Category Archives: Uncategorized

All around the town

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If it’s Tuesday, Buffy must be in trouble. And I rewatched it, here, with this essay entitled History Lessons.

I also was a guest on the Scifitalk podcast this past week. You can listen to that interview here. And speaking of podcasting, I’ll be cohosting Geekly Pleasures with Jules Sherred this Friday. I’ve also written about five of my all-time favorite things, from getting paid to watch Quantum Leap to gay marriage, on the Geekly blog.
Finally, Library Journal likes me, they really like me–but their link leads to Viagra adds, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

FanExpo Vancouver was outstanding!

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Butt in chair report: I wrote 549 words this morning on a story called “Island of the Giants,” another of The Gales (the first being Among the Silvering Herd.) I did manage to do about 200 words worth of work on the story at FanExpo Vancouver, in between surges of meeting fans and hanging with D D Barant and Spider Robinson. I also got to meet comic artist Shane Rooks and, oh, some actor guy. Brendan? Nicholas or something? He was on this show I kinda like, maybe you’ve heard of him?
No, seriously, squee! It was cool. And I was pretty cool, too, which means a) no picture of me in NB’s lap but also b) no criminal charges. Instead, here is a picture of me and DD Barant.
Photo Stream-794
Quite a few of the fans who stopped by wanted to know how one goes about selling a book. Don and I handed out bits and pieces of the usual commonsense and quite general advice: write daily or as near to it as you can manage, lots of persistence, seek feedback, start figuring out how to use it.
Meanwhile Shane Rooks, beside me, had young artists bringing him their portfolios. His advice to them was generous, specific and awesome: this dragon would be better if we could see its face, consider working in other media to get a better perspective on the subject, here you’ve got the light coming from the wrong angle for the shadows, and this figure’s anatomically incorrect.
I am envious of this. A visual artist can look at a whole piece in a second and give–or so it seemed–a lot of concrete feedback. At the Surrey International Writer’s Conference (and I’m sure other venues), there was something of a writer variation on this: I’d get three pages of a manuscript and the author would get fifteen minutes of my first impressions. But this is as close as that gets. There’s no quick-glancing at someone’s entire novel, obviously, especially at an event jammed with, I kid you not, 80,000 fans.

Saturday witterings

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I am sitting home by the fire tip-tapping as the cats patrol the living room. Kelly is away just for the night–her sister’s mom died and all the Robson Sibs have gone to Kamloops to be with Sue during the Celebration of Life. (Dad had three wives, so this isn’t K’s mom. She’s okay, just being an excellent sister.)

I am going to be appearing at FanExpo Vancouver tomorrow, selling and signing books, so I didn’t go.

In cheerier news, my Blue Magic launch at the UBC Bookstore went very well. Joseph Wu came as a guest artist and made this fabulous paper portrait of Sahara Knax, late in her transformation.

It was bright and sunny today and I got out a bit in the morning, and then in the afternoon I went and spent a quick, peculiar hour with Barb. (We were both wiped out and so a lot of it amounted to parallel play, with iPads.) Since then I’ve been home trying to sort through a prodigious pile of tasks.

There’s a big fly buzzing around the living room and Minnow is scrambling around the joint chasing it; it’s better than TV. Speaking of which, I’m thinking of making a BtVS Rewatch (“Homecoming” !) my next task.

 

Blue Magic book launch is tonight!

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If you are in Vancouver and would like to attend, please consider yourself invited. It’ll be at 7:30 p.m. at the UBC Bookstore DOWNTOWN, OMG, please don’t go to Point Grey! at 800 Robson Street. There will be cookies and teas and a surprise guest artist too, and I will read something shiny and new that nobody’s ever heard before.

If you’re out of town and want to join the online party instead, I have continued to do some guest blogging this week:

Joshua Palmatier interviews me about the book, here.
Starmetaloak asked me about the First Nations storyline, so I wrote Raising the Roused for her.
Did I already tell you about The Magic of the Pacific Northwest

Finally, I will be at the Fan Expo Vancouver this weekend, selling, signing books and, I’m thinking, maybe doing a little stuntwriting. In other words, I might sit in the crowded Convention center amid a massive hubbub and see if I can crank words on the latest of The Gales, which is called “Island of the Giants.” Tweeting could ensue.

(The Gales? What Gales? The first is “Among the Silvering Herd.”)

Tuesday’s Girl is Full of Post

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Angel gets his stalk on in this week’s Buffy rewatch post, which is about “Passion.”

Contests! If you are in the U.S.A., Goodreads is giving away ten copies of Blue Magic. Contest deadline is May 4th–last I looked there are about 450 people with their hats in the ring for it. Those are better than lottery odds. And The Qwillery, meanwhile, has copies for Canadians and Americans.

I have been making appearances in other blogs in the past week. One was at The World in the Satin Bag, and it’s about why I chose Oregon as the setting for the Books of Chantment. People, especially Oregonians, ask this a lot. Another was at John Scalzi’s blog–I got to be a Big Idea author. I am a huge fan of Whatever so this was a big thrill.