Fandom Fest/Fright Night Film Fest Report

I know, all you’ve gotten out of me for a couple weeks now is a bunch of guest posts and my whining on Facebook about rehearsals and edits. So strap in, kids, there’s an honest-to-God blog post, written by me, coming. This may even be it.

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to weasel my way onto a couple of panels at Fandom Fest 2011 in Louisville, Kentucky. This was the first year Fandom Fest has had a literary track, and I met up with Stephen Zimmer at ConCarolinas back in June. He told me about the show, and I pestered him until he put me on a couple of panels. While I was there I met some great folks and wormed my way in as an impromptu moderator for a couple of panels that didn’t have one assigned, which was good practice for RoundCon 2011.1, coming up in October, which I’m heading up the literary track for.

Yes I know the grammar in that sentence was awful. But if you hold your head just right, it sounds better.

So, Fandom Fest. This is a fantasy/sci-fi con attached to a horror film fest, which made for some disturbing cosplay, but AWESOME t-shirt vendors. I picked up a couple of t-shirts from old movie posters, including the Texas Chainsaw Massacre shirt (in French) and the Fast Pussycat, Kill Kill shirt. I also got one that says “Quint’s Shark Fishing Tours, Amity’s Favorite since 1976,” which I kinda love. So I spent too much money on t-shirts. But I managed to avoid buying any books. Mostly because I just don’t read in print anymore. Everything I read nowadays is on my kindle or iPad, so I only buy print books when I really want the author’s autograph. And I’m not much of an autograph hound, so I don’t buy many print books.

Anyway, moving on. There were a TON of writers and publishers there, Stephen really did an awesome job in organizing things, bringing together a great lineup of talent and setting up some awesome panels. But he got boned by the con organizers, and being the nice guy that he is, Stephen stepped in to run a bunch of other stuff on top of what he was already slated to do, so he couldn’t really enjoy the weekend like he should have. And he had to bear the ire of any writer who didn’t have their stuff go perfectly. I didn’t see this happen, but it always does when you let humans get involved. He did the best job he possibly could have, but he was doing the work of four people, and it almost killed him.

And the hotel almost killed all of us. If you’re ever planning an event in Louisville, I strongly suggest you avoid the Fern Valley Hotel and Conference Center. It wasn’t really worth the $69 con rate. Not by a long stretch. The air crapped out on Friday, and the facility never recovered. There weren’t enough bartenders, and they weren’t particularly pleasant. The banquet services food was abysmal, and I actually walked out of the restaurant after waiting almost ten minutes for someone to bring me a menu and a glass of water. All the hotel facilities were terrible. The place felt, and smelled, like a Comfort Inn from circa 1980, and all they’d done was glass in the exterior entrances. The doors barely worked, and the hallway outside the room was hotter than anyplace I’ve ever been. And I’ve been to Vegas in July. One afternoon I went back to my room for an hour or so between panels, and when I left my room, the door handle was so hot I used a towel to open the door!

All that said, the con was still a good time, and I’d go back if it were in a decent hotel. At least something on the level of a Courtyard or Holiday Inn Express. All the people were nice, and I learned a TON. Not so much about the craft of writing, but that’s not what I was there to learn. I learned a lot about small press publishing, how it works and who some of the players are. I learned that just like everything else, there are major and minor players in the small press market, and I started to identify who was who. I’ve been thinking of shopping The Chosen around to small presses, because it could use a little editorial love, and I’d like to see what we could do with print sales if I had just a little better exposure. The book has decent e-book sales, so I’d like to keep those rights if possible, and the small press world is the only place I can find anyone willing to do that for me. But if the right offer came along, with the right developmental and promotional package, I’d sell all the rights.

Most of the writers there were published with small presses, and typically small presses that were exhibiting. There were a couple of folks who had New York publishing deals, or had them in the past, and a few self-pub folks like me. It was a good mix of writers, and I had a lot of fun hanging out with them in bars. Now I’m really looking forward to Dragon Con, where I can reconnect with these guys, as well as my other writer pals that I’ve made over the last year.

That’s enough drivel for today, I’ve got to go work on edits for Knight Moves. The hopeful release date of August 14 is looking better, but a lot depends on my proofreaders and my cover guy. I did knock together a temporary cover that I can live with if I have to, but I’d really like to relaunch the back stories with new covers and drop them all three at the same time. We’ll see. But it’s written, and I’m almost through with the first round of edits, so I have high hopes for getting it into people’s hands in the next two weeks!

