very often, and not very often in a public forum, to boot. So needless to say that was the highlight of my weekend.
