One of my absolute favorite memories of WorldCon 2013 is that during the convention, I joined the Skiffy & Fanty team to record a very special Torture Cinema podcast episode about SHARKNADO.

This is the episode in which I declared SHARKNADO to be “the apotheosis of the bad SyFy channel Sci-Fi movie.”

Notice: the recording is filled with total ridiculousness, profanity, and a drunkenly-acted skit.

Listen, if you dare…

A while back, I made some noise about a new 3-book deal with Pocket Star – 2 of the books being in a new series titled YOUNGER GODS, and the other being a novella in the Ree Reyes universe, set after CELEBROMANCY.

Now that I have edits back on the novella, we’ve settled on a title for the novella: ATTACK THE GEEK. This book will be about half the size of a Ree Reyes novel, and focuses on one Incredibly Bad Night (TM) at Grognard’s, featuring Geekomancers new and old, magic curses, whacky monsters, more romantic tension between Ree and Drake, and the on-screen return of everyone’s favorite Grizzled Geekomantic Mentor, Eastwood!

ATTACK THE GEEK will be available on April 7th, 2014. Set your calendars now!

You can see it even now on Goodreads, and pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes. Other links to come. (N.B. the final price will be lower than $5.99, since it’s a shorter work).

w00t!

On 9/11, I was a brand-new Freshman in college. My adulthood has been formed in a number of ways by that day.

I remember waking up and checking news on a Legend of the Five rings blog site and thinking it was a hoax at first. Then spending hours going down internet rabbit holes, needing to know more.

My one class that day spent the first 60 minutes just trying to process what had happened, and our teacher, excellent as she was, wove it back into the subject of the class, on international relations (The West and China, in the class’ case, but it worked).

That night, the dorms at Indiana University had impromptu group grief counseling sessions. Walking back to our dorm, I remember talking with a group about how if we don’t want this to lead to a war, we should contact our representatives, tell them to find a peaceful solution. That didn’t exactly pan out.

Not long after that, I borrowed The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth from the library, which set me on the path of designing my own major (Creative Mythology) out of a need to tell stories, perhaps derived from a desire for some kind of control, to be able to make sense of the world. That major then put me on the path towards becoming a novelist, of going from ‘I want to write fiction some day’ to ‘I am going to start doing this thing, now.’

Would I have still become a writer without 9/11? Probably. But that day, the effects it had on the USA as a country, psychologically, socially, politically, economically, have created the world that I live in.

“Never Forget.” I’m part of the 9/11 generation. How could I ever forget? All I can do is try to move on.

At WorldCon, I had the pleasure of meeting Justin Landon, the man behind Staffer’s Book Reviews. Justin is, for my money, one of the most astute and rigorous reviewers active in SF/F right now, and while that terrifies me as a writer, I think he brings a great deal of passion and insight to the community.

Justin and I were both on a podcast recording about WorldCon, and after the mics turned off, the talk turned to action items – what we as members of the community can do to move forward, to embrace the changes in the makeup of an expanding and evolving fandom.

I’m very glad to see that Justin has already started moving on the ideas. Please head over to Staffer’s Book Reviews and check out his post-WorldCon/Hugos post, and especially the part at the end.

Sherman Alexie just proposed something that I think is super-cool, and I might try to pull off, myself.

Read here:

http://www.bookweb.org/indies-first

Read it? Cool.

Being a former bookseller, this idea is totally up my alley. When I worked retail, I loved the one-on-one interaction, the fun of getting to know someone enough to learn their aesthetic, or the one they were shopping for. There was nothing quite as cool as finding the exact right game for a family to play at a holiday, or connecting a reader with their next favorite book.

Alexie’s post has a slightly mercenary angle to it, in the ‘if you hand-sell a bunch, you will sell your own book, too’ kind of way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Thing is, there aren’t, to my knowledge, Indie bookstores in Baltimore that have a SF section substantive enough for me to be useful that also sell ebooks. Only a small # of indie bookstores have partnered with Kobo to sell epub ebooks – the strategy for indie ebookselling is still emerging, since the current math makes it counter-productive for most indie bookstores to spend time selling ebooks when they could be encouraging print book sales.

Alexie’s idea is a sound one, but how well does it apply to me? I’d still love to do it, since for me the main objective is to show my support for indie bookstores, which is strong.

But my perspective speaks only for me. This idea brings up lots of questions based on the different roles in this proposed scenario.

To my author friends – Would you do this? What’s your take on hand-selling? Do you like it? Fear it?

And booksellers – Would you have an author come into your store? How would you use them?

And bookstore shoppers – Do you like being hand-sold, or do you like to hunt for books on your own? How would you react to an author offering to help you find books in their genres of expertise?

Angry Robot author Madeline Ashby made a blog post about WorldCon’s “Greying of Fandom Problem.” It’s very smart, and you should go over and read it if you haven’t.

An excerpt:

Let me put it another way. The demographic shifts faced by WorldCon’s largest customer segment are the same ones faced by the Republican Party. Let that sink in for a minute. Really let it marinate. These are the same people who cheered me when I talked about Canada’s healthcare plan, and applauded Mark Van Name when he blamed rape culture for America’s ills. They want to be progressive, but they’re being blindsided by the very same demographic shifts afflicting the most conservative elements of contemporary society, for exactly the same reason: they haven’t taken the issue seriously. This is why there isn’t a Hugo for Young Adult novels. Because God forbid we reward the writers who transform young genre readers into lifelong customers at a time when even Bruce Sterling says the future will be about old people staring at the sky in puzzlement and horror.

 

 

Read the whole post here.

For folks who went to WorldCon – what do you think about this demographic situation? Is this something WorldCon should address? How? It’s easy for writers to say ‘Hey, this con needs to bring in younger people so my writing has a future!’ but what can we as writers do about it? What can bloggers, reviewers, editors, and other industry professionals do?