Guest Post – Mary Anna Evans

Guest Post – Mary Anna Evans

Why Write Crime Fiction?  
(or any other kind of made-up stuff that never happened…)

by Mary Anna Evans
Author of environmental thriller Wounded Earth

The protagonist in my thriller Wounded Earth, Larabeth McLeod, is the kind of woman who changes the world.  I love her for that.
She sees a problem—polluted water or soil or air—and she invents a way to fix it.  She uses that knowledge to found a company that employs lots of people.  The world is a better place because she’s in it, and that’s one of the reasons readers cheer her on.  The man who is stalking her, a man so evil that he calls himself Babykiller, is so angry at the world and at humanity that he’s willing to strike back in some terrible ways.  Larabeth doesn’t intend to let that happen, despite the fact that fighting back could cost her everything.
Characters like these are a gift from God for a writer like me.  They matter, but sometimes I ask myself, “Do I?”  Don’t you ever doubt your place in the universe?
Someone please tell me I’m not the only neurotic soul who wonders whether she has earned her spot on the planet on any given day.  When undergoing a bout of end-of-the-day emotional accounting, I feel good about having made sure my daughter had a balanced dinner or about recycling the cans that held the Coca-Cola I probably shouldn’t have drunk.
Mopping the kitchen floor and dusting the furniture don’t give the same karma-improving feeling.  The floor and furniture will be dirty again tomorrow, so how exactly have I made the world a better place by cleaning them today?  And don’t even get me started on laundry…
So where does my profession rate when it comes to making the world a better place?  Am I wasting my time and talents by spending my days writing thrillers and mysteries?  Should I go back to environmental engineering, where I have the opportunity to help our society learn to clean up its messes?
Really, one could ask these questions about any work of art.  Lovely music, pretty pictures, graceful dancing, exciting stories…none of these things put food on the table.  Yet art is what makes us human.  It is the only tool we can use to communicate the wordless feelings in our hearts.  I can’t show you my soul, but I can paint a picture of what’s in it.  Even better, I could write you a story.
Human beings have been telling stories for all of time.  Before we settled in cities, before we learned to grow our food, before we could even light a fire to cook that food, we told each other tales that shared important knowledge or that beat back the terrors of the night.  Crime fiction is simply a descendant of those old, old stories.
I consider crime fiction to be the literature of justice.  I introduce my readers to a world of my own design, then I set it askew in a dramatic way.  Murder can do that.   Then, slowly, I labor with Larabeth (or Faye Longchamp or whoever is my protagonist of the moment) to set that world right.
This isn’t always possible in real life.  Crime goes unpunished and murderers do walk free.  But in the tightly controlled world of my creation, justice can be served.
Sometimes, I dance along the boundaries of that justice.  What is just is not always what is legal, and what is legal is not always what is just.  By exploring that gray and murky boundary, I ask my readers to consider how they want their world to be.  When they close my books, they go back into that world with ideas that are slightly different than they were before.  Maybe they will be gentler with people who are different from them.  Maybe they will stand up and say so when something is just not right.
I hope so.  Because I think that asking people to think hard about right and wrong is an excellent way for a writer to earn her place in the universe.

Mary Anna is the author of environmental thriller Wounded Earth, as well as the awardwinning Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries and Red Adept’s top short story collection of 2010, Offerings.  All her work is available in ebook form.  Wounded Earth and the Faye Longchamp mysteries are also available in print.

Website: http://www.maryannaevans.com/
Personal blog:  http://maryannaevans.blogspot.com/
Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=527135843
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/maryannaevans
Group blog:  http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/

John’s Schedule for Fandom Fest Weekend

I’m driving halfway to Louisville today, stopping off in Charleston, WV for a hopeful repeat of my last few trips there – in other words a little extra green in my pockets (and I need it after dusting off three buyins in our home game last weekend). Then Friday I finish my trek to Kentucky.

I’ll be doing a short reading Saturday night at 10PM – probably a brief segment from Hard Day’s Knight and maybe a piece from The Chosen. Then Sunday morning I’m on a panel about finding alternative sources of writing income, which I’ve certainly done plenty of in my day. That panel’s at 9AM (ouch!), then I’ll hang around the con for a while before driving back to West Virginia, crashing for the night and finishing the trek on Monday. My plan is to spend every morning writing, then be at the con all afternoon and evening, so you can probably find me wherever cheap, crappy beer is served.

I also have to spend a couple of hours each day drilling on my lines for The Irish Curse. Rehearsals are going very well, and I think it’s going to be a great show, but our off-book date is Sunday, so since I’m not there I’d damn sure better have my lines down when I get back on Monday night. I also have Tuesday written off as a vacation day, so if I still have line issues I may stay home and work on them all day Tuesday. Probably not, though, because if I have a spare vacation day I should save it for opening week, when I know I’ll be absolutely exhausted.

This has been a great time, working on the show, but my word count is in the toilet. I just don’t have enough energy for three things – work, writing and theatre. So writing has been relegated to a back seat until the show opens, which I’m less than thrilled with. Lesson learned – if I’m going to do a show, pick a time when I don’t have a book in progress.

Knight Moves is at the editor’s right now, so I’m looking hopefully at an August release. If I can get the edits and rewrites done, and a cover done I’m going to push to have it out by my birthday, which is August 14th. That also marks one year since I release The Chosen, so I’d have released four books in my first year, and I think that would be pretty good output. I also have a couple of other exciting things percolating, but they’re not quite ready to talk about publicly yet, so I’m gonna go try and hammer out a couple thousand words, then pack and drive for half a day.

