Tag: shameless self-promotion

Road Trip Rerun

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Having made it through the Peterborough book signing, we’re now holed up for the night in our favorite inexpensive motel in Manchester NH, and I am pondering the question that always gets asked on occasions like this, which is:  Do readings and book signings actually do a working writer any good?

And the answer comes back, as it so often does in this business:  Who the hell knows?

My own theory, for whatever it’s worth, is that readings and similar activities may not do much to sell the particular book you’re pushing at the time, but they probably do contribute to increasing your “hey, I saw this person once and he was a nice guy, so  why not buy his new book” factor, at least a little bit.

(Don’t be a jerk to the booksellers, though.  Like the folks in Production, they have the means in their hand to exact a  subtle but devastating revenge.)

Back from Martha’s Vineyard…

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…and we’re already contemplating another road trip.  This one, thankfully, is briefer:  a jaunt down to Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough NH for an Impossible Futures booksigning, this Saturday the 26th.

More regular posting about life, literature, and the things that peeve or fascinate me will resume shortly.

A Commercial Reminder

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For those who may be interested:

As of today, my base rate for doing a line-edit and letter of critique on a standard-weight novel is $1500.  The $100 deal for critiquing a short story or the first 5K words/first chapter of a novel still stands, however, and a client who takes that deal and later comes back for a critique of the entire manuscript still gets $100 off of the whole-novel fee.

Meanwhile, the local rains have (temporarily) stopped, and the thermometer is dropping.  Our local purveyors of fresh and organic vegetables anticipate sub-freezing temperatures on the higher elevations, which means no more fresh zucchini for zucchini bread.

Look What the Postman Brought

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One of the small pleasures of a writer’s life is the arrival of author’s comp copies in the mail.  The new-book smell, the solid heft of the real and physical object, the gratifying appearance of one’s name and words in crisp black type . . . there’s nothing quite like it, and it never really gets old.

Today’s mail included our comp copies of the Thomas Easton and Judith K. Dial anthology Impossible Futures, which contains our short story, “According to the Rule.”  We think the anthology looks nifty-keen, especially the cover art:

(This has been a shameless plug.  Buy one; better still, buy a dozen.  They’re just the right thickness to shim up that short table leg that’s been driving you crazy for months now . . . .)

O My Prophetic Soul!

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I do in fact have the 10:30 AM Sunday reading slot at Readercon next weekend.

My full schedule, for those who may be interested:

Friday July 12
8:00 PM   Kaffeeklatsch. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

9:00 PM    Autographs. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

Saturday July 13
10:00 AM       Intellectually Rigorous Fictional Data: Making Up Facts That Are True. Debra Doyle, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Margaret Ronald, Ken Schneyer, Harold Vedeler, Henry Wessells (leader). How do you make up convincing fictional primary sources? No, not for purposes of seeking political office, but because you need to know the facts and how they underpin the world of your fiction and the lives of your characters. Imaginary books and letters are just the beginning, even if they never appear in the narrative. Which fictional data sources matter? How much is enough to make a narrative feel resilient and whole?

Sunday July 14
10:30 AM        Reading: Debra Doyle reads from a forthcoming work.

And my co-author’s schedule:

Friday July 12
8:00 PM        Kaffeeklatsch. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

9:00 PM        Autographs. Debra Doyle, James D. Macdonald.

Saturday July 13
8:00 PM        The Xanatos Gambit. Jim Freund (moderator), Yoon Ha Lee, Scott Lynch, James D. Macdonald. The tangled webs of schemers both good and bad have always had a presence in imaginative fiction. There are the wily king-killers, the intrigue-fomenting spinsters and widows, the bard who hides the knife beside the harp, the indispensable keeper of secrets, and more. What are the challenges in writing an especially clever character? How has the role of the schemer evolved, and what versions do we no longer see?

Sunday July 14
2:30 PM        Reading: James D. Macdonald reads from a forthcoming work.

Utterly Shameless Self-Promotion

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My co-author James D. Macdonald and I have a short story out on-line today, in both text and podcast form:  “The Clockwork Trollop,” over at this month’s issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.