Every once in a while, a news item comes through about “a massive pileup” on a highway somewhere. Conditions turned bad, there was too much congestion on the roadway, and a chain-reaction wreck resulted. Usually the item goes on to describe death, disruption, and/or injuries. Certainly, there are lots of mangled cars and trucks. It’s a bad scene for all involved. No, I wasn’t in a wreck like that (at least no so far, thank God!). But events over the…
Where has the book publishing world been in 2025? Where is it likely to go in 2026? And how can authors – whether indie or traditionally published – gain visibility with the best audiences for their particular work? It’s time for an annual marketing review, and the planning we must do each year. Anyone who’s an author these days has to think about marketing. Back in ancient days when I was a young writer trying to understand the publishing industry,…
Why should I write about a Local Author Fair? The Kansas City Metro area may not seem like a literary hub to people from other parts of the world, but this town is just crawling with writers. I encountered that fact again when I attended the Mid-Continent Public Library’s Story Center Local Author Fair, on November 15, 2025. I’ve tried to offer a glimpse of it in this post. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in the United States…
I had a great time at Archon 48. I stayed super-busy, and that’s how I prefer it. As I normally do, I displayed artwork in this convention’s excellent Art Show – and also brought selections from my late sister and brother-in-law’s art collection to display in the Resale Gallery. I had a full programming schedule. That meant it was a good thing I also had an excellent partner, K. R. Gastreich, to help share the duties at our dealers’ table!…
Recently, I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which new uses of technology are speaking for the dead. Some are more striking than others. But over the last few months I’ve been noticing, and collecting, what are for me some interesting and provocative examples. They also have directly inspired a scene early in my current work-in-progress, Bones for the Children. In my last blog post I talked about the need to find out what happened to people who disappeared. This…
We’ve all heard stories about people who disappeared. It’s standard fare in much of the true crime genre and in mystery fiction. And, as we saw in the Texas Hill Country along the Guadalupe River quite recently as I write this, it’s something that happens in real life. Have you ever known anyone who disappeared? This person is part of your life, and then all of a sudden they’re not there anymore. You don’t know why or what happened to…
I had so much fun at DemiCon 36 earlier this month! It’s been a while since a whole convention felt quite so easy and joyous to me as it did at this year’s edition of the long-running Des Moines science fiction convention. It was an especially welcome experience because so many other things so far this year have seemed hard and unhappy. I’ve noted this before, in some of the few blog posts I’ve been able to produce in the…
It’s high time I shared some thoughts on FenCon XX, since Ty and I attended it a month ago! But then, this FenCon reflection is late for the same reason this is also the first blog post of the year. Since my sister died in September, I’ve been meeting myself coming and going between KC and Texas. Something had to give. This wasn’t our first FenCon – we’d attended several FenCons before the Pandemic. We liked the crowd size (bustling,…
We’re looking ahead to changes at Weird Sisters Publishing. In the wake of Gigi’s death, I quickly realized I cannot do everything that is needed for this publishing effort, into perpetuity, all by myself. There’s only ever been so much of me to go around, and we designed this publishing company to incorporate G. S. Norwood too. I was counting the days till Gigi retired and we could get moving on several initiatives, most notably audiobooks. I was hoping she’d…
One thing I can say at the end of my very sparse “sf convention season” of 2024: Archon persists. We’ve seen a lot of fan-run science fiction conventions bucking strong headwinds since the Pandemic. My “home convention,” ConQuesT, has gone on hiatus. The club isn’t ready to say it’s dead yet, but we didn’t have one this year. Another longtime mainstay, SoonerCon, also went through a bumpy transition this year, as I noted in an earlier blog post. We and…