Guest Post – Brent Nichols

Guest Post – Brent Nichols

Brent is more than welcome to come squat in my cyber-space, especially after the great review he gave to Hard Day’s Knight! Check out his new book, Bert the Barbarian, over on Smashwords! You can find out more about Brent and Bert on his website here.

I’m thoroughly happy to be kicking off my blog tour in the company of John Hartness.  John writes his books just the way I like ’em.  I checked out Hard Day’s Knight and I think I was laughing out loud before I reached the end of the first page.  He doesn’t let a good joke get in the way of a good story, though.  Mystery, suspense, action, it’s all in there.  And the prose is solid as well.  John’s hitting the marks that I’m aiming for.

But enough about him.  I’m here to talk about myself, or more accurately about my creation.  I’ve been a novelist for a couple of decades now, but not a successful one.  It takes a long time to learn this goofy trade.  I wrote, I re-wrote, I sent submissions off to editors and agents, and I racked up an impressive stack of rejection letters.  And I got discouraged.

After a while I wasn’t writing very often.  I wasn’t satisfied with the results when I did write.  Writing was a disheartening chore, and the meagre results hardly seemed worthy of lining the floor of a bird cage.

Then I heard about NaNoWriMo.  How many of you have heard of it?  Let’s have a show of hands.  Okay, more than I expected, but not nearly everyone.  NaNoWriMo stands for “National Novel Writing Month.” Speaking as a Canadian I can assure you that it’s international.  The idea is to spend the month of November writing a novel of at least 50,000 words.  NaNoWriMo is a beautiful concept because it gets writers out of all kinds of mental traps.  If you’re going to finish a novel in a month you can’t agonize over every paragraph.  You can’t spend a year trying to get the first chapter perfect.  You have to move on.

It was exactly the kick on the seat of the pants that I needed.  After years of dithering I finally got back to work, and an unexpected bonus was that writing became fun again.  It actually took me about three months to get through my first draft of Bert the Barbarian, but that was still a massive increase in productivity.

At the end of it, of course, I had a deeply flawed manuscript.  However, you can’t fix a blank page.  For me at least, the only way to write a good novel is to write a bad novel and then refurbish it.  It’s been a couple of years and an astonishing amount of learning since I finished that first draft.  I’m pretty proud of the end result.

Bert the Barbarian is science fiction that reads like heroic fantasy.  Bert Hoover, who’s a bit of a loser, gets kidnapped and taken to a primitive planet.  His friend Janice is in terrible danger with no one else to turn to. Bert must find strength and courage to escape from slavery, rescue Janice, and find a way back home.  Look for it wherever fine e-books are sold.

Thanks for stopping by Brent, and good luck with Bert!

Rehearsal? What’s that?

We take a break from our regularly scheduled discussions of writing and promotion to talk about my imminent return to the stage. On a lark, I auditioned for a role in the upcoming play The Irish Curse, directed by an old friend of mine. There were a couple of factors that made me want to audition. I’ve known the director for ten years or more, and we used to run a theatre company together, so he knows I can act a little. So it was a stress-free audition on that front. There were two roles that I thought would fit my type, which is becoming increasingly rare as I get older and fatter. And then there were the magical words in the audition announcement – “all roles will be compensated.”

You see, I’ve spent more than twenty years in theatre in some form or another. I’ve designed, directed, produced, performed and done almost everything that there is to be done in a piece of theatre. For the record, the list of jobs I haven’t held is – Musician, Musical Director, Choreographer, Dancer, Props Designer, Dresser and Dramaturg. I think I’ve done everything else that has a name, including Costume Designer, Makeup Artist and Poster Designer to name just a few. And I’ve been compensated fairly well for some of those things.

But I’ve never been paid to act. I’ve been paid to speak in front of crowds, and I’ve been paid to perform poetry for an audience and cameras, but I’ve never been paid to be an actor. And that’s always bugged me a little. I haven’t auditioned much (not in years), but it always felt a little off that I’ve never done anything as an actor that garnered me any cash.

So I auditioned. I have no idea how many guys came out that fit the part, but I got it. And having been on the other side of the audition room, I know that there are a lot of things that go into casting. Being friends with the director helps. Being easy to work with helps a lot. Having a proven capacity for learning my lines and not tripping over the furniture doesn’t hurt, either.

So I was cast as Father Kevin in The Irish Curse. The cast so far has been great to work with, and it’s a lot of fun working with Glenn (the director) again after all these years. But I’m working muscles that haven’t seen much use lately, so to speak, and it’s an adjustment. I haven’t been onstage since 2008, and that was only a few lines. I haven’t had a major role since 2007, and haven’t performed any contemporary shows in even longer. So I’m trying to remember how to learn lines, how to learn blocking, and still trying to fit writing in amongst all that. It’s a challenge, to say the least.

But it’s a lot of fun, and it’s reminding me why I decided to do this all those years ago. The friendships, the fun of working hard for a good show, the magic of theatre. If you’re around in August, stop by the show. It’ll be a fun ride.