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…
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!…
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…
No two ways about it: change is hard. It’s inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any easier to manage. And when innovation butts heads with tradition, change is really hard. SoonerCon 32 offers a sometimes-painful, sometimes-cautiously hopeful, case in point. I remember decades ago when my husband and I witnessed another painful transition. We were assistant directors of a summer camp unit that had seen a complete change of staff from one summer to the next. The camp organization was…
Here at Weird Sisters Publishing, new visions keep popping up. Sometimes They are literal visions, AKA illustrations, of the sort I shared a few weeks ago in the post about a new way of approaching Warren C. Norwood’s adventure-filled Windhover Tetralogy. One of the new visions I’ll share for the first time in this post has been seven months in the making. Another came into being quite suddenly. And at the end of the post I’ll talk about a convention…
Now it’s time for the “New Year Dragon Gentlemen” whose dragon-themed artwork I want to highlight. I Introduced two “New Year Dragon Ladies” in last week’s post, figuring it’s hard to go wrong with “ladies first.” But I didn’t want to leave the guys hanging for too long. When I found out that 2024 is the Year of the Dragon, I knew I wanted to feature dragon-themed artwork in my social media. I know a lot of excellent artists who…
Allow me to introduce my two “New Year Dragon Ladies,” Theresa Mather and Rachael Mayo. When I discovered that this Chinese New Year’s animal was the Dragon, I immediately thought about all the amazing artists I know, who paint or sculpt – indeed, specialize – in dragons. You could even say that in my paper sculpture I myself lean heavily toward dragons. Full disclosure: I also was working every spare second to complete a near-finished draft of Bone of Contention,…