In addition to a discount on The Chocolatier’s Wife, you can also celebrate Celebrate Chocolate Day with some free prose from me!

Back before Sarah was born, I went and banked some blog posts, figuring that for a couple of weeks when I was too frazzled to write, I would be able to just click “Publish,” and the posts would go out into the world.  Well, it turned out I was too frazzled to just click “Publish,” so I’ve had these things languishing in a file, some of them long past the time when they were relevant.  This one seems to have become relevant again, so:

If you haven’t seen it already, I donated a vignette last year for use in promoting WickedFaire.  To publicize this year’s theme, Jeff Mach set up the virtual Wicked Chocolate Factory, which includes individual rooms written by different authors.  Each room contains a vignette or piece of flash fiction, an illustration, and a link to the author’s Web site.  At present, the factory consists of two stories by Jeff, one by me, and another by the lovely and talented Sara Harvey–who, I might add, recognized “Garden of Dreams” as mine even early on when a glitch had the vignettes up without the authors’ names.

Enjoy!

Wrap-up of AlbaCon after the jump.

AlbaCon Wrap-up

Whenever anyone asks my advice for planning a wedding, my favorite response is that everything will go wrong, but no one will notice it but you–and if you only keep that in mind, you’ll be all right.  Well, planning a convention is a lot like planning a wedding, except on a much larger scale with crappier food.  But at AlbaCon, the biggest thing that went wrong was front and center, because Anne McCaffrey, the guest of honor, had to cancel because of her health.

It was still a good convention.  Her son, Todd McCaffrey, came in her place and did readings and panels.  I didn’t get a chance to meet him, but my wife skipped my book signing to go to his presentation, and she says he’s really nice.  And there was a get well card to Anne McCaffrey, for everyone at the convention to sign.

The hotel was also very nice, and we had a view of downtown Albany, with a river visible between the buildings.  And the hotel catered the Green Room, which was a nice plus, though we didn’t find out about it until Saturday night.  And the pool had good hours, from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.  We went there Saturday night and had a good chat in the hot tub with some people from the Anne McCaffrey Web forum Meeting of Minds.

My first event of the convention was my book signing on Saturday at 3:30.  It was nice to have the morning off, with Andrew at his grandparents’ house, so Rachel and I slept in, and then went to a lazy lunch, from which we barely got back in time for the signing.  I shared my slot with a military SF writer named Ryk Spoor, who has a following already, so the table was mobbed by four or five of his fans.  I wasn’t sure they would have any interest in my work, but two of them bought Antlered Bird on CD-ROM anyway.  A third came to my reading but didn’t buy a book.

I’m still figuring out what’s the best chapter to do at a reading.  For the last two readings I started at the beginning, but the book starts kind of slowly and builds in intensity, so I’m not sure that’s the best place to start.  On the other hand, each chapter builds on the things that happened before, so starting it anywhere else may leave the reader without enough information.

All my panels were on Sunday, and they were all on heady topics:  Implying Other Languages; Believable Evil; and The Role of the Afterlife in Fantasy Fiction.  Made for some fascinating discussion, but in retrospect it would have been a good idea to ask to be on at least one truly silly panel to break it up.

In additional news, I found the costume piece around which I will build this year’s Hallowe’en costume.  I won’t give details yet, because I want to surprise some people who might read this blog, but I promise to post a photograph once it’s done. And we got into a discussion late Saturday night with an odd group of people with very diverse opinions.  That discussion inspired a piece of flash fiction designed to mess with the head of an editor who was in the room.  We’ll see how that goes.

 This is likely to be my last convention appearance of the year, for reasons I will delve into in a later post.  Don’t worry, it’s good news.