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…
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…
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…
The day came! You might remember that last week I wrote a blog post titled “Any Day Now,” about how long it was taking to get my latest book, Bone of Contention, into print. All the unexpected amounts of time things took. All the unintended mixups. Not to mention all the delays beyond my control! The waiting isn’t quite over yet – not all of it. But the day came, at least for one thing! My Amazon pre-sale promotion is…
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…
What’s the proper balance between political opinion, professional life, and writing? Every writer, every publisher, and indeed every individual person must decide how to delineate their own personal “proper balance.” Here at Weird Sisters Publishing, the eponymous sisters – G. S. Norwood and I – see many things the same way. But not all things. Recently I’ve come to realize that the expression of political views in the public-facing, professional sphere is one of those things. G. is more reticent…
It’s time for an Archon Overview. Time to look back from a bit more than a week’s distance and share my thoughts about this year’s event. This was the penultimate convention for my four-con “season,” but for today’s post I want to focus just on Archon 46. This concom (convention committee) gets a lot of things right. They have a long, solid history of good art shows, now ably helmed by Anna Mulch, and a dynamic programming team. This year…
By Jan S. Gephardt A whole cluster of holidays happen during what is for the Northern Hemisphere a season of harvest and winter’s onset. The common thread that weaves through them all is dealing with death. I’ve written about Halloween/Samhain, Día de los Muertos, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day on my “Artdog Adventures” blog in the past. Indeed, my “Virtual Ofrenda” is one of my most enduringly popular posts. Through them all, I’ve kept coming back around to…