There seemed to be authors everywhere at Capricon 40. I’ve already introduced several of them in the “Capricon Project” posts “Detectives in the Wild” and “Indie Author Speed-Dating.” But there were yet more!

Personal experiences

These Capricon Project posts focus only on authors I met and interacted with personally at the con. My apologies to all the other authors who were there. If I didn’t encounter you in a meaningful way at the con, I didn’t include you.

I did also video-record a series of short interviews with Indie authors with tables in the Capricon 40 Dealers’ Room. I’m still working on those. I need to learn how to use Premiere Pro to edit them. I hope to produce them for posting during the spring months.

Yes, there were authors everywhere at Capricon 40. Let me mention a few more here.

Jonathan P. Brazee

I’ve had the pleasure of being friends with Jonathan Brazee since we met in Puerto Rico in 2017. He is a prolific, successful Nebula Award-nominated, Dragon Award-winning author who mostly writes military science fiction. I included a short profile of him in one of my post-Capricon articles last year, but he’s expanded several of his series since then.

He wrote his 2020 novel Gemini Twins in honor of his own twin daughters. Other recently-completed series include Ghost Marines and The Navy of Humankind-Wasp Squadron.

Dorothy Winsor

I shared a reading time-slot with Dorothy Winsor at Capricon 40. She read a wonderful short story. I believe she said it’s unpublished to date, but it deserves to be seen and read! She writes mostly middle-grade and Young Adult fantasy. 

The book she promoted most at Capricon was The Wind Reader. It’s a story about a young boy who tells fortunes on the street to earn a living. Then he tells a fortune for prince that later actually comes true(!) Next he’s compelled to come to the castle to be the royal fortune teller–a role for which he’s not prepared.

Lance Erlick

I stayed for the readings that followed mine and Dorothy’s. This gave me the opportunity to hear an excerpt from Lance Erlick’s book Reborn. It’s the first of his Android Chronicles books. Interesting and well written, it probably ought to come with trigger warnings. 

Erlick’s android protagonist “Synthia Cross is a state-of-the-art masterwork of synthetic human design—and a fantasy come true for her creator.” She shows enough alarming signs of emergent behavior, however, that her creator wipes her memory each day to keep her in control. He has his nefarious reasons, but she’s already learning how to leave herself clues so she can reconstruct her past–and reveal her creator’s true intentions.

Kristine Smith

Kristine shared the reading time-slot with Lance. A winner of the John W. Campbell Award, she’s been writing the Jani Kilian Chronicles for several years. Its multiple volumes tell the story of a struggle for understanding and peace between humans and an exo-terrestraial species called the idomeni.

The title character is a former captain with powerful enemies and a body that’s been expensively repaired after traumatic injuries that allowed her death to be faked. Kilian subsequently forms a friendship with the idomeni ambassador. Smith’s reading selection this time was an excerpt from the most recent Jani Kilian book. She also writes the Lauren Reardon series, under the name of Alex Gordon.

Donna J. W. Munro

I shared an autographing table with Donna J. W. Munro, who primarily writes dark fantasy horror, YA fiction, and science fiction. She is a prolific writer of short fiction, including two stories, “Death’s Day Off,” and “My Forever Love,” in the anthology Beautiful Lies, Painful Truths, Vol. II. 

According to her blog, the first of a series about zombies, called the Poppet Series (“about tamed zombies and the girl who wants to save them”), will be available in May 2020.

W. A. Thomasson

Like Jonathan Brazee, I met Bill Thomasson in Puerto Rico in 2017, and we’ve bumped into each other at conventions ever since. Bill has been working on a sword and sorcery novel for some time. He’d hoped that The Whip of Abadur would be available in time for Capricon 40, but it’s still in production (indeed, there’s no cover yet!). 

He describes the story this way: “In an ancient Fertile Land that is not quite the one we know, the cat burglar Teema is hired to retrieve a demon-god’s stolen symbol of power and return it to its proper temple. But she quickly learns that meddling in the affairs of gods and demons is more dangerous than she had thought.”

As you can see, Capricon 40 featured authors everywhere! I hope you’ve enjoyed one more small tour through some of the exotic and interesting worlds they’ve created, in this final episode of the Capricon Project.

IMAGE CREDITS:

The photos of Jonathan Brazee, Dorothy Winsor, Lance Erlick, and Kristine Smith all were taken at Capricon 40 by Jan S. Gephardt with the subjects’ knowledge and consent. If you wish to re-use or reblog any of these photos, please credit Jan as the photographer and if possible include a link back to this post. 

The photos of Donna J. W. Munro and W. A. (Bill) Thomasson were taken by Tyrell E. Gephardt, also at Capricon 40, and also with the subjects’ knowledge and consent. Please observe the same courtesy of including an attribution and link back, if you use these photos.

The Capricon 40 header is courtesy of Capricon 40’s website. All of the book cover images are courtesy of Amazon (see captions for individual links).